The site and corresponding iOS and Android apps would seamlessly integrate the latest Covid data and content from multiple federal agencies, hospitals nationwide, and private sector companies.

Moderna’s Melissa Moore explained why we should be excited about the dawn of mRNA vaccines; the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Christopher Krebs, talked about the cybersecurity issues that pose the biggest threat to our democracy; and Slack's Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce's Bret Taylor told us about how digital-first workplaces will become the norm even when we can return to the office.

“This model opens up a lot of possibilities, and it creates a dynamic where workers can leverage their power through an organization,” says Wes McEnany, the East Coast lead for CWA’s Campaign to Organize Digital Employees.

But as mobile screens have gotten better, the technology inside the digital picture frames has also improved dramatically.The pictures on the Aura look vibrant, but the screen doesn't glow brightly like a computer display.

Other livestreams from participants have been removed by the platforms themselves, part of a scrambling effort by social media giants to scrub their feeds of footage like Evans’ stream.

Even the industry’s fanciest nights, like the National Book Awards gala, took place as digital events, with participants glammed up and sitting at home.WIRED asked the writers behind five of our favorite 2020 tomes to tell us what it was like to release a book during quarantine.

In a year where some in Big Tech pledged support for the activists demanding police reform, they still sold devices and furnished apps that allow government access to far more intimate data from far more people than traditional warrants and police methods would allow.

Today, our main access points to the people around us, and to the larger world, happen through screens—in the last 10 months, Zoom became the primary spillway for how we reconstructed IRL traditions digitally: birthdays, game nights, weddings, funerals, work meetings, therapy sessions, happy hours, group workouts, dance parties (and even sex parties ) took place through a fuzzy rectangular screen.

Such digital extortion attempts have been around for decades, but the Vastaamo situation was particularly egregious, because the stolen data, which went back roughly two years, included psychotherapy notes and other sensitive information about patients' mental health treatment.

When you turn on your new iPhone, you’ll be greeted by the Setup Assistant, through which you’ll establish essentials like your Wi-Fi network and six-digit passcode, Face ID, your Apple ID and iCloud account, and whether you want to activate Find My Phone and Location Services.

This week, several major United States government agencies—including the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Treasury, and State—discovered that their digital systems had been breached by Russian hackers in a months-long espionage operation .

The Trump administration did no favors with respect to the diplomats responsible for digital issues; it cut the State Department’s overall budget, minimized the importance of its technology work, and pulled the rug out from underneath those working in areas like free internet access and 5G supply chain policy.

Like digital-age necromancers, Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi and head of digital conservation Rich Whitehouse resurrected Sega VR, emulating it along with the Sega VR game Nuclear Rush on a modern Vive VR headset.Frank Cifaldi, Video Game History Foundation.

Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features .Discs aren't always cheaper than digital downloads, but they often are—especially once a game has been out for a while.

With Apple and Google Pay, you just pull out your phone, unlock the home screen, and hover it over the reader—it'll "swipe" your digital credit card instantaneously, faster than any chip-based card.

He told people he met along the way that he had worked in the tech industry and he wanted to detox from digital life.A veteran hiker named Matt Mason was working that day, and the two men started talking.

Memories also hosts digital “vaults” for living people to store things like precious photos, videos, and life stories, which can be shared after their passing.Though death is hard to control, people like Ainsworth are determined to create a future where you at least have some say in what comes next.

As the election approaches, many liberal and left-leaning digital organizations and influencers have rallied behind Biden, creating a late-breaking wave of online support.

"The attacker just shines an image of something on the road or injects a few frames into a digital billboard, and the car will apply the brakes or possibly swerve, and that's dangerous," says Yisroel Mirsky, a researcher for Ben Gurion University and Georgia Tech who worked on the research, which will be presented next month at the ACM Computer and Communications Security conference.

Hwang draws an extended analogy between the pre-2007 housing bubble and today’s market for digital advertising.Just as housing played an outsized role in pre-crash financial markets, so does advertising in the digital economy.

Today at the digital Virus Bulletin security conference, Facebook researchers presented a detailed picture of how the malware, dubbed SilentFade, actually works and some of its novel methods, including proactively blocking a user's notifications so the victim wouldn't be aware that anything was amiss.

It helped that back in December, while the coronavirus was just starting to spread inside the Chinese city of Wuhan and the World Health Organization was still months away from declaring a global pandemic, the Taiwanese government deployed its equivalent of the US Defense Production Act to produce masks for its citizens.

Mitchell says law enforcement agencies routinely use tools that trawl social media for posts on particular topics, and that they have been used, for example, against people protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.“If you live in the United States and you’re exercising your rights to free speech and assembly to march and demonstrate, you might not realize that the entire time there’s a lot of data being vacuumed up and used against you,” Mitchell said.

However, according to John Naslund, who studies digital mental health at Harvard Medical School, the Covid-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented surge in online activity.It’s interesting that they’re not considered essential.” In his research into online groups dedicated to mental health issues, he’s found such communities to be incredibly helpful for some people’s wellbeing.

The Xbox Series X is $500, which is about what most next-gen consoles start at.There's no Blu-ray disc drive, so you can only play digital games from the Microsoft Store.

Fortunately for candidates, both major parties already had digital infrastructure in place for grassroots fundraising: The Democrats launched ActBlue in 2004, and this cycle expanded the platform to all registered candidates, including presidential, for the first time; Republicans launched their equivalent, WinRed, in 2019.The Republican National Committee has also more than tripled the size of its email list since 2016, according to a spokesperson.

Attempting to teach and learn from home has put a tremendous strain on all parents, teachers, and students, but for families without access to high-speed broadband or the (proper number of) devices for kids to work off of, the upcoming school year poses the possibility that those children will fall even farther behind .

“I think especially when we think about operating in this new reality that we’re in, where you really need to build compelling digital experiences for people,” says Alfred Johnson, cofounder of Mobilize, an organizing platform used by Democratic and progressive campaigns.

TikTok may very well be the future of the image.Sign up for our Longreads newsletter for the best features, ideas, and investigations from WIRED.And they're built, by design, on a kind of appropriation—the original lip-syncing app required users to mime existing audio.

Photograph: AmazonThe first backup is the simplest—buy an external hard drive and regularly copy your data to it.