Just a tiny amount of fentanyl, the equivalent of a few grains of sand, is enough to stop a person’s breathing. The synthetic opioid is tasteless, odorless, and invisible when mixed with other substances, and drug users are often unaware of its presence.

It’s why biotech entrepreneur Collin Gage is aiming to protect people against the drug’s lethal effects. In 2023, he became the cofounder and CEO of ARMR Sciences to develop a vaccine against fentanyl. Now, the company is launching a trial to test its vaccine in people for the first time. The goal: prevent deaths from overdose.

“It became very apparent to me that as I assessed the treatment landscape, everything that exists is reactionary,” Gage says. “I thought, why are we not preventing this?”

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Hacker conferences—like all conventions—are notorious for giving attendees a parting gift of mystery illness. To combat “con crud,” New Zealand’s premier hacker conference, Kawaiicon, quietly launched a real-time, room-by-room carbon dioxide monitoring system for attendees.

To get the system up and running, event organizers installed DIY CO₂ monitors throughout the Michael Fowler Centre venue before conference doors opened on November 6. Attendees were able to check a public online dashboard for clean air readings for session rooms, kids’ areas, the front desk, and more, all before even showing up. “It’s ALMOST like we are all nerds in a risk-based industry,” the organizers wrote on the convention’s website.

“What they did is fantastic,” Jeff Moss, founder of the Defcon and Black Hat security conferences, told WIRED. “CO₂ is being used as an approximation for so many things, but there are no easy, inexpensive network monitoring solutions available. Kawaiicon building something to do this is the true spirit of hacking.”

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In letters sent to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.

“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

The letter adds that site-based age verification methods have “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.” Aylo says device-based authentication is a better solution for this issue because once a viewer’s age is determined via phone or tablet, their age signal can be shared over its application programming interface (API) with adult sites.

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