Elon Musk's X Is Suspending Accounts That Reveal a Neo-Nazi Cartoonist's Alleged Identity Researchers and journalists have been blocked on X from sharing the alleged identity of the neo-Nazi cartoonist Stonetoss. X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site ow

The families of four people killed at a mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket have filed a sweeping lawsuit against a slew of major internet companies, weapon vendors, the family of the perpetrator, and a Japanese toy company. In a lawsuit filed Friday, the families name internet giants Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet, including social media they own; smaller platforms like Reddit and Snapc

Documents obtained by WIRED confirm that Good Smile, which licenses toy production for Disney, was an investor in the controversial image board. Toxic image board 4chan has managed to stay online for the past seven years—amid boycotts and advertiser flight, after being implicated in several mass shootings, even as it was identified as a source of the conspiracy theories that inspired the January 6

Just one person remains to enforce the company’s ban on child sexual abuse content across Japan and the Asia Pacific region. Removing child exploitation is “priority #1”, Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk declared last week. But, at the same time, following widespread layoffs and resignations, just one staff member remains on a key team dedicated to removing child sexual abuse content from the

While the infamous imageboard’s ties to mass shootings have long been clear, its relationship with a Japanese toymaker has remained remarkably murky. Over the past 19 years, the imageboard 4chan has been tied to Gamergate, the inception of QAnon, the incubation of a particular brand of online racism, and a raft of domestic terror attacks that have killed scores of people. Tragically, references an

Back from a sheltered-in-place July 4th vacation, complete with Hamilton and a disastrous attempt at s’mores. They’re more complicated than you think! You could argue that Taylor Lorenz was Clubhouse’s biggest fan. When the New York Times tech culture reporter noticed the new app in April, she instantly signed up. She had no idea that the real-time audio-based social network would soon become invi

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act barred the humans who made hiring decisions from discriminating on the basis of sex or race. Now, software often contributes to those hiring decisions, helping managers screen résumés or interpret video interviews. That worries some tech experts and civil rights groups, who cite evidence that algorithms can replicate or magnify biases shown by people. In 2018, Reuters

The techie-turned-philanthropist on vaccines, Trump, and why social media is “a poisoned chalice.” Despite trillions of dollars of economic damage, Bill Gates is optimistic that a strong pipeline of therapies and vaccines will carry the US through the pandemic.Photograph: JEFF PACHOUD/Getty Images For 20 years, Bill Gates has been easing out of the roles that made him rich and famous—CEO, chief so

The dating app's new end-of-the-world, choose-your-own-adventure game, called Swipe Night, will generate new matches based on your choices. It’s the last day on Earth. You’ve just heard the news, felt the tremble of the emergency alert on your phone: A meteor, barreling through deep space, will shatter the planet in a few hours, obliterating everything you know. Goodbye to your mom; toodle-oo to y

On a bright Monday in January 2017, at 2:30 in the afternoon, about a thousand Google employees—horrified, alarmed, and a little giddy—began pouring out of the company's offices in Mountain View, California. They packed themselves into a cheerful courtyard outside the main campus café, a parklike area dotted with picnic tables and a shade structure that resembles a giant game of pickup sticks. Man

The notion of a so-called zero-day vulnerability in software is supposed to mean, by definition, that it's secret. The term refers to a hackable flaw in code that the software's maker doesn't know about but that a hacker does—in some cases offering that hacker a powerful, stealthy skeleton key into the hearts of millions of computers. But according to new findings from security firm Symantec, one

Among those involved in David Pokora's so-called Xbox Underground, one would become an informant, one would become a fugitive, and one would end up dead. The trip to Delaware was only supposed to last a day. David Pokora, a bespectacled University of Toronto senior with scraggly blond hair down to his shoulders, needed to travel south to fetch a bumper that he’d bought for his souped-up Volks­wage