Around this time every year, my office is overrun by new cases. I am currently surrounded by more than 60, and many of them are perfectly fine! They just don’t really stand out, or they have one quirk I don’t really like. That’s what you’ll find below. You might like them more than I do.

OtterBox Figura MagSafe Case for $50: These tie-dye phone cases are super rad. The buttons click well, and the MagSafe connection is strong. They’re a little slippery, but the edges around the screen are raised well enough to protect it.

OtterBox Symmetry MagSafe Case

At 9:30 am on a Wednesday in late September, a hacker who asked to be called Tom Smith sent me a nonsensical text message: “query voltage recurrence.”

Those three words were proof of a remarkable feat—and potentially an extremely valuable one. A few days earlier, I had randomly generated those terms, set them as the passphrase on a certain model of encrypted USB thumb drive known as an IronKey S200, and shipped the drive across the country to Smith and his teammates in the Seattle lab of a startup called Unciphered.

Unciphered’s staff in the company’s Seattle lab.

Photograph: Meron Menghistab

Smith had told me that guessing my

For the past decade, social media platforms have struggled to stop the spread of extremist violence livestreamed on their platforms. Now they face a much different problem: This time, they know what’s coming.

In the days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the group’s military wing said it would kill an Israeli hostage every time Israel launched an attack on Gaza. Abu Obeida, a spokesperson for the al-Qassam Brigades, added that these executions would be broadcast “in audio and video.” As of today, Hamas is holding 220 people hostage, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Amid the October 7 attack, one person livestreamed footage showing Hamas fighters murdering Israeli citizens—a

The ideal smart home seamlessly anticipates your needs and instantly responds to commands. You shouldn’t have to open a specific app for each appliance or remember the precise voice command and voice assistant combination that starts the latest episode of your favorite podcast on the nearest speaker. Competing smart home standards make operating your devices needlessly complicated. It’s just not very … well, smart.

Tech giants try to straddle standards by offering their voice assistants as a controlling layer on top, but Alexa can’t talk to Google Assistant or Siri or control Google or Apple devices, and vice versa. (And so far, no single ecosystem has created all the best

Github secured its status as a programmer’s best friend by combining tools for managing software with collaboration features that create a kind of social network for the code-literate. Its success has seen it pick up a less welcome feature of social platforms: a black market in fake engagement.

An ecosystem of online stores and chat groups openly sell GitHub stars, which users award to signal interest in a project and can be tallied to rank the most popular. For the bargain price of $6 paid in ether, the crypto token of the Ethereum blockchain, WIRED bought 50 stars for a dormant GitHub project via

If you’re purchasing a new iPad, there are a variety of accessories you can buy to help you get the most out of your tablet. Below, we’ve highlighted some of our favorites, all of which you can find in our Best iPad Accessories guide.

Zugu Case for $50: This is our favorite folio case for the iPad for multiple reasons. It’s not only durable (complete with a rigid bumper), but it has a magnetized cover that stays shut and a flap that allows you to position the screen at eight different angles. The case is magnetic too, allowing you to stick it on the

What if, instead of seeking out a charger and plugging in for half an hour, you could swap out your depleted EV battery for a new one in just five minutes? That’s the question asked by Nio, a 7-year-old Chinese electric car company with a network of more than 1,300 battery-swap stations for doing exactly that.

However, the vast majority of these stations are in China, with 100 in Shanghai alone, serving customers who mostly live in apartments and lack the space to install a charger at home. Customers buy the car but lease the battery, with the monthly fee granting them access to

In the last hard days of World War I, just two weeks before world powers agreed to an armistice, a doctor wrote a letter to a friend. The doctor was stationed at the US Army’s Camp Devens west of Boston, a base packed with 45,000 soldiers preparing to ship out for the battlefields of France. A fast-moving, fatal pneumonia had infiltrated the base, and the ward he supervised was packed full of desperately sick men.

“Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face,”

The UK government, with its reversals on climate policy and commitment to oil drilling and air pollution, usually seems to be pro-apocalypse. But lately, senior British politicians have been on a save-the-world tour. Prime minister Rishi Sunak, his ministers, and diplomats have been briefing their international counterparts about the existential dangers of runaway artificial superintelligence, which, they warn, could engineer bioweapons, empower autocrats, undermine democracy, and threaten the financial system. “I do not believe we can hold back the tide,” deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden told the United Nations in late September.

Dowden’s doomerism is supposed to drum up support for the UK government’s

Crossplay games are ones you can play online with people on consoles or platforms different than yours. They’re increasingly common, but the landscape remains fractured, and the options can be confusing. Some games are available only in a couple of places, and it’s often unclear why some platforms are supported for crossplay and others aren’t. Here, we’ve rounded up the best games that work on the most gaming destinations possible, so you can play with friends and family around the world. 

Looking for advice on gaming gear? Check out our many other product guides, including the Best Gaming Headsets, Best Gamepads, Best Gaming Mice, and Best Keyboards.

Updated October 2023: We