Business

On a dead-end road that climbs out of the tiny city of Jenkins, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Kentucky, there stands a large warehouse with a mint green roof. It shares the road with a few other businesses, but is otherwise surrounded by an expanse of open fields and tree-lined slopes. Inside, the warehouse is stacked high with racks on racks of computers—thousands of them. But none have ever been switched on.

Analysts at the US Department of Homeland Security shared an internal report to local agencies in August, warning them about the economic risks of using Chinese utility storage batteries. It warns that the dependence on Chinese batteries could hurt developing a secure supply chain in the US.

The document, first obtained by national security transparency nonprofit Property of the People and seen by WIRED, accuses Chinese companies of “using People’s Republic of China state support to quickly and cheaply enter the emerging US utility battery energy storage industry and create supply chain dependencies on China,” and asks that any suspicious activity be reported.

Last summer, when Krystal White was visiting Houston for a National Federation of the Blind convention, she claims she had to hide her guide dog named Gage in order to get an Uber from the airport.

This is a frequent problem, she explains.“I’ve had them drive right past me, and I’ve had neighbors go, ‘I think that was your Uber driver,’” White says. “And I’m like, ‘oh great.’ So I’ve missed appointments, I’ve missed my daughter’s play at school.

As I leave my house on an overcast Tuesday morning to walk the dog, I’m accosted by a neighbor who cheerily calls down the street: “I hear you have an OnlyFans now!” I start to wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake.

OnlyFans has—how shall I put it—a reputation. Like many online platforms, it matches content creators with their audience. But OnlyFans is primarily known for one type of content: sex.

A TikTok video of actor Brian Baumgartner, from the American version of The Office, calling for the overthrow of the president of a small European country was an early sign that this would be no ordinary election.

Late last year, Baumgartner appeared among a lineup of American celebrities addressing Maia Sandu, the current, pro-European president of Moldova and proclaiming in bad Russian: “We, Hollywood stars, support the people of Moldova in their desire to overthrow you, Sandu.” These weren’t deepfakes. Instead the videos—which researchers suggested were part of a pro-Kremlin influence operation—were commissioned on Cameo, the app that lets anyone buy personalized greetings from celebrities. Neither Cameo nor Baumgartner’s representatives replied to WIRED’s request for comment.

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and essentially harassing him to death. So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.

Last year, a foundation called Tools for Humanity went on tour to show off its eye-scanning Orb. The metallic globe—an actual, physical orb—was one part of a process where citizens would someday use their biometric information to verify their humanity.

The project, called Worldcoin, might have been written off as another techno-utopian project bound to fail had it not had one name attached to it: Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, one of the most dramatic tech companies of the modern era. An inkling of Worldcoin began in 2019 when Altman began exploring identity verification that could be used in universal basic income schemes.

SpaceX is seeking approval for changes to Starlink that the company says will enable gigabit-per-second broadband service. In an application submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission on October 11, SpaceX claims the requested “modification and its companion amendment will enable the Gen2 system to deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of people globally who still lack access to adequate broadband.”

From the ground, northeastern Norway might look like fjord country, peppered with neat red houses and dissected by snowmobile tours through the winter. But for pilots flying above, the region has become a danger zone for GPS jamming.

The jamming in the region of Finnmark is so constant, Norwegian authorities decided last month they would no longer log when and where it happens—accepting these disturbance signals as the new normal.

The Trump family’s new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, is off to an inauspicious start after website crashes limited the ability for investors to participate in an inaugural token sale event.

The crypto token, WLFI, went on sale at around 9 am Eastern time on Tuesday. At the time of writing, the website continues to be plagued by reliability issues, pushing some visitors to an error page. “We can’t connect to the server for this app or website at this time,” the notice states.