Wired

Fans, it seems, are not dancing out of Joker: Folie à Deux.

Director Todd Phillips’ film, which features the return of Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck and the addition of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, was highly anticipated, especially after the success of the first chapter, released in 2019. Following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, however, there was no shortage of criticism from film reviewers and the audiences who saw it in Italy. Since its US release this past weekend, during which the movie brought in a lower-than-expected $40 million at the box office, that chorus of discontent has grown louder.

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Last spring, At an event in New York City, Robert Triefus, then Gucci’s CEO of Vault—the brand’s virtual marketplace—argued the recent deflation in hype around the metaverse was just a brief hiccup. “I see it more as a correction,” he told the crowd. “We’re now at a much more sensible place, where you’ve got individuals [and] companies … who are very serious about what they’re doing.” When asked how buying real estate in The Sandbox aligned with Gucci’s broader goals as a brand, he responded with quasi-mystical language: “The metaverse is an opportunity to embrace the digital self.”

When Charlie Kelly first messaged saying he wouldn’t make it home that night, his partner wasn’t happy. It was September 6, 2023, a Wednesday, and the 56-year-old, a keen hillwalker, had left the house that he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, near the Scottish city of Stirling, before she went to work. His plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100-meter-high peak overlooking Glen Etive, the remote Highland valley made famous by the James Bond film Skyfall.

It’s too soon to say how the spate of deals between AI companies and publishers will shake out. OpenAI has already scored one clear win, though: Its web crawlers aren’t getting blocked by top news outlets at the rate they once were.

The generative AI boom sparked a gold rush for data—and a subsequent data-protection rush (for most news websites, anyway) in which publishers sought to block AI crawlers and prevent their work from becoming training data without consent. When Apple debuted a new AI agent this summer, for example, a slew of top news outlets swiftly opted out of Apple’s web scraping using the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt, the file that allows webmasters to control bots. There are so many new AI bots on the scene that it can feel like playing whack-a-mole to keep up.

Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business. The market for surrogacy is expected to expand to $129 billion by 2032, fueled by older parents, rising infertility, and more same-sex families. Silicon Valley contributes to the growth too: Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Snap pitch in up to $80,000 toward the six-figure cost of the process.

Yet it’s still controversial to “rent a womb” (as detractors call it). One human rights expert for the United Nations said that commercial surrogacy “usually amounts to the sale of children.” Critics claim the practice exploits poor women who are not fully informed of the hazards; in fact, the United States is one of the only developed countries that allows pregnancy for profit.

Bose might have turned 60, but the audio company seems to be firmly settling into its graduate school era. After late founder Amar Bose donated majority ownership to MIT in 2011—a little-known fact—it became higher-ed’s most valuable audio brand, and broadened its focus. Gone are the days of wired speakers, or a few paltry headphone options to pair with your stylish Bose Wave CD radio.

In the past four years with CEO Lila Snyder—a former 15-year McKinsey consultant who is herself an MIT graduate with a master’s in mechanical engineering—Bose has seemingly righted a ship that appeared to be banking toward shore.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Mathematics started with numbers—clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far more abstract enterprise. One of the first major steps down this road was taken in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It involved a field called group theory, and it changed math—theoretical and applied—as we know it.

Groups generalize essential properties of the whole numbers. They have transformed geometry, algebra, and analysis, the mathematical study of smoothly changing functions. They’re used to encrypt messages and study the shapes of viruses. Physicists rely on them to unify the fundamental forces of nature: At high energies, group theory can be used to show that electromagnetism and the forces that hold atomic nuclei together and cause radioactivity are all manifestations of a single underlying force.

In Butler, Pennsylvania, a billboard read “In Musk We Trust.” A Tesla Cybertruck parked on the side of the road sported a TRUMP 2024 flag.

With a month left in the presidential campaign, former president Donald Trump returned to Butler for a rally less than three months after the assassination attempt on Trump’s life that resulted in the death of one rally attendee. This time, Trump was joined by X owner Elon Musk and vice presidential candidate JD Vance.

Thousands of machines running Linux have been infected by a malware strain that’s notable for its stealth, the number of misconfigurations it can exploit, and the breadth of malicious activities it can perform, researchers reported Thursday.

The malware has been circulating since at least 2021. It gets installed by exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the internet potential targets, researchers from Aqua Security said. It can also exploit CVE-2023-33426, a vulnerability with a severity rating of 10 out of 10 that was patched last year in Apache RocketMQ, a messaging and streaming platform that’s found on many Linux machines.

THIS ARTICLE IS republished fromThe Conversationunder aCreative Commons license.

A little bit of alcohol was once thought to be good for you. However, as scientific research advances, we’re gaining a clearer picture of alcohol’s effect on health—especially regarding cancer.

The complex relationship between alcohol and cancer was recently highlighted in a new report from the American Association for Cancer Research. The report’s findings are eye-opening.

The authors of the report estimate that 40 percent of all cancer cases are associated with “modifiable risk factors”—in other words, things we can change ourselves. Alcohol consumption being prominent among them.