Wired

Comics are due for a reboot and the old guard knows it. DC Entertainment, the elder statesman of the business, has been trying everything to get young eyes on its familiar characters, from Monday’s surprise announcement of DC Go! webcomics, to a recently-launched kids’ line, to a licensing deal with teen favorite Webtoon.

Today, the company announced a partnership with even more potential to reshape the medium: a distribution deal with GlobalComix, a digital platform that has raised millions in funding to optimize traditional comics to be read by scrolling vertically on a smartphone.

Christopher Ren does a solid Elon Musk impression.

Ren is a product manager at Reality Defender, a company that makes tools to combat AI disinformation. During a video call last week, I watched him use some viral GitHub code and a single photo to generate a simplistic deepfake of Elon Musk that maps onto his own face. This digital impersonation was to demonstrate how the startup’s new AI detection tool could work. As Ren masqueraded as Musk on our video chat, still frames from the call were actively sent over to Reality Defender’s custom model for analysis, and the company’s widget on the screen alerted me to the fact that I was likely looking at an AI-generated deepfake and not the real Elon.

Just after 9 pm on an August night in 2020, Kimberly Thompson and Brian James pulled the car into a driveway in Akron, Ohio, and stepped out into a barrage of gunfire. They were shot in the legs, rushed to a hospital, and survived. But Thompson’s 20-month-old grandson, Tyree Halsell, who was still sitting in the car, was shot in the head and mortally wounded.

In the aftermath, Akron police collected video footage from the neighborhood and asked for the public’s help with identifying two men who’d been seen approaching the victims, firing, then fleeing in a truck. Within months, detectives narrowed in on a suspect, Phillip Mendoza, and obtained a search warrant for his cell phone location data from Sprint, according to court records. They also served a geofence warrant on Google, seeking information on devices whose GPS, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth records placed them near the scene of the shooting. Neither warrant turned up any evidence locating Mendoza or his devices on the 1200 block of Fifth Avenue, where the shooting occurred, that night.

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After living in big cities like San Francisco and New York, when I set foot in Wally World in the Midwest, I heard angels sing. Rows and rows of fluorescent lights highlighted any and every product needed for your house in one place. Screw the mom-and-pop bodega—I missed this level of convenience. If by chance they don’t have what you need in-store, there’s even more online, with pickup and delivery available.

As Hurricane Miltonmade landfall on Florida’s west coast the evening of October 9, a deluge of rain ruptured the city of St. Petersburg’s water main lines. The damage meant that some hospitals in the area—including one with a large neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)—were temporarily cut off from public water.

Jason Weida, secretary of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), knew access to water could be an issue after Milton. Hurricanes can affect the water supply in a few different ways. They can cause infrastructure damage, like in St. Petersburg. They can knock out power at water treatment plants, leading to untreated or undertreated water. And stormwater runoff can contaminate groundwater and surface water. In 2022, after Hurricane Ian hit, some Florida hospitals were left without running water for days.

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No one likes the feeling of insect repellent. I have vivid memories of being sprayed down with the stuff as a kid before venturing into the woods in northern Minnesota on family vacations and feeling like chemical warfare was being waged on all of my senses. I was willing to endure it because being covered in mosquito bites is even worse. And the truth is, wearing repellent can save your life, protecting you against West Nile virus and Lyme disease, just to name a few of the pathogens mosquitos and ticks can pass on.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

SpaceX has reached an important milestone in testing Starship, the spacecraft it wants to use for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars. Following a test launch yesterday, the Super Heavy booster that launches Starship returned to Earth and landed at its “Mechazilla” launch tower, succeeding in the first ever attempt at this maneuver. This success brings SpaceX a step closer to its ambition of making Starship a fully reusable spacefaring system.

Metaphor: ReFantazio, the newest game out of Japanese video game company Atlus’ Studio Zero, owes a lot to the Persona games that came before it. From the mind of longtime Persona designer Katsura Hashino, it’s a sprawling role-playing game that combines dungeon crawling with social sim elements, using a daily calendar to dictate your progress.

While there’s no wrong way to play Metaphor—choice is the point, as you decide how you want to spend your days and who you want to spend them with—the game can feel overwhelming at times due to its size and the scope of everything you can do. Whether you’re new to Atlus RPGs or just want some friendly tips to start, here are a few things to keep in mind as you plunge into the United Kingdom of Euchronia.

Technology makes travel easier by allowing us to research and map out our travel plans. But for the disability community, technology can be the most valuable travel companion. The following apps and sites help people with disabilities make smart and safe choices so they can get out in the world and explore more than ever.

The service AccessibleGO was created by Miriam Eljas, whose mom, Emma, had multiple sclerosis and was a wheelchair user. The site allows you to book accessible flights and hotels across the United States. Then, a team member calls each of the vendors to confirm they can meet your needs. Founder Eljas tells me that the additional follow-up call offers assurance for clients with disabilities, “so you know a real person has understood your accessibility requirements and has personally spoken with your hotel, airline, or car company to ensure a smooth trip.”

The password-killing tech known as “passkeys” have proliferated over the past two years, developed by the tech industry association known as the FIDO Alliance as an easier and more secure authentication alternative. And although superseding any technology as entrenched as passwords is difficult, new features and resources launching this week are pushing passkeys toward a tipping point.

At the FIDO Alliance’s Authenticate Conference in Carlsbad, California, on Monday, researchers are announcing two projects that will make passkeys easier for organizations to offer—and easier for everyone to use. One is a new technical specification called Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) that will make passkeys portable between digital ecosystems, a feature that users have increasingly demanded. The other is a website, called Passkey Central, where developers and system administrators can find resources like metrics and implementation guides that make it easier to add support for passkeys on existing digital platforms.