Enlarge (credit: dakuq via Getty)

Victor Miller is running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with an unusual campaign promise: If elected, he will not be calling the shots—an AI bot will. VIC, the Virtual Integrated Citizen, is a ChatGPT-based chatbot that Miller created. And Miller says the bot has better ideas—and a better grasp of the law—than many people currently serving in government.

“I realized that this entity is way smarter than me, and more importantly, way better than some of the outward-facing public servants I see,” he says. According to Miller, VIC will make the decisions, and Miller will be its “meat puppet,” attending meetings, signing documents, and otherwise doing the corporeal job of running the city.

But whether VIC—and Victor—will be allowed to run at all is still an open question.

Enlarge / A logo on equipment stored near the OceanGate Inc. offices in Everett, Washington, US, on Thursday, June 22, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

Enlarge (credit: Just_Super via Getty)

Today, people around the world will head to school, doctor’s appointments, and pharmacies, only to be told, “Sorry, our computer systems are down.” The frequent culprit is a cybercrime gang operating on the other side of the world, demanding payment for system access or the safe return of stolen data.

The ransomware epidemic shows no signs of slowing down in 2024—despite increasing police crackdowns—and experts worry that it could soon enter a more violent phase.

“We’re definitely not winning the fight against ransomware right now,” Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, tells WIRED.

Enlarge / Fungus samples are seen on display inside the Fungarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, west London in 2023. The Fungarium was founded in 1879 and holds an estimated 380,000 specimens from the UK. (credit: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s hard to miss the headliners at Kew Gardens. The botanical collection in London is home to towering redwoods and giant Amazonian water lilies capable of holding up a small child. Each spring, its huge greenhouses pop with the Technicolor displays of multiple orchid species.

But for the really good stuff at Kew, you have to look below the ground. Tucked underneath a laboratory at the garden’s eastern edge is the fungarium: the largest collection of fungi anywhere in the world. Nestled inside a series of green cardboard boxes are some 1.3 million specimens of fruiting bodies—the parts of the fungi that appear above ground and release spores.

Enlarge (credit: Courtesy of NYU Langone)

Surgeons in New York have removed a pig kidney less than two months after transplanting it into Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman with kidney failure who also needed a mechanical heart pump. The team behind the transplant says there were problems with the heart pump, not the pig kidney, and that the patient is in stable condition.

Pisano was facing heart and kidney failure and required routine dialysis. She wasn’t eligible to receive a traditional heart and kidney transplant from a human donor because of several chronic medical conditions that reduced the likelihood of a good outcome.

Enlarge (credit: Flavio Coelho/Getty Images)

Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.

Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in a password-protected digital wallet. He generated a password using the RoboForm password manager and stored that password in a file encrypted with a tool called TrueCrypt. At some point, that file got corrupted, and Michael lost access to the 20-character password he had generated to secure his 43.6 BTC (worth a total of about 4,000 euros, or $5,300, in 2013). Michael used the RoboForm password manager to generate the password but did not store it in his manager. He worried that someone would hack his computer and obtain the password.

“At [that] time, I was really paranoid with my security,” he laughs.

Enlarge (credit: RyanLJane via Getty)

Last week, the Biden administration announced it would levy dramatic new tariffs on electric vehicles, electric vehicle batteries, and battery components imported into the United States from China. The move kicked off another round of global debate on how best to push the transportation industry toward an emissions-free future, and how global automotive manufacturers outside of China should compete with the Asian country’s well-engineered and low-cost car options.

But what is an electric vehicle exactly? China has dominated bicycle manufacturing, too; it was responsible for some 80 percent of US bicycle imports in 2021, according to one report. In cycling circles, the US’s new trade policies have raised questions about how much bicycle companies will have to pay to get Chinese-made bicycles and components into the US, and whether any new costs will get passed on to US customers.

On Wednesday, the Office of the United States Trade Representative—the US agency that creates trade policy—clarified that ebike batteries would be affected by the new policy, too.

Enlarge / Tesla sold 1.2 million Model Y crossovers last year. (credit: John Paraskevas/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

For at least a decade, a car theft trick known as a “relay attack” has been the modern equivalent of hot-wiring: a cheap and relatively easy technique to steal hundreds of models of vehicles. A more recent upgrade to the radio protocol in cars' keyless entry systems known as ultra-wideband communications, rolled out to some high-end cars including the latest Tesla Model 3, has been heralded as the fix for that ubiquitous form of grand theft auto. But when one group of Chinese researchers actually checked whether it's still possible to perform relay attacks against the latest Tesla and a collection of other cars that support that next-gen radio protocol, they found that they're as stealable as ever.

In a video shared with WIRED, researchers at the Beijing-based automotive cybersecurity firm GoGoByte demonstrated that they could carry out a relay attack against the latest Tesla Model 3 despite its upgrade to an ultra-wideband keyless entry system, instantly unlocking it with less than a hundred dollars worth of radio equipment. Since the Tesla 3's keyless entry system also controls the car's immobilizer feature designed to prevent its theft, that means a radio hacker could start the car and drive it away in seconds—unless the driver has enabled Tesla's optional, off-by-default PIN-to-drive feature that requires the owner to enter a four-digit code before starting the car.