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 WIRED Dozen, our weekly list of the pieces you absolutely must read before the sun rises on Monday morning. Ignore these stories at your peril: Being the only person at the office who doesn’t know about America’s plutonium-238 shortage will lead to abject misery.
Porn Stars Fear Data Thieves More Than Stalkers
A writer recounts her weirdest job: tagging videos for a Bay Area porn site, so that subscribers could find their favorites. The gig taught her a ton about the tribulations of porn performers, which include having to comply with an onerous federal identification law–a requirement that makes them vulnerable to hackers. Would you trust the producers of My Friend’s Hot Mom 8 to keep your Social Security number in a secure database?
How China Keeps the Web on a Leash
To get a better sense of how China’s censors operate, a Harvard professor set up a fake social network and hired a Chinese software firm to help run it. This arrangement gave him first-hand access to the filtering tools that flag potentially troublesome posts—-tools created not by the Chinese government, but by private companies keen to censor as efficiently as possible. Probably not what Mao Zedong had in mind.
Losers on Facebook Could Make You a Financial Pariah
Several small lenders are mining social-network data in order to determine customers’ credit-worthiness. Start thinking twice before accepting a friend request from someone who’s nearly in hock to MasterCard.
Let’s Film Our Crime Spree!
On Chicago’s South Side, gang members are openly bragging about their criminal exploits on social media. All the boastful chatter is helping perpetuate the community’s endemic violence, as Facebook tiffs are resolved with gunfire. But the cops are watching, too, and the intelligence they glean can sometimes save lives.
Dropbox Wants to Be Your Everything
Dropbox is no longer content to provide you with a place to backup your music files and baby photos. Now the online storage giant wants to make the physical hard drive extinct, by giving you the means to stream everything from the cloud. The company is staffing up with serious talent, including the inventor of Python. But it will take more than just gifted engineers to convince the public that Dropbox can be trusted with so much power.
iOS 7 Is Too Small of a Leap Forward
You’re right to be excited about that snazzy new operating system on your iPhone, because it’s a fair bit more efficient than its predecessor. But it’s also far from revolutionary, with too little emphasis on predicting the individual needs of users. That oversight reveals something troubling about Apple’s revered design culture.
The Hazards of Loving a Heap of Silicon and Steel
Soldiers are developing strong emotional attachments to the robots they use to defuse IEDs and perform other hazardous tasks. When those machines are destroyed on the battlefield, their human operators can feel as if they’ve lost a treasured comrade. And that’s a cause for concern, since the military doesn’t want soldiers to hesitate when asked to place their robots in harm’s way.
Become King of the Land of Dreams
Fear that you’re losing precious insight when you inevitably forget your dreams? Shadow could be your savior. The sleek app helps rouse you when you’re most primed to remember your dreams, then lets you record all the little details that typically vanish by the time you reach the breakfast table. Shadow’s creators also plan to build a database containing millions of dream descriptions, so that researchers can someday figure out why everyone is so afraid of showing up naked for French class.
Living Hand to Mouth Off Bitcoins
Tired of begging for spare change, a growing number of Florida’s homeless are opting to hop on public Wi-Fi networks and accumulate bitcoins instead. They accumulate the digital currency by watching YouTube videos or tapping icons, two activities that pay a fraction of a bitcoin at a time. It’s not an easy way to get by-—earning more than $1 per day is tough—-but it beats dodging the police and worrying about thieves.
We're Almost Out of Plutonium
NASA’s plans for cosmic exploration are endangered by a severe shortage of plutonium-238, the radioactive isotope that powers the likes of Voyager 1 and the Mars rover Curiosity. We only have 36 pounds of the stuff left, and no easy way to make more. The best solution may be for engineers to design a new battery that doesn’t gobble up so much of the stuff-—a task that could take upwards of a quarter century to complete.
Setting Limits in the Realm of GTA
If Spider-Man has taught us anything, it’s that great power and great responsibility should go hand-in-hand. Do the creators of Grand Theft Auto V have an obligation to heed that moral imperative? Perhaps not, since the game’s grisliness is purely make-believe. But the author of this piece would beg to differ: “The go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of cops-and-robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases.”
The Brutal Truths of E-Waste in the Wild
In the run-up to the publication of his book on e-waste, Shanghai-based journalist Adam Minter is running a daily portrait of the trashed hardware that now litters our planet. Thank your lucky stars that you’re not recycling power strips by hand in Guiyu.
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Brendan I. Koerner is a WIRED contributing editor and the author of The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking.
