Wired Opinion

We spend nearly half our waking hours at work, and much of that time is not even spent doing our actual job: It’s all work about work. Email is broken, and what works on social networks like Facebook just doesn’t …

Since we know that computers connected to the internet are vulnerable to outside hacking, an air gap should protect against those attacks. (Osama Bin Laden used one.) Air gaps might be conceptually simple, but they’re hard to maintain in practice. …

After the initial Jeopardy excitement, most people forgot about Watson, the first computer ever to pass the Turing Test. But we need to pay attention, and now. Because Watson heralds the emergence of ‘thinking machines’ capable of knowledge creation that …

So, this was kind of a big week in the WIRED world. These are the 12 stories to read NOW to make sure you’re wired, too.

The real problem with ebooks is that they’re more ‘e’ than book, so an entirely different set of rules govern what someone can and can’t do with them compared to physical books, especially when it comes to pricing. The collusion …

In resisting the commoditization of creativity and the inaccessibility of resources for independent creators, XOXO has managed to replicate both problems.

There’s a danger to the one-dimensional discussions around autonomous cars: We can’t rely on the technology inside the car alone. We need to think about what’s outside, too — a smart, interconnect infrastructure for our roadways. Especially because the smartest …

GNU just turned 30 years old. But much has changed since the beginning of the free software movement; now there’s SaaS and more. Malware is common in proprietary software products since users don’t have control over them. Why does this …

Hello, you there — under that rock. Yes, you; come here a minute?

Fictive depictions of tech are influential. In most shows, technology is painted as either implausibly superpowered (‘Wait—enhance that image!’) or alarmingly dangerous. The Good Wife avoids this Manichaean trap.

The general assumption is that young kids lack the faculties to comprehend a topic as seemingly esoteric as programming. But it is code, not Mandarin, that will be the true lingua franca of the future.

Everyone is talking about hardware, sharing all kinds of optimism about how hardware is cool again. We’ve already heard the reasons why. But here’s what we don’t know, and what we need to talk about if we want the current …

Whether looking for a job or an apartment or interestingness, it turns out our friends have ‘informational deficit’ — which is why weak ties are better than social friendships.

Hard as it may be to believe, the tech world continued to spin while you were busy installing iOS 7 and cracking jokes about Larry Page’s quest for immortality. Catch up on what you missed with this installment of the …

When Apple’s chief marketing maven, Phil Schiller, said the new line of iPhones were designed to be “environmentally friendly,” my interest was piqued (I’m the guy behind the iFixit teardowns). Because there is no such thing as an environmentally friendly …

There’s a tendency to refer to smartphones, tablets, and laptops as different sizes of the same thing, and while that may be true in pricing or business models or disrupting markets, it’s not true of design. Our PC-driven instincts are …

We write the equivalent of 520 million books every day on social media and email. The fact that so many of us are writing — sharing our ideas, good and bad — has changed the way we think. Just as …

Chaotic week, right? In addition to the piles of work, your brain was preoccupied with thoughts of chemical weapons and Jesse Pinkman’s fate. Keeping abreast of your social-media streams was thus nearly impossible, and now you’re afraid of sounding ignorant …

While there’s a great deal of discussion around the pros and cons of fingerprint authentication, no one’s focusing on the *legal* effects of moving from PINs to fingerprints. Because the constitutional protection of the Fifth Amendment may not apply when …

Far from being the measure of disgrace it once was, failure now seems to be a sort of badge of honor. But somewhere along the way, it got to be uncool to reduce one’s risk of failure. People have somehow …