Author: Wired Magazine

Self-driving cars are nearly ready for primetime, and so are the laser sensors that help them see the world. Lidar, which builds a 3-D map of a car’s surroundings by firing millions of laser points a second and measuring how long they take to bounce back, has been in development since 2005, when a guy… Continue reading Luminar’s New Lidar Could Dominate the Self-Driving Car Market

The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there’s no panacea for what ails this internet we’ve built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that’s been there all along but has often… Continue reading RSS Readers Are Due for a Comeback: Feedly, The Old Reader, Inoreader

Much of driving a Porsche, or any sports car, is about confidence—the reassurance that you’re sitting in a work of art that can also fling you away from a red light, putting the proletariat in their place: the rearview mirror. The rule holds for the automaker’s upcoming Mission E, the all-electric sedan aiming to replace… Continue reading Porsche’s Electric Mission E Gets Its Own Superchargers

Anyone need a ride? It’s the question on the lips of just about everybody involved in the transportation business—and a few who aren’t. The ranks of those offering ride-sharing services have swelled far beyond the likes of Uber and Lyft, past the self-driving gurus like Google sister company Waymo, past even the established automakers. Now… Continue reading Ride-Hailing Is Now So Much Bigger Than Uber and Lyft

Riding an electric bicycle is a bit like becoming the Hulk. When I hopped on a pedelec bike owned by Jump Bikes (”pedelec” short for “pedal electric cycle,” an e-bike with a small motor that assists pedaling but doesn’t do all the work) for a ride around San Francisco, I felt just a touch stronger.… Continue reading Dockless Electric Bike-Share Companies Take on Uber

Cryptojacking only really coalesced as a class of attack about six months ago, but already the approach has evolved and matured into a ubiquitous threat. Hacks that co-opt computing power for illicit cryptocurrency mining now target a diverse array of victims, from individual consumers to massive institutions—even industrial control systems. But the latest victim isn’t… Continue reading Hackers Hijacked Tesla’s Cloud to Mine Cryptocurrency

Angel Torres was driving down a major Los Angeles boulevard in late 2016 when it happened: Ride requests from Uber and Lyft arrived at the same second. As he looked away from the road to decide which trip was more worth his time, he nearly rear-ended the car ahead of him. “It scared the crap… Continue reading Mystro Lets Drivers Juggle Competing Uber and Lyft Rides

All those computers and sensors can hurt fuel economy and range, practical problems for commercial systems.