News

Amazon Is Making a Lord of the Rings MMO Game

Greetings, gamers! Welcome to a new edition of Replay, WIRED's lightning-fast videogame news roundup. Undoubtedly the biggest deal this week was the announcement of Nintendo's new Switch Lite, but that's just the beginning. There's also a new Lord of the Rings MMO on the horizon, and Cuphead might be getting a TV show. Let's press […]

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Tropical Storm Barry Pits New Orleans Against Water—Again

If all does not go well this weekend, Tropical Storm Barry will spin into the city of New Orleans, bringing with it (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) life-threatening storm surge, 40 mile-per-hour winds, and perhaps as much as 25 inches of rain. Barry is a lumbering brute; forecasters expect it to linger. […]

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Hack Brief: A Card-Skimming Hacker Group Hit 17K Domains—and Counting

You may not recognize the name Magecart, but you’ve seen its impact. A set of sophisticated hacking groups, Magecart has been behind some of the bigger hacks of the past few years, from British Airways to Ticketmaster, all with the singular goal of stealing credit card numbers. Think of them as the ATM skimmers of […]

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AI's Latest Job? Designing Cool T-Shirts

The T-shirts sold by Cross & Freckle, a New York–based fashion upstart, don't look revolutionary at first glance. They come in black or white, they're cut for a unisex fit, and they sell for $25. Each of them has a little design embroidered into the cotton that references staples of New York City life: pigeons, […]

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By Dying, MAD Gets Its Best Shot at a Second Life

The first MAD magazine I ever read flew so far over my 7-year-old head I'm surprised I could hold onto it. The cover, a parody of Time's Person of the Year starring Pac-Man, was an utter mystery; I'd heard of Pac-Man by that point, but hadn't played it. I definitely hadn't read Time. Confusion only […]

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Depth of Field: On Pose, the Past Is the Present

Death stalks just about every nook, crevice, and corridor of Pose's fourth episode. Only it's not the scowl of HIV/AIDS that is the threat this time. Many characters in the current season of the FX hit—its second, and a fantastic one so far—still struggle with the life-threatening virus, but that's not where this week's episode […]

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Reddit’s ‘Manosphere’ and the Challenge of Quantifying Hate

Away from the main thoroughfares of r/Showerthoughts and r/mildlyinteresting, far from the light of r/aww, there is Reddit’s “manosphere.” It’s a confederacy of men’s rights subreddits, so named because it’s a place where women are unwelcome. Manosphere members might think of themselves as “involuntarily celibate,” like the man who drove a van into Toronto pedestrians […]

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Little Plastic 'Nurdles' Are Flooding Beaches and Waterways

This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last September, Jace Tunnell discovered a layer of tiny round plastic pellets covering a beach on Padre Island, off the southern coast of Texas. There were “millions of them,” he recalled, “and it went on for miles.” Tunnell, a marine biologist, […]

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The Fed Chair Says Facebook's Libra Raises 'Serious Concerns'

Within hours of its splashy Libra announcement last month, Facebook’s cryptocurrency plans had become a political cudgel. Drawing on Facebook’s privacy missteps and a gathering storm over antitrust, lawmakers swiftly demanded the company halt work on Libra while it addressed how it would avoid past mistakes. Those calls didn’t pose an immediate threat. Now, though, […]

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The WIRED Guide to the Blockchain

Depending on who you ask, blockchains are either the most important technological innovation since the internet or a solution looking for a problem. The original blockchain is the decentralized ledger behind the digital currency bitcoin. The ledger consists of linked batches of transactions known as blocks (hence the term blockchain), and an identical copy is […]

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