Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i WIRED

Readers share their wonder, anger, and advice: RE: “MISSION OUT OF CONTROL” I want to call WIRED on its bro-centric recounting of Apollo 11’s history. The only mention of women was in reference to them as weavers of the copper wire that converted “code to machine-readable binary.” However, Margaret Hamilton was a major contributor to the development of the software discussed in the article, and was conspicuously missing. —Candace Egan, via WIRED.com RE: “THREE YEARS OF MISERY INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S HAPPIEST COMPANY” Nitasha Tiku’s article is great, but it fails to point out the hypocrisy of Google’s reluctance on Project Maven while benefiting from dual-use systems like GPS for free. Googlers apparently didn’t want to associate with a defense program that could potentially aid drone strikes. What do they think…

They helped you move into your new house. They helped you paint your apartment. They listened to you vent about your horrible boss. Good friends will always go the extra mile for you. Now it’s time to share something extra-aged with them. Extra-aged Jim Beam Black® is a premium bourbon whiskey made to be sipped and savored with those who are always there for you. The 86-proof bourbon spends more years in white oak barrels, giving it a full-bodied flavor with smooth caramel and warm oak notes. Sure, it takes a little longer to make. But trust us, it’s a bourbon that’s worth the wait. To learn more, visit www.jimbeam.com VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW @WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK…

“WE NEED ACTION FROM GOVERNMENTS, BUILDERS, USERS, AND PEOPLE INSIDE SILICON VALLEY.THE POINT ISN’T TO STOP PROGRESS BUT TO ENABLE IT.” IN 1904, a group of Canadian workers began the hard slog of constructing the world’s longest bridge, across the Saint Lawrence River just south of the city of Quebec. It was a wildly ambitious project. And it wasn’t just for the Quebecois: Railroads were revolutionizing commerce and communications, and the bridge would connect people and allow trains to run from New Brunswick in the east to Winnipeg in the west. The river was 190 feet deep at the center, and ice piled high above the water’s surface in the winter. Nothing about the bridge’s construction would be easy. The engineers chose a complex cantilever design, a cutting-edge approach but…

FOUNDER / AlgoTransparency Pushing Big Tech to clean up its algorithms. I’M BUILDING A BROWSER EXTENSION THAT WILL WARN YOU ABOUT THE ALGORITHMS TRYING TO MANIPULATE YOU AS YOU BROWSE THE WEB … IT MIGHT SAY,“THIS ALGORITHM IS MADE TO MAKE YOU BINGE-WATCH, NOT TO RECOMMEND THINGS THAT ARE TRUE.” I USED TO WORK at Google, but I had a more positive impact on it after I left. When I started at the company in 2010, I had recently completed a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I joined a team working on new algorithms to recommend YouTube videos. Our work centered on increasing a single number—the amount of time people spent watching videos. That was seen as the way to compete with Facebook and gain audience from TV. In my experience, every…

COFOUNDER & CEO / Cloudflare 1 Recently, Cloudflare acted under pressure to kick bad actors off its service—the Daily Stormer, then 8chan. What concerns you most about tech right now? The internet is at a crossroads. Most of the globe has followed the model set by the US, where anybody can post online and content is generally available to all. But a lot of the world has lost faith in that model. The alternative is closer to China’s. China treats the internet the way the US treats radio stations, where you need a license to put content on it. The bad news is that I think we will move toward that more permissioned model, which constrains innovation. 2 Where’s the biggest impact of this shift? I’m thinking a lot about…

RESEARCHER / Harvard Unmasking how human cells can malfunction. WHEN JASON BUENROSTRO started graduate school at Stanford, he became captivated by a problem that had long frustrated researchers. At the time, Buenrostro was already something of a prodigy: A child of immigrants without high school diplomas, he had attended a small liberal arts college and then worked in a lab where he helped invent a new tool for diagnosing cancer and other diseases. Within weeks of his arrival, though, Buenrostro was singularly focused. The human body is made of trillions of cells, nearly all carrying the same DNA. What makes a kidney cell different from a brain cell lies in which set of genes—out of the roughly 25,000 in the human genome—are active, meaning turned on and doing stuff (undergoing…

AWARD-WINNING SCI-FI AUTHOR 1 What concerns you most right now? Lack of forward-thinking leadership in key positions of our society. We're facing a climate crisis, and the “progressive” members of our government seem committed to the status quo, while the radical right wing seems nihilistically committed to making things worse. We as a species have the intelligence to resolve this. 2 How can genre fiction help? Simply by portraying the world and humanity accurately. What we see in real life is that technology is just a tool, which can be used or abused. So as writers and readers, we need to be realistic about our engagement with technology—how quickly we acknowledge its limitations and dangers, how rapidly our laws and systems of access adapt to it, whether it’s a good…

CEO/SpinLaunch Putting small satellites into orbit on the cheap. A TYRANT GUARDS the gate to outer space, and that tyrant’s name is the rocket equation. It states, quite simply, that the heavier your rocket is, the more fuel you’ll need to launch it into orbit. That’s a problem, because the more fuel you add, the heavier your rocket gets. No amount of calculus can change this stubborn fact: For every ton of payload your rocket carries, it will have to burn nearly 25 tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Short of disrupting gravity itself, what’s a tech ideator to do? Jonathan Yaney and his colleagues at SpinLaunch, a startup based in Long Beach, California, believe they’ve found the answer. Their nearly fuel-free system, known as a mass accelerator, will use…

COUNTY CLERK / Travis County, Texas Saying “enough” to lousy voting technology. THIS COUNTRY'S SYSTEM for running elections is about as decentralized as its system of local public libraries. When Americans go to cast their ballots in November 2020, they’ll file into polling places administered by a sprawling archipelago of more than 10,000 county, town, and precinct authorities. Or, as Dana DeBeauvoir puts it, it’ll be “Aunt Sally and Uncle Bob” against the Russians. DeBeauvoir happens to be one of those local officials herself. For more than 30 years, she’s been the Travis County Clerk in Austin, Texas. And for much of that time, she’s been caught in a bind: forced to purchase clunky, expensive voting machines from the three big vendors in the cartel-like election industry, while simultaneously catching…

PRESIDENT & CHIEF SCIENTIST / Dfinity Breaking Big Tech’s monopoly on cloud computing. IN THE MID-1990S, when the internet was in its infancy, some companies thought they could build a better version of it. One of them was Microsoft, which envisioned a network that would be faster and more capacious, able to handle a new thing called multimedia. This was the infamous Information Superhighway. There was just one hitch: It likely would have been a proprietary network—a toll road. “Can you imagine how horrible that would have been?” says Dominic Williams. We escaped that nightmare, but Williams says we’ve stumbled straight into another: cloud computing. The cloud is now nearly as crucial as the internet itself, key infrastructure for data storage and high-powered processing. And it’s dominated by tech giants…

DIRECTOR / Astria Keeping Earth’s orbital highways open. OUTER SPACE MAY be infinite, but these days it’s starting to feel a little crowded. An estimated 500,000 human-made objects are hurtling around our planet right now. Some of them beam GPS signals to our phones or premium programming to our TVs; others fill scientists’ hard drives with up-to-the-minute climate readings and glamour shots of the cosmos. More than 99 percent of what’s up there, however, is just plain junk—spent rocket boosters, exploded satellites, runaway flecks of paint. NASA and the Department of Defense don’t know what, or where, much of it is. That makes getting to space a bit like merging onto the highway without using your mirrors. Also, all the other cars are going more than 6,700 mph. “I predict…

1 X is all about far-out ideas that solve massive problems. How might tech help us fix the climate crisis? Radical improvements to, or radical creative reuses of, technology are necessary but not sufficient to solve the climate crisis. If you were to try to solve the problem purely through public policy and social solutions without any real changes in technology, you would be asking people to give up a lot of their quality of life. That’s not realistic, which is why technology has to be an important part of the solution. 2 What about geoengineering schemes, like spraying aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s energy? We learn by sandboxing so we can try things safely. A lot of geoengineering tends to get ruled out. Anything that has…

Candidly, I was about four wines deep by high noon. Hold the judgment, if you please. It was one of those whoopsie-daisy kinds of Saturdays where the sun begs you to sip its splendor in the form of semi-effervescent California whites at your favorite neighborhood cantinas. Minimal risk of indecorum on my part—of all the creative names my enemies call me, Ripley D. Lightweight isn’t one of them. Though, yes, I do suffer that lightest pinkening of cheeks, a lush’s flush, when I imbibe. Perhaps also a certain slackening of step and sense. So sue me! Presently, I had a decision to make. Where to next? I polled the locals, who could agree only on a nonrecommendation: Wherever I went, it must not be that winery down the way. “I’ve…

The year 2015 was a heady time to do marketing for tech startups. The venture baronry that controlled the fates of founders had decided that markets, rather than engineering or personnel, made or broke new companies. If you were a strategist or a creative, swagger came with the job, along with corporate Uber and free lunches of glistening sushi. You’d enter a pitch meeting in your sharp blowout and bravura nail art—every time; it was all about the rose gold accent nail that year—extremely confident that a solid creed preceded you. The only thing startups need is markets. ▪Marketing was on fleek, just as “on fleek” was on fleek. Those were the days. I was the editorial director of a tech marketing shop based in San Francisco, and—having come up…

Back in 2007, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg gave some advice at Y Combinator’s Startup School: Do a startup before you’re old. In technology, he said, twentysomethings rule. The olds are useless. ▪ “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter.” ▪ That comment has not aged well. As we watch tsunamis of disinfo rage through social networks, we’re now suspecting it wasn’t so great for cocky young techies to so rapidly reupholster the public sphere. Those dudes may have been technically adept, but they were, as one early Twitter employee told me, “naive as fuck.” With little experience of the real world, the dewy pioneers were woefully unprepared for the hate speech, dog-piling, and sock-puppeted algorithm-juking that ran riot in…

$499 HELM SERVER There’s ever more reason to worry about entrusting our data to big tech companies, but the convenience and ubiquity of web services like Gmail and iCloud make it hard to consider anything else. Helm’s server aims to create a seamless and equally convenient alternative, letting you host your own email, contacts, and calendar, as well as store files and photos yourself—no snoopy tech giant pulling the strings. Set up your Helm with its mobile app, then access its contents from anywhere. Your data stays safe in your home, where it’s protected by multifactor authentication, including a physical security key. The 4.3-inch-tall Helm comes with an expandable 120 GB of storage, and it regularly uploads a fully encrypted backup to the cloud so you won’t lose everything in…

TP-LINK ARCHER AX6000 Best for: Hyper-connected families The eight high-gain antennas spiking up from the Archer’s chassis pump out a blast of Wi-Fi strong enough to flood a McMansion. And TP-Link’s router supports the just-released Wi-Fi 6 wireless standard, which can serve bandwidth to more devices without clogging the tubes—increasingly important in our stream-happy world. Security is built in, with TP-Link and Trend Micro’s HomeCare service preinstalled (free for three years, price thereafter TBD). It provides protection against malicious websites and phishing emails, as well as a neat system that quarantines any device on your network that may be compromised. Families will applaud the parental controls, which group together each person’s devices for easier management. So if you want to block Jimmy’s YouTube access after 10 pm, with one tap…

HEAD OF THREAT LAB / Electronic Frontier Foundation Protecting the rest of us from hackers and spies. EVA GALPERIN DIVIDES the targets of state-sponsored hackers into two categories: First, there are the corporations, government agencies, and billionaires that can afford to pay expensive cybersecurity consultants, staff 24/7 security operations centers, and hire incident responders after a breach. Then there’s everyone else—an underclass of victims who enjoy virtually none of those pricey protections. But now they do, at least, have Eva Galperin. Earlier this year, Galperin, the head of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, formed a new and unusual team within the venerable digital rights group. For nearly three decades, the EFF has acted as a kind of geeky nonprofit law firm, fighting to protect online privacy and free expression…

VP OF ENVIRONMENT, POLICY, AND SOCIAL INITIATIVES / Apple Building a fully recycled and recyclable supply chain. In Lisa Jackson’s first year at Apple, fresh off a stint as President Obama’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she took over a campaign to transition all company facilities to 100 percent renewable energy. But before Apple hit that goal in April 2018, Jackson rolled out an even more audacious plan: designing an iPhone made entirely from recycled materials. Since then, Jackson and her team have come up with new methods of recycling aluminum and recovering tin, engineering faster circuits that use less silicon, and building robots that can strip down 200 iPhones an hour. These advances bring Apple closer to what Jackson calls a “moon shot” goal: to make all of…

CEO / Twist Bioscience Engineering DNA to store data—forever. EMILY LEPROUST FISHED around in her pocket until she found what she was seeking: a stainless steel tube, about the size of a large pill capsule. She set it on the table with a metallic ping. “In this you can put dozens of Google data centers,” she says. “If not hundreds.” Leproust’s company, Twist Bioscience, makes what goes in that capsule: DNA. Hyperdense, easy to replicate, and stable over millennia, it’s close to an ideal archival storage medium. Twist engineers the DNA to represent the data, translating the binary code of machines into the genetic code of life (for example: 00=A, 01=G, 10=C, 11=T). If you want to read that data, say, two centuries later, you sequence the DNA and translate…

COFOUNDER & CEO / Oasis Labs Helping people control—and profit from—their data. LATELY, “OWNING” YOUR data has emerged as an ideal state. It's seen as a remedy to the rampant collection, leaks, deals, and hacks that compromise our privacy at every turn, and a way to give ordinary users a piece of the action in a hot market. But there’s a problem: Share your data with the companies that can put the information to use and it will slip from your grasp, reshared and copied until its value to you is nil. Guard your data jealously and it’s just as worthless—because nobody can do anything with it. “I think most people don’t even know that their data can be valuable,” says UC Berkeley computer scientist Dawn Song. She wants to…

FOUNDER & DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR INNOVATION AND PUBLIC PURPOSE / University College London Setting us up for a green moon shot. A few years ago, when governments across the globe were responding to the financial crisis by embracing fiscal austerity, Mariana Mazzucato assigned herself an odd accounting task: She began tallying all the public investments that had given rise to the iPhone. The internet, GPS, touchscreens, Siri: All that tech had originally been commissioned by either the Pentagon, the National Science Foundation, or the CIA. So why were today’s leaders excoriating government spending? In 2013, Mazzucato published her findings in The Entrepreneurial State, a book that describes how governments have been a primary investor in innovation. Since then, she’s become one of the world’s most influential economists, advising leaders at…

COFOUNDER & CEO / Stripe Making change, step by step, to “increase the GDP of the internet.” PATRICK COLLISON, the 31-year-old cofounder and chief executive of Stripe, is an exceedingly careful thinker. In his Twitter bio, he identifies himself as a “fallibilist,” by which he means he likes to probe every system of ideas, looking for its bugs. Collison fits a Silicon Valley archetype: a programming whiz who dropped out of college (MIT) and started a company now worth a stratospheric sum ($35 billion, on paper). But unlike others in his cohort, he speaks in strikingly self-effacing terms. At a conference in May, he described Stripe as “a hard-to-understand and maybe boring company.” Well, fair enough. But let’s give it a whirl. There is a piece of plastic in your…

RESEARCH SPECIALIST / MIT Media Lab Preparing humans for life with robots. A decade ago, Kate Darling asked a friend to hold a Pleo toy dino-bot upside down until it squirmed and whined. Because Darling isn’t a sociopath, it upset her—and spurred her to begin exploring the strange new frontier of human-robot interaction. Now an outspoken researcher at MIT, she is writing a book, The New Breed, about our budding relationships with robots in the context of how we’ve treated animals throughout history. Consider that in the Middle Ages, Europeans put cows and other animals on trial for killing people. They believed animals had moral agency. The temptation, as robots become more sophisticated and social, is to assume they’re working with similar agency when really they’re just a collection of…

RESEARCHER / UC Berkeley Creating tools to suss out manipulated images. IN 2001, HANY FARID was frustrated. He just couldn’t beat his long-standing tennis buddy. To make light of his hopelessness, Farid, then a computer science professor at Dartmouth, made a fake. He used Photoshop to paste his friend’s head onto the shoulders of a professional tennis player. (He thinks it was Andre Agassi.) As he stretched the face to make it fit its new physique, he realized that the algorithm Photoshop used to perform the operation would leave a characteristic signature on that part of the image. Farid had previously specialized in computer vision, getting computers to understand pictures more as humans do. But now he set about establishing a new field of image science, developing methods to detect…

FOUNDER & CEO / Impossible Foods Replacing all animal-based meat with plant-based “meat.” BACK IN 2009, Pat Brown set off on a sabbatical from the department of biochemistry at Stanford, intent on identifying the most important problem in the world that he could help solve. That, he eventually decided, was the impact of animal agriculture on the environment. By July 2011, Brown had founded Impossible Foods, hired a team, and set off on a five-year journey to develop a plant-based replacement for meat. The big hurdle, of course, was making something that tastes so good people would give up the real thing: “The most urgent, important scientific question in the world is what makes meat delicious,” Brown says. Off the bat, the team at Impossible dove into the science behind…

“Even more than his invention for revealing a cell’s active genes, Jason Buenrostro himself. Like many scientists, he’s passionate about his work. But he’s also humble and empathetic. If Jason represents the next generation of scientific research, I’m all for it.” —Contributor Jennifer Kahn (page 56) “Talking with Hany Farid about his work with political leaders to encourage the tech industry to protect us against deepfakes, without creating mechanisms that could be exploited to suppress online expression.” —Senior writer Tom Simonite (page 70) “SpinLaunch, a company ditching conventional rockets to dramatically lower the cost of access to space. If successful, the company will lay the foundation for a truly robust space economy that is essential for turning humans into a multiplanetary species.” —Staff writer Daniel Oberhaus (page 61) “Joanna Pearlstein.…

It was a sweltering August Saturday in Hong Kong, and the authorities had just shut down one of the most important technologies in the city: the MTR, Hong Kong’s uber-efficient subway system. So the protesters walked. ▪The demonstrators were in their 12th week of continuous action; they’d been marching, singing, occupying streets, forming human chains, confronting police. They started when the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam—a leader essentially handpicked by Beijing—introduced a bill that would allow Hong Kong’s government to extradite suspects to main-land China for prosecution. Hong Kong is a “special administrative region” of China, with an independent judiciary and much wider freedoms than those found on the mainland. Fearing that the extradition law would lead to the further erosion of those freedoms, large numbers of protesters took to…

DEMOCRATIZE THIS! The operations overlords of wired make me use Airtable. It’s a hip workflow tracker, with pretty color coding and copious tabs and a “robust” API that syncs with Slack. It’s also, apparently, a superhero. The Captain America of spreadsheets. Airtable isn’t just a shinier version of Excel—it’s on a self-professed mission to “democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build tools that meet their needs.” As if the oppressed white-collar workers of the world were crying, “Help! Bring salubrious democracy to my dismal day-today!” Democratizers run rampant through tech these days. An app called Robinhood (was that guy pro-democracy?) wants to “democratize finance for all.” Veo aims to democratize soccer videos “one camera, one field, one team at a time.” Custom Movement wants to democratize bespoke sneaker ownership,…

JIOBIT Best for: Preschool-age Prefontaines The keychain-sized Jiobit is the easiest tracker to clip to a wriggly kid’s belt loop, shoelace, or backpack. It uses a combination of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular data, and GPS to turn the companion app into a real-life Marauder’s Map. When I toggled on Live Mode at a park, I could watch onscreen as my preschooler sprinted out of sight, turned around at an intersection, and walked back. In the app, you can share your child’s location with trusted adults, create geofences, get alerted when your kid goes out of bounds, and swipe between multiple children—or dogs. ($9 monthly subscription required) $129 $50 RELAY KIDS PHONE Best for: Independent elementary schoolers If you’re not quite ready to give your kid a smartphone, the Relay is a…

At the end of the ’60s, in the embryonic days of cable television, an enterprising executive had an idea. He persuaded the leadership of Olean, in upstate New York, to hook up closed-circuit TV cameras, via the newly laid cables, along the town’s main street. With 20,000 residents, Olean was hardly crime-blighted Manhattan. But when the first-of-its-kind surveillance system was installed in 1968, law enforcement officials from as far away as Israel and Thailand came to marvel at the eight robotic cameras attached to utility poles. Miscreants were also impressed: Not a single crime was attempted during the 18-month run of the experimental network. After that, there was no stopping video-based crime deterrence. More than 50 million CCTV cameras now watch over the residents of the United States, and four…

FOUNDER / Algorithmic Justice League Calling out bias hidden in tech tools. IN 2015, MIT Media Lab master's student Joy Buolamwini gazed, puzzled, into her webcam. She was working on an art piece to project digital masks on faces, but her own was invisible to the off-the-shelf face-tracking software she was using. She scrawled a face on her hand in marker. Face detected. Hmm. She covered her dark skin with a white mask left over from Halloween. Face detected. Oh. Buolamwini had come to MIT to explore how people could use technology for social change. The algorithm that couldn’t see her face set her on a new path: exploring how tech could be misused and abused. When she learned how facial recognition is used in law enforcement, where error-prone algorithms…

FOUNDER & CEO / Rigetti Computing Bringing quantum magic to the masses. IN 2013, CHAD RIGETTI became aware that the field of quantum computing was entering a kind of adolescence. Sketched out in the 1990s, the technology was supposed to leapfrog conventional computing by tapping into the weird physics of subatomic particles. For years, researchers had been held up by the devilish unreliability of qubits, the devices needed to perform quantum manipulations on data. But now, finally, they were finding new ways to tame them. “It was black magic, and then a framework emerged,” Rigetti says. “You could start to see all the pieces coming together.” That’s when he quit his job at IBM and struck out on his own. Six years later, in labs stocked with steampunky equipment and…

MAJORITY COUNSEL / The US House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law Laying the foundation for breaking up Big Tech. AT A CNN TOWN HALL meeting this April, Elizabeth Warren fielded a question from an audience member. The questioner, named Meghan, extolled the convenience of Amazon and then asked Warren—who had recently proposed a plan to cut online platforms down to size—“How is breaking up Big Tech good for me?” The candidate launched in. “A lot of these giant tech companies, they actually run two businesses,” she said: They run a platform that connects buyers and sellers, and they compete on that platform as vendors themselves—while collecting near-omniscient data on their rivals. Warren then described how Amazon might use this intel to quash a hypothetical brand called Pet Pillows…

COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGIST / Cassava Virus Action Project Diagnosing crop disease in the field to stop its spread. Cassava is an obliging plant. The tuber can be turned into flour, paper, adhesives. It can be steamed, fried, roasted, boiled. Sweet or bitter. In Africa, it feeds more than 500 million people daily. Cassava can endure long periods of drought and abide plenty of rain, making it ideal for a changing climate. But for years, viruses have been decimating the tubers. Cassava is dying. In 2013, Laura Boykin didn’t know much about that. She had studied whiteflies—a vector for cassava viruses—and was head-down at her desk at the University of Western Australia, doing computational work on the evolution of various plants, when she was asked to join a team of East African…

DIRECTOR / Stanford Internet Observatory Powering research into online cesspools. As the former cybersecu-rity chief for both Yahoo and Facebook, Alex Stamos knows something about the power—and pitfalls—of sheer size. Which is why his next act doesn’t involve protecting any single company’s users. It aims instead to shield even larger online populations. How? By giving researchers around the world what they need to study the scourge of disinformation, security breaches, and propaganda, particularly on social media. Launched earlier this year and funded with $5 million from Craig Newmark’s foundation, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which Stamos leads, hopes to act as a clearinghouse for data about all those abuses—both real-time and historical—from across the web. Rather than spend months wrangling data themselves, social scientists could instead put in a call to…

COFOUNDER & CEO/Patreon Helping the creative class survive—and thrive—on the internet. For artists, singers, writers, and other creative types who are nice to have around if you enjoy a flourishing civilization, the internet has been a mixed bag. Yes, it provides a bottomless well of collaborators and ideas, along with the power to reach a nearly unlimited audience. But pesky thing, the internet also keeps finding new ways to destroy the economic basis for these folks to make a living, replacing it with flimsy ad-revenue-sharing deals. “A creative person can be reaching millions of people through this free distribution architecture and getting paid a few hundred bucks,” says Jack Conte, a YouTube musician turned tech CEO. “It sucks.” (See “The Alchemist,” issue 27.10.) Conte’s company, Patreon, aims to rescue the…

Bringing broadband internet to underserved parts of the globe. IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged—by the Allbirds-wearing set, at least—that a technological problem must be in want of a technological fix. So when a tech CEO hears that nearly 3.7 billion people around the world lack access to the internet, he gets to solutioneering. If the problem is that some regions are just too remote or too impoverished for telecom operators to cover profitably, he asks, then why not launch satellites to beam broadband to the masses from on high? All it’ll take to close the digital divide is billions of dollars in R&D. That’s the tack SpaceX, Amazon, OneWeb, and other companies are taking. But Christopher Fabian and his colleagues at Unicef Ventures, a kind of tech incubator within…

DIRECTOR / NSA Cybersecurity Directorate Collecting signals to defend the “security of the nation’s most sensitive networks.” IN AUGUST 2016, a group called the Shadow Brokers popped up on Twitter touting a brazen cybertheft: It linked to a trove of hacking tools stolen from the National Security Agency. The know-how of one of the top intelligence agencies in the US had been released into the wild. Criminals and foreign government hackers seized on the tools, and within months North Korea was weaponizing them to inject ransomware onto 300,000 computers in hospitals, telecoms, and energy firms around the world. Now, three years after that disastrous data dump, the NSA has established a Cybersecurity Directorate. Its leader, Anne Neuberger, is tasked with creating a conduit between siloed parts of the agency. By…

COFOUNDER & CEO/Memphis Meats Replacing slaughtered-animal meat with cell-based meat. UMA VALETI LOVED meat. But he didn’t eat it. Cruelty to animals was something he just couldn’t stomach. Fortunately, Valeti was also a cardiologist who worked on regenerating human heart muscle with stem cells. So he cinched up these two parts of his life and became cofounder of the first cell-based meat company, Memphis Meats. With cell-based meat, conscientious carnivores can have their steak and eat it too: real animal flesh, no slaughter necessary. Muscle cells from animals are placed in a bioreactor—similar to the tanks used to brew beer—and supplied with a combination of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals to help them grow and multiply. Three to six weeks later, the raw meat is pulled from the tank, ready to…

THAN MORE 50 buildings and soundstages sprawl across the 44 acres of the Sony Pictures lot. That’s a lot of windowless oblongs, and even more distance between them. If you need to get from, say, the Jimmy Stewart Building to Stage 15, golf carts and Sprinter vans are the customary mode—even on sunny days. On a particular Saturday in February, while an atmospheric river settled over Los Angeles, those vehicles were a necessity. The downpour was bad luck for the dozens of journalists there that day, but it was also a touch allegorical. After what felt like years of anticipation, Apple was about to take us behind the scenes of a show it was making for its still mysterious, still unnamed subscription streaming service. We were going to find out if…