Category: BUYSEMPERFI

The DCU’s hybrid technical and legal approach to chipping away at cybercrime is still unusual, but as the cybercriminal ecosystem has evolved—alongside its overlaps with state-backed hacking campaigns—the idea of employing creative legal strategies in cyberspace has become more mainstream. In recent years, for example, Meta-owned WhatsApp and Apple both took on the notorious spyware maker NSO Group with lawsuits.

Still, the DCU’s particular progression was the result of Microsoft’s unique dominance during the rise of the consumer internet. As the group’s mission came into focus while dealing with threats from the late 2000s and early 2010s—like the widespread Conficker worm—the DCU’s unorthodox and aggressive approach drew criticism at times for its fallout and potential impacts on legitimate businesses and websites.

“There’s simply no other company that takes such a direct approach to taking on scammers,” WIRED wrote in a story about the DCU from October 2014. “That makes Microsoft rather effective, but also a little bit scary, observers say.”

Richard Boscovich, the DCU’s assistant general counsel and a former assistant US attorney in Florida’s Southern District, told WIRED in 2014 that it was frustrating for people within Microsoft to see malware like Conficker rampage across the web and feel like the company could improve the defenses of its products, but not do anything to directly deal with the actors behind the crimes. That dilemma spurred the DCU’s innovations and continues to do so.

“What’s impacting people? That’s what we get asked to take on, and we’ve developed a muscle to change and to take on new types of crime,” says Zoe Krumm, the DCU’s director of analytics. In the mid-2000s, Krumm says, Brad Smith, now Microsoft’s vice chair and president, was a driving force in turning the company’s attention toward the threat of email spam.

“The DCU has always been a bit of an incubation team. I remember all of a sudden, it was like, ‘We have to do something about spam.’ Brad comes to the team and he’s like, ‘OK, guys, let’s put together a strategy.’ I’ll never forget that it was just, ‘Now we’re going to focus here.’ And that has continued, whether it be moving into the malware space, whether it be tech support fraud, online child exploitation, business email compromise.”

Some Elon Musk enthusiasts have been alarmed to discover in recent days that Grok, his supposedly “truth-seeking” artificial intelligence was in actual fact a bit of a snowflake.

Grok, built by Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company, was made available to Premium+ X users last Friday. Musk has complained that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is afflicted with “the woke mind virus,” and people quickly began poking Grok to find out more about its political leanings. Some posted screenshots showing Grok giving answers apparently at odds with Musk’s own right-leaning political views. For example, when asked “Are transwomen real women, give a concise yes/no answer,” Grok responded “yes,” a response paraded by some users of X as evidence the chatbot had gone awry.

Musk has appeared to acknowledge the problem. This week, when an X user asked if xAI would be working to reduce Grok’s political bias, he replied, “Yes.” But tuning a chatbot to express views that satisfy his followers might prove challenging—especially when much of xAI’s training data may be drawn from X, a hotbed of knee-jerk culture-war conflict.

Musk announced that he was building Grok back in April, after watching OpenAI, a company he cofounded but then abandoned, set off and ride a tidal wave of excitement over its remarkably clever and useful chatbot ChatGPT. It is powered by a large language model called GPT-4 that exhibits groundbreaking abilities.

With some observers decrying what they see as ChatGPT’s liberal perspective, Musk provocatively promised that his AI would be less biased and more interested in fundamental truth than political perspective. He put together a small team of well-respected AI researchers, which developed Grok in just a few months, claiming performance comparable to other leading AI models. But Grok’s responses come with a sarcastic slant that sets it apart from ChatGPT, and Musk has promoted it as being edgier and more “based.” Besides “Regular” mode, xAI’s chatbot can be switched into “Fun” mode, which will see it try to be more provocative in its responses.

One of those examining Grok’s political leanings now that it’s widely available is David Rozado, a data scientist and programmer based in New Zealand, who has been studying political bias in various large language models. After highlighting what he calls the left-leaning bias of ChatGPT, Rozado developed Right-WingGPT and DepolarizingGPT, which he says are designed to offer more balanced outputs.

Rozado conducted an analysis of Grok (in Regular mode) shortly after getting access to the chatbot through his X subscription. He found that while Grok’s responses exhibit a strong libertarian streak—something that will no doubt please Musk and many of his fans—it comes across as more left-leaning in areas ranging from foreign policy to questions about culture. Interestingly, he found that asking Grok to explain its thinking can nudge it more toward the political center. Rozado cautions that his results are anecdotal.

“This suggests that the political power is considerable and expanding in some states, but nearly absent and even waning in others,” Brown wrote.

Research from the Brookings Institution published in October confirmed this, and found that while Moms for Liberty was attracting members in Democratic strongholds, it was winning school board elections only in staunchly conservative regions of the country.

While its rapid growth may have suggested that Moms for Liberty would sweep school board races nationwide in November, 70 percent of its endorsed candidates lost their races, according to an analysis from the American Federation of Teachers. Weeks after the embarrassing election losses, the group was forced to remove two Kentucky chapter chairs from leadership positions after the women posed for photos with members of the Proud Boys militia. The group has a long history of associating with members of the Proud Boys, and Ziegler herself had to deny links to the group after she posed with two members at a victory party after she was elected to the Sarasota County School Board.

Then, the group removed Phillip Fisher Jr., a pastor who coordinates faith-based outreach for Philadelphia’s Moms for Liberty chapter, after it was revealed he was a registered sex offender.

Then came the revelations about the Zieglers.

Initially, the Moms for Liberty groups circled the wagons and slammed the media attention on the story, claiming in a statement on X that the sexual assault allegation made against Christian Ziegler was ​​”another attempt to ruin the reputation of a strong woman fighting for America.”

But in early December, a chapter chair in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, who was also the state legislative lead for the group, announced she and the other members were splitting from the national group to form their own organization because of the leadership’s response to the scandal.

In the weeks since, those who are closely tracking the group’s activities say chapters have gone quiet. Some, including several chapters in Maryland, have been removed from the Moms for Liberty website and their online activity has slowed to a crawl.

“Moms for Liberty has been repeatedly exposed as hypocrites over the past months, but I believe these new issues will be insurmountable to them,” Karen Svoboda, cofounder of Defense of Democracy, a group created to counter Moms for Liberty’s actions, tells WIRED. “Moms for Liberty, the powerhouse that wreaked such havoc on our communities and schools, is becoming undone by their own hubris.”

Buying a mattress online is easy and efficient. A box comes to you with no need for a truck or professional movers. Just lug the bed-in-a-box inside, crack the cardboard, slash open the plastic wrap, and watch the mattress spring into shape. Want it extra fast, without having to make a new account? Order a mattress on Amazon! With Prime taking over the world, you can buy a relatively cheap mattress today and sleep on it tomorrow night.

The drawback to online shopping is you can’t test a showroom of mattresses until you find the perfect fit. Add in the fact that Amazon reviews can be gamed by bad actors, and it’s hard to know what’s worth your time and what’s not. WIRED has done the work for you, spending at least a week if not longer sleeping on some of the best-rated mattresses on Amazon—we’re looking for a great night’s sleep at a good value. It’s worth noting that we don’t think Amazon is the best place to buy a mattress—we go into our reasons below—but if your prime focus is cost and convenience, then you do have some good options. The prices below are based on the queen size.

Be sure to check out our other sleep guides, including the Best Mattresses, Best Organic Mattresses, Best Mattresses for Side Sleepers, and Best Sleep Gadgets.

Special offer for Gear readers: Get WIRED for just $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com, full Gear coverage, and subscriber-only newsletters. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day.

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The Pros and Cons of Buying a Mattress on Amazon

Amazon is a solid place to buy almost anything, but it’s less advantageous for mattress purchases than most other goods. That’s because domestic manufacturers dominate the bed-in-a-box game, and you can often get a better deal by buying from the mattress maker directly. Some of these brands throw in two pillows with your purchase or have other discounts, though this is not always true—a few mattresses in this guide are cheaper on Amazon.

Most mattresses sold on Amazon tend to be on the cheaper side, which is the main draw. You can easily compare various versions of the same thing (i.e., memory foam or hybrid mattresses), plus you don’t have to make a new account. Best of all, you can get fast and dependable shipping.

Amazon’s terms for returning goods have an exception for mattresses. Once you open the box you are at the mercy of the maker instead of being covered by the more generous terms Amazon offers for most products it sells. If you’re looking at mattresses below $500, you should not expect any test period or money-back guarantee, whereas that’s a reasonable thing to expect of any mattress above $1,000. Things vary widely in the middle zone.

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Carbon removal techniques come in two main flavors—the technological and the natural—but also increasingly a melding of the two. The dominant technology at the moment is direct air capture, or DAC. This involves giant machines sucking in air and filtering out the CO₂. Like an air purifier filters dust out of your indoor air, DAC facilities scrub the atmosphere of carbon. Technically, carbon removal is distinct from carbon capture, which intercepts the gas at the source, such as a power plant, before it reaches the atmosphere.

DAC, though, is a nascent technology, and it’s nowhere near operating at the scale needed to put a proper dent in global emissions. In 2021, researchers calculated that it would take a huge annual investment of between 1 and 2 percent of the global gross domestic product to remove about 2.3 gigatons of CO₂ annually by the year 2050. To put that in perspective, global emissions of CO₂ are currently around 40 gigatons a year—and are unfortunately still rising instead of going down. The 2021 study found that we’d need between 4,000 to 9,000 DAC facilities by the year 2075, and more than 10,000 by 2100, to theoretically be sequestering up to 27 gigatons of carbon a year. (The idea behind this rapid scale-up being that as the technology and industry progresses, it gets easier and cheaper to deploy more plants.)

So DAC could play some part in removing carbon from the atmosphere, and it will grow more impactful the more carbon we can stop emitting, since there will be less to clean up. But it’ll take a whole lot of cash. “Could we actually scale it up fast enough to go from a couple million tons a year now to, say, a billion tons a year in 2050?” asks Nemet. “That’s where I’m actually more optimistic. We could do it, but it’s challenging. That doesn’t change at all our policy right now, or what our goal should be: We need to really quickly start reducing emissions and get down to close to zero by 2050.”

Even if DAC were scaled up massively, it couldn’t alone save us from ourselves. If it’s removing a billion tons of CO₂ annually in 30 years, and humans are still emitting tens of billions of tons of the gas, it’ll be like trying to drain a bathtub with the tap still running. One promise of carbon removal, though, is that it could help offset future emissions from hard-to-abate sectors, like the steel industry, which require enormous amounts of fossil-fuel power to run. Unlike making a home fully solar-powered, you can’t just slap panels on these factories and call it a day.

I had a miserable time setting up LG’s 65-inch C3 OLED TV. The long and short of it is that LG TVs don’t play nicely with networks like mine by default. It was a frustrating situation, but maybe the biggest lesson learned is that when a TV looks this great, I’m terrible at holding a grudge.

Like the C2 before it, the C3 uses LG’s Evo panel technology to help it get a lot brighter than OLED TVs from just a few years back. It’s still not the brightest OLED in its price class—that title goes to Samsung’s impressive S90C—but that doesn’t take away from its sensational performance. With sparkling HDR highlights, dashing contrast and shadow detail, and rich, naturalistic colors, the C3 won my heart.

I’m still not in love with its webOS smart system, and my setup woes didn’t help, but LG’s second-tier OLED remains one of the best in the business. With performance so good, this TV is worth some hassle.

Fifth Time’s the Charm

From TVs to smart speakers, today’s modern network devices make setup a relative breeze, letting you skip the headaches and move on to the good stuff. LG’s C3 brought me back to the bad old days of miscues and missed connections, fumbling through a litany of setup failures.

Through four resets and power cycles, the TV continuously claimed it was connected to my network. Yet, when I tried to launch apps or open the app store, the connection failed and/or told me to log in to my account, creating a feedback loop of system errors.

Finally, after a video call with LG, we were able to get the TV properly connected by changing its DNS IP Address from my network’s default address to Google’s (8.8.8.8). LG said my DNS IP address being the same as my Gateway IP address caused the issue, though I’ve had no such network trouble outside of LG TVs.

Doing some more research online, it appears this is a rare but not wholly uncommon LG issue that can occur when everything is set to automatic, so if you come across it, you may need to manually change your TV’s DNS server. I’ve reached out to LG for more info about why this is the case, and will update this review when possible.

It was relatively smooth sailing after that, but webOS still lags behind my favorite TV interfaces from Roku and Google TV, and even Samsung’s Tizen in some ways. The setup engine, even when working properly, is clunky. The home screen is as loaded with junk ads as anything out there. The app store is similarly crowded and difficult to navigate, and apps seem to require more updates than other systems.

I do appreciate webOS’s advances over the years, including conveniences added to keep up with the competition, like the ability to log in to apps on your phone and arrange them by most recently used. The response is also a fair bit snappier than my LG C1 and other TVs I’ve evaluated, and settings are easier to locate than Samsung’s Tizen, making it a decent enough daily driver. Of course, if you don’t love it, you can always add a streaming stick or box.

Sleek Style

Assembling the C3’s hardware is relatively simple. While it took a while to get all the screws in place, I love the look of its pedestal stand. The main panel is slightly thicker than that of rivals like the S90C and Sony’s A80L, but I actually prefer the more robust build. Unlike those models, I was never worried about bending the display when moving it or hoisting it on my console. The panel’s backside sports a distinctive, uniform design with soft ridges and a slick punch-out cabinet for the circuitry.

You’ll find slightly fancier designs in flagships like Samsung’s S95C (8/10, WIRED Recommends), which offers slimmer bezels and a uniform design thanks to the One Connect box that harbors all the inputs and connects over a single cable. But make no mistake: The C3 is a premium display that looks the part.

One spot still in need of updating is the remote. Where Samsung has redesigned its tiny remote for intuitive control, even adding solar power with a USB-C backup for its top models, LG’s bulky magic remote has remained essentially unchanged for years. It works well enough, but it would be nice to see some evolution there.

A Clever Blend of Features

When it comes to usability, the C3’s strong mix of gaming and home theater features equates to a stellar entertainment centerpiece, whatever you’re into.

On the gaming side, all four HDMI 2.1 inputs support 4K content at up to 120-Hz frame rates, as well as gaming extras like VRR (variable refresh rate) and ALLM (auto low latency mode) with next-gen consoles. Switching on the Game Optimizer makes it easy for serious gamers to control settings on the fly, while the gaming hub offers built-in cloud gaming from services like Amazon Luna and GeForce Now.

Every year, I gift at least one person an astrology-themed item. You can get them anything from a candle with scent notes specifically selected for a Virgo to a book with adorable artwork and fun facts about a Sagittarius. There are even socks for four different astrology signs that are still sitting in my closet, waiting to be gifted to friends (look, I’m great at shopping, and not so great at going to the post office).

Astrology gifts should get a little more credit. Tracking the movements of the sun and stars is part of a long and respected scientific tradition. It was invented by the Babylonians, and Ancient Greeks and Romans like Ptolemy and Plato all practiced it (check out the astrology text Astronomica for details). If the Romans were astrology fans, then why can’t I gift all my Roman Empire–loving friends astrology sweatshirts?!

But astrology doesn’t have to be about checking your horoscope or trying to predict the future. Rather, I use astrology to reflect (and make memes about my friends’ personalities). When I give someone an astrology-themed gift, I’m not trying to tell them they should embody all the qualities of a Scorpio. Instead, the real beauty is recognizing there was a moment in time when your loved one came into the world and got on the path that led them into your life. Astrology-themed gifts say, “Hey, I love you, and we’re on this bizarre plane of existence together.”

Instantly Personal

Photograph: Tanja Ivanova/Getty Images

You have to know someone pretty well to ask them where and when they were born. Obviously, an astrologer is going to ask you in order to generate a birth chart, and we’ve all met random astrology fans who make it a point to ask right after meeting you. But I love learning a new fact about a new real-friend or loved one. Sometimes they don’t know it themselves and I have to ask them to text their mom (which most of my friends had to do). I have a note in my phone with my close friends’ birth locations and times so I never forget. It’s rude to forget it after they spent time finding such personal information for me.

For most astrology items, of course, you only need one piece of information: the exact month and date they were born. That’s how you find out a sun sign, which is supposed to symbolize your basic identity. Part of why it’s a popular baseline for astrology is because it’s so easy to know—just about everyone knows their birthday off the top of their head. The sun moves pretty consistently around the 22nd of each month, making it easy to remember which sign you are.

When you hear someone say, “I’m such a Libra,” they’re probably referencing their sun sign. Most gifts I get for friends are for their sun sign. Sure, I could get my best friend a gift for her moon sign in Scorpio, but she’d usually be much happier to get the Virgo one—usually, I say, because scented astrology-themed items open up more preferences than just a book or sweatshirt.

What Does My Sign Smell Like?

There are many ways to interpret each astrology sign. That flexibility lends to its popularity and an ease in finding yourself within the definitions. But that also means you might not agree with someone’s interpretation, and when you dive into scent-based astrology gifts, the nuances and preferences become much clearer.

The scent palettes from Zodiac Perfumery, a celestial-inspired fragrance shop, has a scent for each of the twelve signs. The perfumery’s method was to choose a similar ingredient for each of the four elements that connect the signs—such as “containing vanilla to provide warmth” for fire signs like Aries and Leo, and “including citrus to feel light” for air signs like Gemini and Aquarius—and build on those scent profiles to customize it for each sign. I tried out all of the items in the fragrance sampler. While I enjoyed the floral scent of Libra, my sun sign, my favorite ended up being the apple and sandalwood combination of my moon sign’s scent, Virgo.

This is where knowing someone’s entire birth chart comes in handy. If you know your friend loves a vanilla-based scent and has a couple fire signs in their chart, then you have a little more flexibility as to which one you can pick. You can review the options with their entire chart in mind versus just choosing the simple sun sign.

The Birthdate Candles are a less flexible gift, but that hasn’t stopped me from gifting them to every one of my friends I’ve ever seen use a candle. The brand has a custom scent for every day of the year, so you can plug in your loved one’s birthday and get a candle designed for their day. The label around the candle also includes numerology and a tarot card for the day of their birth, making it a fun read to see all the information about the day you came into the world.

The only downside is not knowing whether they’ll like the scent. For my birthday, the scent is hydrangea, peony, and jasmine. It’s a very mild, floral scent that I usually wouldn’t choose, but I still loved lighting it. The scent was floral without being cloying, and was nice to burn year-round.

More Ideas

Looking for ideas without a scent? Here’s what I love to give.

Books are my favorite astrology gift; they’re a way teach someone to fish, if you will. You can learn to read your own birth chart, or quickly access info about all the signs and various terms used for the zodiac and astrology. The Seeing Stars line of books are all themed around the 12 different sun signs. Another book that I love is Star Power, which is surprisingly dense, considering its small size. I expected more of a coffee table book than the true guidebook it manages to be.

If you’re worried the person you’re shopping for might already have these books, preorder them a new one. Alice Bell, the resident astrologer for British Vogue, has a new book called Trust Your Timing, available for preorder for her January 2024 release.

Gifting for someone who’s more of a writer than a reader? Papier’s astrology journals and planners are absolutely beautiful, with a fantastic quality to the pages and design. They’re almost too beautiful to write in (though that certainly didn’t stop me). Papier makes astrology designs for each sun sign for their 2024 planners and wellness journals.

You know what everyone loves? A caffeinated drink of some kind. Therefore, everyone must love a fun vessel for their caffeine, right? Glad we all agree. I love these gorgeous, funky mugs from the Etsy shop Astral Weekend so much that I have two of them. They’re the perfect size for an extra large cup of tea, fit nicely in hands that are both big and small, and have survived years of cups of tea without any permanent stains.

Look, your horoscope might not always be correct. The patterns and predictions of the universe are beyond me. But for me, the astrology gifts I give are about looking back at how the planets were aligned when my favorite people came into the world. First they weren’t here, and then they were! It’s a moment I’ll always be grateful for.

Does your favorite movie star or pop singer really love the Kremlin? Though the ads in your Facebook feed may lead you to believe such a thing, it’s just not true. In recent months, a major disinformation campaign has run rampant on Meta and X (aka Facebook and Twitter). The campaign uses fake ads that show existing photos of extremely famous celebrities—Beyoncé, Oprah, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Cristiano Ronaldo—which have been doctored with fake quotes that back Russia and criticize Ukraine. The campaign, which is still in progress, was perpetrated by a pre-Kremlin group known as Doppelganger. Information shared exclusively with WIRED has also linked this disinformation campaign to Russia’s GRU military spy agency.

On this week’s show, we talk with WIRED contributor David Gilbert, who reports on digital disinformation. David says Doppelganger has been acting in plain sight for over a year, buying targeted ads and using networks of bots and fake Facebook pages to get its pro-Russia propaganda in front of millions of people.

Show Notes

Read David’s story about Doppelganger’s campaign. Read all of David’s recent coverage. Also read our coverage of other online propaganda campaigns.

Recommendations

David recommends the movie Saltburn. Mike recommends buying Italian blood orange soda instead of sparkling cider for your next holiday part. Lauren recommends supporting a union!

David Gilbert can be found wrangling all kinds of disinformation on social media @daithaigilbert. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

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Gen Z-ers are making aspirational boards about houses they want to live in, places they want to visit, and even people they want to date, says Sarah Pollack, Pinterest’s global head of consumer marketing.

The app also brings a more visual alternative to traditional search. Some Gen Z-ers are ditching Google, substituting the search engine by browsing on TikTok, Instagram, and now Pinterest. “Search is getting increasingly fragmented,” says Jeremy Goldman, senior director of marketing, retail, and tech briefings at research firm Insider Intelligence. When people are looking for outfit ideas, recipes, and vacation travel, they may turn to Pinterest, where they’ll be connected to products by their interests, rather than by who they follow.

Despite its success, Pinterest is still a smaller fish in a sea of social media giants. YouTube, TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram are each used by more than half of teens, according to a recent Pew Research survey (the survey did not mention Pinterest.) But the pinboard site may have a leg up: In a 2023 survey from global market research firm Forrester, 33 percent of adults under 25 said they found Pinterest to be “cool,” the highest rating of any social media site. Instagram and Snapchat were close behind, with TikTok, Facebook, and X all coming in lower.

Pinterest earned some Gen Z love in 2022 when it unveiled a collage-making app, Shuffles, which let users take photos themselves or use images from Pinterest’s own library to create mood boards with animation and effects. But as creativity-driven as Shuffles and Pinterest may be, they’re also persuading people to buy things, and luxury brands are paying attention, seeing what styles people are pinning and leaning into those trends. Pollack says 84 percent of Gen Z-ers say they look to Pinterest for products to buy, and that the company wants to connect every item people can pin to a way they can buy. And with direct shopping links, visual discovery, and integrated ads, Pinterest is “aligned with what advertisers and what retailers want,” Goldman claims.

If Pinterest’s predictions for 2024 hold true, we can expect to see more “grandpa style” clothes, people playing badminton, and even “jellyfish haircuts.” The true test for Pinterest, though, is if it can hold Gen Z’s attention longer than these trends do.