Wired

Europe’s most famous privacy activist, Max Schrems, landed another blow against Meta today after the EU’s top court ruled the tech giant cannot exploit users’ public statements about their sexual orientation for online advertising.

Since 2014, Schrems has complained of seeing advertising on Meta platforms targeting his sexual orientation. Schrems claims, based on data he obtained from the company, that advertisers using Meta can deduce his sexuality from proxies, such as his app logins or website visits. Meta denies it showed Schrems personalized ads based on his off-Facebook data, and the company has long said it excludes any sensitive data it detects from its advertising operations.

Just one week after America’s 100 percent tariffs on China EVs kicked in, the European Union has voted to officially approve additional tariffs for electric vehicles imported from China, making it harder for Chinese automakers to compete in the European market.

The tariffs were proposed by the European Commission in June after it concluded that Chinese-made EVs have received significant government subsidies that create an unfair advantage. Electric vehicles made in China—both by Chinese brands and by Western ones like Tesla and BMW—will be subject to varying levels of import duties between 7.8 and 35.3 percent.

One phrase encapsulates the methodology of nonfiction master Robert Caro: Turn Every Page. The phrase is so associated with Caro that it’s the name of the recent documentary about him and of an exhibit of his archives at the New York Historical Society. To Caro it is imperative to put eyes on every line of every document relating to his subject, no matter how mind-numbing or inconvenient. He has learned that something that seems trivial can unlock a whole new understanding of an event, provide a path to an unknown source, or unravel a mystery of who was responsible for a crisis or an accomplishment. Over his career he has pored over literally millions of pages of documents: reports, transcripts, articles, legal briefs, letters (45 million in the LBJ Presidential Library alone!). Some seemed deadly dull, repetitive, or irrelevant. No matter—he’d plow through, paying full attention. Caro’s relentless page-turning has made his work iconic.

Most of us don’t know how our food is made. We don’t know much about what our burger ate when it was part of a cow, where that cow lived, or how it died. Ditto for the wheat in our bread, or the leaves in our salad. The food system is mostly a black box to us.

This disconnection is why farm-to-table has been so successful—it seeks to reacquaint us with our food, and to consider the water, emissions, labor, and care that go into our meals.

In a future conflict, American troops will direct the newest war machines not with sprawling control panels or sci-fi-inspired touchscreens, but controls familiar to anyone who grew up with an Xbox or PlayStation in their home.

Over the past several years, the US Defense Department has been gradually integrating what appear to be variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets as the primary control units for a variety of advanced weapons systems, according to publicly available imagery published to the department’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System media hub.

Fifty-four Academy Awards and 267 nominations. That’s the sort of canonical foresight the Black List has had since first launching in 2005 as Hollywood insiders’ go-to index of screenwriters. The Social Network, Edge of Tomorrow, Selma, Don’t Worry Darling—each one was selected for the annual Black List survey before going on to critical and commercial acclaim.

“I knew there were great writers and great scripts that existed outside of the Hollywood ecosystem,” its founder Franklin Leonard says. “I wanted to find a way for that to benefit everybody.”

In early September, Warner Bros. released a teaser for A Minecraft Movie, the studio’s new film based on Mojang’s nearly 15-year-old sandbox game. Directed by Napoleon Dynamite helmer Jared Hess, it was, frankly, very goofy. Jack Black was Steve; Jason Momoa was sporting maybe the worst hairdo he’s ever had. Everyone involved, even the animated creatures, seemed to think they were in a different movie.

But that wasn’t what the trolls latched onto. Instead, they fixed on the fact that a Black woman—Orange Is the New Black’s Danielle Brooks—was in the Overworld.

Toward the end of last year, US health authorities got a tip-off about an upcoming wave of respiratory syncytial virus, a seasonal virus that kills 160,000 people globally every year. Before hospitals reported an uptick in patients, they could see that RSV was more acute in the northeast of the country, with concentrations of the virus ultimately reaching levels more than five times greater than in the western United States. Their early warning system? Wastewater.

Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

In a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published on Friday morning, researchers found that in the wake of the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and charges against leaders of the so-called Terrorgram Collective, dozens of extremist groups have moved to the app SimpleX Chat in recent weeks over fears that Telegram’s privacy policies expose them to being arrested. The Terrorgram Collective is a neo-Nazi propaganda network that calls for acolytes to target government officials, attack power stations, and murder people of color.

Carina Marquez, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is a big believer in prevention. So she was delighted when, last year, health authorities in the US and Europe approved the first vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus. RSV vaccines hold the potential to reduce the thousands of hospitalizations and deaths associated with the virus in the US each year. But vaccines are only effective if they get in the arms of the people who most need them. “It’s really important to make sure that people have equal access,” Marquez says. “Inequities in access result in inequities in hospitalizations and deaths.”