Category: BUYSEMPERFI

Building design elements into cars that make sense for dogs and kids and groceries isn’t sexist, or buying into a stereotype—it’s a nod to the invisible labor women do every day, regardless of whether they work full-time, stay home, or something in between. And, incidentally, plenty of men do that labor, too, and might appreciate a small detail that makes dealing with a car seat or traveling with a golden retriever easier.

Scotty Reiss, founder of the site A Girls Guide To Cars, spends her time helping women navigate the car industry, exploring things like which cars have headrests best suited for ponytails (which lots of people wear regardless of gender), or the way fashion influences car design, even profiling designers at OEMs like GMC and Toyota. She says she’s seeing some inklings of Offer’s notion already, namely at Buick (which, incidentally, S&P Mobility said accounted for more than 55 percent of all new female vehicle registrations in 2022).

“Buick has been redesigning its brand unabashedly for women,” says Reiss. “They have tooled their interior to the female buyer with lighter colors, larger sunroofs and a cabin that’s designed to make you feel good. Buick has really tried to figure out what women need and want in their cars and deliver it in a way that’s attainable.”

Of course, all OEMs do their homework in terms of marketing and customer focus groups. They are well aware of female buying power. Cars.com released data in 2019 showing that female consumers accounted for 62 percent of all new cars sold in the US and influence more than 85 percent of all car purchases. Kia as well, says Reiss, is competing with Buick for the female buyer: “The Sorrento is another good example. It’s very functional and easy to use: center row captain’s chairs, room for big dogs and babies.” (General Motors, which owns Buick, declined comment for this story.)

Volvo’s All-Female Concept Team

Perhaps, though, it may not always feel that the end result of designing for women resonates with men and women alike, much less the LGBTQIA+ community. For instance, in 2004, an all-female team at Volvo asked women what they’d like to see in a vehicle, both inside and out. The result was the one-off Your Concept Car (YCC), which aimed to hit all of the notes the women surveyed listed: easy to park, minimal maintenance, smart storage, good visibility, easy to get in and out of. Where is it now? Not on the market, though the two-year-old Reddit thread discussing the YCC and what it could have been is packed with insight from gearheads of all genders.

There is some evidence to suggest that OEMs see women as a voice of practicality in car design, especially as the industry shifts to EV technology. On an all-female panel in January 2023 held at a meeting of the National Automobile Dealers Association, a few sales and marketing execs from GMC, Toyota, and Audi gathered to talk through what women want in EVs.

The second site pushed by Doppelganger bots targeted Germans. In October 2022, an investigation by the German newspaper Die Welt found that the author of content on the EuroBRICS site was being paid directly by InfoRos, which is registered as the operator of the EuroBRICs website by the German domain registrar.

Many of the same images from Doppelganger’s campaign, along with others targeting an English-speaking audience, were also shared on X by the same network of bots that have previously shared links to the Doppelganger campaigns.

“We collected a whopping 75-plus fake quotes by celebrities from the US and EU, all massively posted recently by bots of Doppelganger, the pro-Kremlin influence campaign,” one of the researchers at Antibot4Navalny tells WIRED.

The campaign on X, which coincided with the Facebook campaign, used over 10,000 bot accounts, according to the researchers. In the space of one eight-hour period, the bots posted over 27,000 messages. At one point, the bot accounts were posting 120 messages every minute.

The posts on X are identical to those posted as ads on Facebook identified by Reset, except that some of these posts were in English. The X campaign also featured mocked-up versions of celebrities’ verified Instagram accounts, making it seem as if screenshots of celebrity Instagram accounts, using similar anti-Ukraine quotes, were being shared.

X did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED about the Doppelganger campaign. Since Elon Musk took control of the platform in October 2022, he has eliminated most of the company’s trust and safety team, and disinformation has flourished on the site, especially around breaking news events like the recent Israel-Hamas war.

One of Reset’s researchers, who did not want to be identified to protect their identity from retaliatory attacks, tells WIRED that, in recent days, researchers have seen Doppelganger’s celebrity-based campaign evolve. Some ads on Facebook now, like the ones on X, feature screenshots that appear to show verified Instagram accounts of the same celebrities, adding a further layer of authenticity to the campaign. In one case, a screenshot of a fake Instagram post from the entrepreneur Richard Branson suggests that he believes America was behind the Nord Stream explosion.

The researcher also found video ads that feature real footage of celebrities with fake audio dubbed over the top, which they say have been created with text-to-speech apps. The researchers at Reset were unable to identify which app was being used to automate the creation of the videos. One example reviewed by WIRED showed footage of German filmmaker Wim Wenders speaking in English about his own films, dubbed to make it appear as if he was speaking in French about how “the Ukrainians are ruined.” The ad was posted to Facebook on November 25 and was seen by up to 3,000 people before it was removed for failing to have the “required disclaimer,” according to Facebook’s ad library.

More details are emerging about a data breach the genetic testing company 23andMe first reported in October. But as the company shares more information, the situation is becoming even murkier and creating greater uncertainty for users attempting to understand the fallout.

23andMe said at the beginning of October that attackers had infiltrated some of its users’ accounts and piggybacked off of this access to scrape personal data from a larger subset of users through the company’s opt-in, social sharing service known as DNA Relatives. At the time, the company didn’t indicate how many users had been impacted, but hackers had already begun selling data on criminal forums that seemed to be taken from at least a million 23andMe users, if not more. In a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, the company said that “the threat actor was able to access a very small percentage (0.1 %) of user accounts,” or roughly 14,000 given the company’s recent estimate that it has more than 14 million customers.

Fourteen thousand is a lot of people in itself, but the number didn’t account for the users impacted by the attacker’s data-scraping from DNA Relatives. The SEC filing simply noted that the incident also involved “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry.”

On Monday, 23andMe confirmed to TechCrunch that the attackers collected the personal data of about 5.5 million people who had opted in to DNA Relatives, as well as information from an additional 1.4 million DNA Relatives users who “had their Family Tree profile information accessed.” 23andMe subsequently shared this expanded information with WIRED as well.

From the group of 5.5 million people, hackers stole display names, most recent login, relationship labels, predicted relationships, and percentage of DNA shared with DNA Relatives matches. In some cases, this group also had other data compromised, including ancestry reports and details about where on their chromosomes they and their relatives had matching DNA, self-reported locations, ancestor birth locations, family names, profile pictures, birth years, links to self-created family trees, and other profile information. The smaller (but still massive) subset of 1.4 million impacted DNA Relatives users specifically had display names and relationship labels stolen and, in some cases, also had birth years and self-reported location data affected.

Asked why this expanded information wasn’t in the SEC filing, 23andMe spokesperson Katie Watson tells WIRED that “we are only elaborating on the information included in the SEC filing by providing more specific numbers.”

Unlike OpenAI, Mozilla’s nonprofit cannot fire executives in charge of for-profit work. Each for-profit unit has its own board, with members annually selected by the nonprofit foundation’s board. “It’s different jobs, it’s a different mix of skills,” Surman says. “If you have different functions, it makes sense to have a separation of powers.”

The different boards, with distinct characters and missions, are also intended to give the commercial endeavors greater autonomy. Mozilla tries to seat people who know philanthropy, open source technologies, social issues, and tech policy on the nonprofit board, Surman says. It looks more toward leadership experience in venture capital or corporate marketing and innovation on the for-profit boards.

Mozilla’s different boards have sometimes convened to discuss big shifts in technology, like the emergence of generative AI, which led to the creation of the Mozilla.ai. But the nonprofit foundation’s board holds ultimate authority by overseeing budgets and has the right to remove the for-profits’ board members. While that latter power hasn’t ever been exercised, there have sometimes been intense disagreements between what Mozilla leaders describe as movement goals and market goals, says Brian Behlendorf, a software developer who has been on the foundation’s board since its founding and is also a cofounder of the Apache Software Foundation.

In 2015, after consulting with the nonprofit board, the Mozilla Corporation shut down a project developing an open source mobile operating system that had spent hundreds of millions of dollars but struggled to win over smartphone makers. “To be competitive, you had to do more proprietary software and strike the kind of deals that were not about creating public goods,” Behlendorf says. “A letdown, but we didn’t see a way to fulfill the mission and Mozilla Manifesto.” That foundational document commits the project to keeping the internet open and accessible to all.

Competing Interests

Fixing OpenAI’s governance is in some ways more complex than anything ever faced by Mozilla, which has outside donors but no investors. OpenAI has to serve its overall mission of helping humanity while also pacifying investors who, after the recent crisis, are demanding a greater say in the organization’s direction. This is especially true of Microsoft, which has committed $13 billion to the company.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear last week that he considered it unacceptable to have been surprised by the board’s removal of Altman, which was communicated to OpenAI’s primary backer only minutes before it was announced publicly. “There is no OpenAI without Microsoft leaning in in a deep way to partner with this company on their mission,” Nadella said on journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast last week. “As a partner, I think it does mean that you deserve to be consulted on big decisions.”

Earlier this year Gill had become intrigued by how Apple’s Push Notification service (APNs) works, and how these bidirectional notifications might offer some clues into breaking open Messages.

First, Gill had to better understand how the Apple ID worked, so he reverse engineered how Apple Music operated on a Windows computer. He noted the traffic and how a non-Apple device registered with Apple servers. Next, he noted how a macOS computer signs into iMessage, then inspected that traffic. Then he reproduced it all in Python.

He began to put together a proof-of-concept that examined the various handoffs between the Apple ID, its Push Notification Service, and its messaging technologies.

“In theory, iMessage uses public encryption keys, because that’s how end-to-end encryption works,” Gill says. (Gill is correct, in that asymmetric encryption or public-key cryptography relies on a public-private key pairing; one is used to encrypt a message, and the other to decrypt it.) “Pypush actually figures out how we can publish those keys to Apple’s key server and how you can retrieve keys from Apple’s key server,” Gill says.

“His proof of concept demonstrates that on any computer with Python, you can sign into iMessage and send and receive messages,” Migicovsky says. He was so impressed with Gill that he offered him a contract to work part-time at Beeper. Gill accepted, with parental approval.

Gill’s mother, Erin Gill, says she and her husband were slightly concerned about Gill’s ability to manage his time as a junior in high school, but he had handled his part-time job at McDonald’s well enough that they told him to “go for it.” His father is a computer engineer and helped him with the details of the contract. “I’m an artist, and I understood almost nothing of what he was telling me other than he was excited about it,” Erin Gill says.

Migicovsky and the team quickly took Gill’s proof of concept, rewrote it, and added new features to it: support for photo and video sharing, group chat dynamics, and even someone’s typing status when they’re drafting a message. Over the past three months, the team folded all of those features into Beeper. The company’s original app, Beeper Cloud, still uses the Mac mini servers, but the new Beeper Mini runs entirely within the app client.

Color Wars

Migicovsky insists he’s not rushing out BeeperMini just because other upstarts have recently tried to hack Apple’s Messages, or because Apple recently acquiesced to a newer, Google-supported messaging standard might make the blue-bubble/green-bubble wars less fraught.

“We were planning to launch this two weeks before Nothing tried this, but we decided to hold off,” Migicovsky says.

According to my wife, the world comes with two types of people in it, “soakers” and “non-soakers.” She is the latter. Without question, I am the former. I still dream of a world in which I never need to leave the shower, living my life in a cozy, warm mist like Kramer in that one episode of Seinfeld.

One of the first things I wanted to do when my wife and I snagged our one-bathroom bungalow was upgrade the plumbing. Our water pressure, and the associated showerhead that the previous owners attached, was middling. We are lucky to have a sliding glass door so we don’t have to deal with mildewy curtains, but otherwise our shower/bath combo could be described as woefully utilitarian. When I looked at the cost of bathroom remodels and better plumbing, I settled into a series of small upgrades.

The biggest and most profound change I’ve made since my bidet-volution came one day while scrolling through Instagram. I found the Boona. This dual-headed wonder presses itself to the wall above your shower, giving you the ability to use one side, the other side, or both. It’s turned my bathroom into Water World. You can shower together with a partner—or have a partner who takes a quick shower while you’re soaking in there—and not get cold. It’s utterly glorious.

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Splish Splash

The Boona comes in a long, heavy box with everything you need to attach the showerheads and bar, right down the the plumber’s tape. The review unit sent to me came in shiny chrome, but you can also get it in multiple other colors, including a cute blue/pink combo. The only tool you’ll want is a good wrench to detach your existing showerhead with.

From there, it’s as simple as putting up the bar, hooking up the water line, and turning on the faucet. There is a valve on the faucet facing the water line that allows you to easily pick between the front and rear showerheads, or turn on both at once (my preferred method as a “soaker”).

The two showerheads on my review unit have adjustable sprayers that allow you to choose between the middle of the head and outer part of the head, which helps you pick between higher and lower pressure. I used them with the flow restrictors installed (as they are for California residents and folks in places with more water restrictions), and the heads worked more than adequately; both had better pressure than my previous showerhead.

I like how adjustable the heads are. They swivel around pretty far, which means you can treat either head as the main one, depending on which way you fancy during a given session.

DIY

Photograph: Boona

The Boona doesn’t even look that out of place in my unfancy bathroom. Especially if you get it in the shiny polished stainless steel that I got, you really won’t notice the added bar between your two showerheads.

If you’re a plumber, I know it’s not nearly as cheap as buying two showerheads and installing it the professional way. The Boona won’t increase your property value like a real upgrade would. Still, if you’re a renter, or someone who’s just not as handy, it’s a great solution that works as advertised.

I like being able to shower with my wife without freezing my butt off, and it made bathing my dog easier than ever. But to say that those are the reasons to get the Boona would be disingenuous. I got this, and love it, because I am a soaker with a standard bathroom and I wanted the comfort of two heads. If you also enjoy your shower time, I probably don’t need to explain why you want this. You just do.

ATI’s pilots are taking a less antagonistic tone in hopes of bringing Amazon to the negotiating table. “What we don’t want to do is affect our customers,” says Sterling. “We’ve done a lot to protect our obsession with Amazon.” However, he says the intransigence of ATSG’s management has left the pilots with no choice but to call a strike.

“This side of Amazon’s network is the most vulnerable to labor strikes,” says Marc Wulfraat, president of logistics consultancy MWPVL. If drivers or warehouse workers strike, the company can shift the flow of products and packages to one of its many nearby warehouses, but airports are fewer in number and farther apart.

Amazon could compensate for a walkout at ATI by shifting volume to other air carriers under the Amazon Air umbrella, but only if they have the capacity to handle the influx at all of the airports. It could also transport some of its packages by truck instead, which it did during the brief 2016 strike. However, this could result in slower shipping times and reduced service, says Wulfraat, which flies in the face of Amazon’s mantra of customer obsession.

Pilots also have the advantage of being generally in a strong position across the airline industry. “It’s still a very, very hot job market” for pilots, says Geoff Murray, a partner who works on aerospace at management consultancy Oliver Wyman. Plummeting demand for passenger pilots during the pandemic sent many into early retirement, worsening an existing pilot shortage that got more acute as the industry bounced back. Wages have soared. Oliver Wyman estimates that captains’ pay at the US mainline carriers, such as Delta and UPS, has increased 46 percent since 2020, while regional carriers have increased pay by 86 percent.

Pilot Drew Patterson came to ATI in 2021, attracted by the work-life balance the airline offered, but as the carrier lost pilots, he has seen his workload creep up and his schedule become more unpredictable. With fewer crews to operate the same number of flights, “everybody else’s schedule gets compressed,” he says. “Sometimes you can be away from home for a long time.”

Long-term, he thinks Amazon’s continued growth should be a good thing for ATI and its employees, so he’s been willing to stick it out. But he’s not so sure all of his colleagues will feel the same about current conditions at the company.

“All of this has a real house-of-cards feeling to it,” says Sterling. “We just can’t sustain what we’re doing.”

Most of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos just sitting on our phones and computers that we rarely get to revisit in a polished way. I make photo albums, but some deserve to be more on display, and there are just too many to frame. That’s why I love digital photo frames.

If you’re thinking of the tacky, pixelated digital frames of the early aughts, you’re in for a nice surprise. They’ve come a long way. They’re nice to have around the house, and they also make great gifts. You can set them up for others and push your latest vacation photos straight to them, so your parents or grandparents can always stay up-to-date. Most require a Wi-Fi connection. Cheaper ones often have SD card slots, but the quality suffers. If internet isn’t an issue, I have several recommendations. These are the best digital picture frames (and the worst).

Don’t have enough pictures? Check out our many other buying guides, like the Best Compact Cameras, the Best Mirrorless Cameras, the Best Photo Printing Services, and the Best Camera Gear for your Phone.

Updated December 2023: We’ve added two new frame recommendations from Aura and Loop.

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Before You Buy

Photograph: Aura Frames

You might not think that photos count as sensitive information, compared to a bank account statement or your Social Security number. But it can be devastating to find photos of loved ones used for nefarious or unsavory purposes.

This is why we prefer frames from reputable companies like Aura and Nixplay over cheaper ones with less clearly defined privacy and security practices. Nixplay offers reasonable security measures, like encrypting your photos during transmission, and Aura offers the option to delete metadata, like the location where a photo was captured. However, both say they may disclose personal information if court-ordered or subpoenaed, and neither provides safety guarantees against hacking.

If you’re concerned about security, you can avoid connecting to third-party services, but your most secure option is to just download several photos on a tablet and disable all internet connectivity.

“Did you learn things in CIA training about withstanding interrogation that are going to make it harder for me to interview you?” I asked Joe Weisberg, creator of the TV espionage drama The Americans and onetime CIA agent. He looked momentarily startled, as though he’d expected this to be easier. Good, I had him where I wanted him: off-balance. I saw him taking my measure. Then he laughed affably, but I mistrusted the affability, since I knew from his own books that affability is among the qualities the CIA recruits for: people who can get other people to trust them, or at least want to have lunch with them.

I suppose I had certain fantasies about interviewing an ex-spook (was he equally profiling me? more skillfully?), no doubt the result of having read too many John le Carré novels. As it happens, reading le Carré had a lot to do with propelling Weisberg himself to spycraft. Sure, he knew it was a fantasy world being depicted, but it was still a world he felt he belonged in. There was also his consuming obsession with bringing down the Soviet Union, which unfortunately for his career aspirations was soon to collapse on its own.

Weisberg, who is 57 and on the short side, has a sharp, possibly even hawkish visage along with an invitingly squishy-liberal midsection, which in combination externalize the essential duality in his being, one that’s both shaped his life story to date and yielded one of the most complex married couples in television history, the Russian sleeper agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings. The Americans aired on FX from 2013 to 2018, but everyone I know seems to be compulsively binge-streaming it lately—maybe the fear that your neighbors are plotting to bring down democracy somehow resonates again with the mental state of the country? Loosely based on the FBI’s 2010 arrest of a network of Soviet spies living under assumed identities in the US, the series springs at least as much from the depths of Weisberg’s psyche. Elizabeth, a cold warrior to her core, is, Weisberg says semi-jokingly, him pre-therapy; the détente-curious Philip is him after.

Therapy also figures significantly in his more recent limited-run series, The Patient, created with his writing partner Joel Fields (they were showrunners together on both series) and starring Steve Carell as a shrink horribly unlucky in his clientele. Something haunts me about both these shows, and not just because they feel like case studies in American paranoia. At a time when most scripted television specializes in moral preening—trafficking in sentimentality, pandering to liberal do-gooderism, leaving us feeling better about ourselves and the world—Weisberg’s shows put you through a merciless psychological and spiritual wringer. They’re willing to leave you floundering.

So what about those interrogation-evading techniques? I pressed Weisberg. We were chatting in his downtown apartment, the top two floors of a century-old building—gracious entryway, high-ceilinged rooms, also a rental and steep third-floor walkup with an inoperable buzzer. (“Joe doesn’t have fancy taste, he’s not acquisitive, he’s not super interested in money,” says his brother, Jacob.) Decorative touches include his late mother’s porcelain eggcup collection, a row of family photos (some “off the record”—Weisberg is divorced and has a teenage daughter), the residues of successive hobbies—photography, painting, cooking—and a wall of serious-looking books. The vestibule is devoted to an extensive high-tech backpack collection: his only consumerist passion is an unequivocally nerdy one.

What I really wanted to know was what he’d learned about getting inside people’s heads—knowing what your adversaries are thinking, using their desires against them. It’s what’s so seductive about le Carré: his operatives aren’t just spies, they’re master psychological strategists. As are Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, always knowing the precise right play: who’s dissembling, where’s the weak spot. Does CIA training give you a leg up at that kind of thing in later life? Does it make you better at grasping dark human complexities, thus at writing layered and contradictory characters?