The Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News
Bored teenagers looking to make some extra cash have played a major part in spreading the fake news that has influenced major global events – this piece looks at how they do it.
The dizzying story of Symphony of the Seas, the largest and most ambitious cruise ship ever built
A story looking at the sheer complexity and scale involved in designing the floating cities that make up modern cruise ships. http://bit.ly/wired-cruise
How An Entire Nation Became Russia’s Test Lab for Cyberwar
A piece examining the extent of Russian cyber warfare in the Ukraine.
Inside China’s Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking
A look at the new credit scoring tools available in China, made possible by deep integration of services around a small handful of companies, and reaching into almost every part of daily life. As one user succinctly puts it – “If your friends are all high-score people, it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, it’s not nice.”
Second Life was Just the Beginning
Second Life was perhaps the first virtual world to enter mainstream discourse. Its founder thinks new virtual reality technologies are its successor, and destined for mass adoption. http://www.bit.ly/wired-secondlife
The Rise and Fall of Silk Road
A long look at the infamous online marketplace for illegal goods, starting with a DEA raid on a grandpa in Utah who had just taken receipt of $27,000 of cocaine. http://www.bit.ly/wired-silkroad
Romain Pizzi is saving endangered animals, one operation at a time
A leading veterinary surgeon, the perfect man if you have “a tiger with gallstones, or a suspiciously sickly beaver”, has been turning his hand to a broad array of endangered animals.
It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
A special issue of Wired contains several strong pieces looking at the complex freedom of speech trade-offs required in the new information era. Pieces include – the web infrastructure company Cloudflare being embroiled in a free speech debate when offering services to far-right extremists, Reddit as a case study for civil discourse online, a startup making smartphone-neutralising pouches, six stories of censorship, and a look at a database of extremists called Whack-a-Mole.
Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook – and the World
A piece examining the series of challenges Facebook has faced as it struggles to manage the intended and unintended consequences of its huge scale and the reach it has into many parts of its users’ lives.
A New Look Inside TheranosÕ Dysfunctional Corporate Culture
The story of the much-feted healthcare startup where things went very sour. http://bit.ly/wired-theranos