Wired

Apple's Iconic Over-Ears Headphones Have a Ton of Software Upgrades

The Apple AirPods Max 2 will never require a second glance. This year’s iteration is basically stuffing the headphones with all the new software that landed in the AirPods Pro 3. They have Siri, Live Translation, head-based gestures, and more, along with some of the best noise-canceling on the market, deep bass, and shimmering highs. If you’re an iPhone owner with $549, there is just no reason to get another pair of over-ear headphones besides these.What's Old Is New AgainI have the OG AirPods Max and yes, the two look exactly the same. They have the same milled aluminum casing, magnetic replaceable (and repairable) ear cups, the button and dial on the right ear cup, and the mesh headband (that Apple calls “the canopy”) that looks like a Herman Miller Aeron chair. Yes, they’re still two ounces heavier than every other headphone, but the canopy goes a long way towards making them feel lighter than they are.And yes, they still come in the soft, magnetic, bra smart case. I understand why Apple uses this case. You can carry the headphones easily by just sliding the canopy onto your wrist; they’re easier to pull out of a bag. The canopy is

Why Does Wikipedia Think I’m Evan Spiegel?

For fifty-one weeks out of the year, I’m 100 percent not the CEO of Snap, the company behind Snapchat. That’s Evan Spiegel, the company’s billionaire cofounder. No one in their right mind would question that. But for one week out of the year, specifically last week, some people may have thought I was the social media firm’s top executive. If you looked on Wikipedia, it sure seemed like I was.Starting on Sunday, when you clicked on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page, there was a picture of me. The same thing happened if you ran a Google Search for Evan Spiegel or asked Google Gemini about him. At the time of publication, that’s still the case.How did this happen? Despite what the internet might have you believe, I’m Maxwell Zeff (friends call me Max). The photo on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page was taken at a TechCrunch conference last year. I’m a reporter in my twenties, and while I write about technology companies for a living, I’ve never met Spiegel and have barely ever written about Snapchat.But now I’m the CEO—according to Wikipedia. This first came to my attention on Monday, when I was scrolling through social media and I saw a random account post

Waymo Is Trying to Crack Down on Solo Kids in Driverless Cars

By law, autonomous vehicles aren’t allowed to carry unaccompanied minors in California. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving-car company, doesn’t allow kids under 18 to ride alone anywhere outside of metro Phoenix, Arizona. But that hasn’t stopped some time-strapped parents from using their own accounts to transport their kids to school, extracurricular activities, and even social outings. Some have reported that the lack of drivers makes them feel safer.Waymo is working to crack down on the practice, the company confirmed Friday, after reports of new mid-ride age-verification checks began to float around on social media. The company has “policies in place” to help it identify violations of its terms of service, Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli wrote in a statement to WIRED. “We are continuing to refine our system and processes for accuracy over time.” Violating its terms of service can lead to temporary or permanent suspension of an account, Waymo says.The company uses cameras inside its cars to check that riders aren’t violating its rules. Its privacy policy notes that the company records video inside the vehicle during trips. Waymo says its support workers “may review video under certain circumstances” and, “in more urgent circumstances,” access live video during a trip. The company

OpenAI Enables Marketing Cookies by Default for Free ChatGPT Users

OpenAI is ready to target free users of its services with advertisements around the web, based on what it knows about them.On Thursday, OpenAI sent an email to users laying out major changes to the AI company’s privacy policy in the US. “We’ll now use cookies to promote OpenAI products and services on other websites,” reads the email sent on April 30. “This does not impact your conversations in ChatGPT. Your conversations with ChatGPT are private and are not shared with marketing partners.” Cookies store information in users’ browsers as they explore the web.Chats with the bot aren’t shared with third parties. Even so, details OpenAI collects as users interact with its services may soon be used to market those same services, like ChatGPT, outside the platform. This appears to be targeted at converting free users (WIRED found that marketing settings were “on” by default) and seeing how effective its ads are at conversions.The move comes as OpenAI looks to expand its own advertising network inside ChatGPT. The company started rolling out ads at the bottom of ChatGPT outputs for US users in February. Competitors including Google are exploring how ads can be woven into the user experience of generative

Dangerous New Linux Exploit Gives Attackers Root Access to Countless Computers

Publicly released exploit code for an effectively unpatched vulnerability that gives root access to virtually all releases of Linux is setting off alarm bells as defenders scramble to ward off severe compromises inside data centers and on personal devices.The vulnerability and exploit code that exploits it were released Wednesday evening by researchers from security firm Theori, five weeks after privately disclosing it to the Linux kernel security team. The team patched the vulnerability in versions 7.0, 6.19.12, 6.18.12, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254) but few of the Linux distributions had incorporated those fixes at the time the exploit was released.A Single Script to Hack Them AllThe critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows.“‘Local privilege escalation’ sounds dry, so

A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat

In an Instagram video posted on April 1, lifestyle influencer Melissa Strahle poses outdoors before an American flag as soft instrumental music plays. “AI lets me focus on what matters most,” she tells her 1.4 million followers. “We need to invest in American-made AI to ensure America leads the way in innovation and job creation.”Strahle labeled the post an advertisement, but she didn’t disclose what organization had paid for it. It turns out the funding came from Build American AI, a dark-money group tied to Leading the Future, a $100 million super PAC supported by, and in some cases directly funded by, tech figures affiliated with companies like OpenAI and Palantir.The video is part of a coordinated influence campaign that Build American AI is funding, which is being rolled out on social media in two phases. The first focused on working with lifestyle influencers like Strahle, who did not respond to a request for comment, to promote the US artificial intelligence industry and American innovation. But the second and current phase of the campaign is all about China.Marketing agencies are pitching influencers deals such as $5,000 per TikTok video to amplify Build American AI’s messaging about how China’s technological rise

The Next Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Will Take More Than Just Science

Alzheimer’s research is entering a new phase, as treatments that have taken decades to develop begin to reach patients. But getting those advances to people will depend on more than scientific progress alone, according to pioneering Alzheimer’s researcher John Hardy.Speaking at WIRED Health in April, Hardy, chair of the Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease at University College London, said that alongside more effective drugs, better diagnosis and political will were still needed to improve treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. “We’ve got to get better,” he said.Hardy was instrumental in identifying the central role of amyloid, a form of protein found in the brain and body, in Alzheimer’s disease in the 1990s. He and his colleagues helped establish the idea that deposits of amyloid form plaques around brain cells. These plaques are thought to disrupt normal brain function, increasing activity and triggering inflammatory responses.At the time, he said he was “naively optimistic” about how quickly this discovery would lead to effective treatment. “But now, finally, we've got somewhere,” he said.His findings led to the development of antibodies designed to prevent amyloid deposits forming. But these early approaches did not “suck amyloid out of the brain of those people who already had the

The Chinese Government Just Got the World’s Largest Digital Rights Conference Canceled

RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference, was canceled this year due to pressure from the Chinese government, according to the nonprofit organization that organizes the annual event.In a statement, Access Now says it was “told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person.”The Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, and the United States Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. When WIRED called the Zambian embassy in Washington, a member of the staff answered the phone and transferred the call to another staff member who then picked up for several seconds before hanging up. A follow-up call went unanswered.Access Now says it was told “informally from multiple sources” that “in order for RightsCon to continue, we would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation.”RightsCon 2026 was set to feature several panels on China’s international influence, including about how Beijing exports digital authoritarianism and spreads disinformation in regions like Africa, as well as discussions on Chinese cyberattacks and the global spread

You Found Satoshi? Let’s See the Receipts

In December 2024, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, I met with a professional investigator named Tyler Maroney. He told me he was on a quest to discover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, and he felt that he had cracked the case. My first thought was, join the club. Literally dozens of journalists and investigators have spent months or even years trying to uncover the mysterious creator of the most popular cryptocurrency, who ended his (or her or their) online presence in 2011 and amassed around $83 billion in Bitcoin. All have failed to make a convincing identification.Maroney’s project is out now, a documentary called Finding Satoshi, where he and his team conclude that Satoshi is a collaboration between two of the most commonly cited possibilities, Hal Finney and Len Sassaman (both are dead). In an instance of unfortunate timing, the doc was released just a week after ace investigative reporter John Carreyrou dropped his own epic Satoshi story in The New York Times. Carreyrou is the guy who exposed the frauds of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, so his descent into the Nakamoto rabbit hole came with hold-my-beer swagger. Both can’t be right. Both might

This Treatment Could Reverse Osteoarthritis Joint Damage With a Single Injection

You almost certainly know them: Someone who had to retire from soccer because of a hip problem. A grandmother who can't lift her arm to comb her hair because of shoulder pain. A coworker who had a knee replacement. So often, the cause is osteoarthritis, a wear and tear of the joints that affects one in six people over the age of 30. Osteoarthritis has no cure, and the only remedies are the implantation of a prosthesis or some treatment for pain.There is reason for optimism, however, because an agency in the US Department of Health and Human Services has allocated millions of dollars to various initiatives investigating a cure for this disease. That agency is the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), and the project that seeks to eradicate osteoarthritis is called NITRO, or Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis. The most advanced initiative in this area is being undertaken by a multidisciplinary team at the University of Colorado Boulder, which has received a $33.5 million grant from NITRO to develop an experimental therapy with the potential to reverse joint damage in a matter of weeks through a simple injection.Osteoarthritis is characterized by the progressive wearing away

This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?

When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: Children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults.McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian. The adults largely blamed a singular force: YouTube.McDermott and a team of five researchers across four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have released new research they believe proves the fears about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations.What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching 10 children's videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to demonstrate a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz-language recommendations for what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots showing no language preference at all. The