If you’ve committed any internet crimes lately, you probably shouldn’t have paid for them with Bitcoin. While many crypto-evangelists have long thought of digital currency as a means of buying legal and illicit goods on the web with total anonymity, the fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency transactions leave a digital trail behind them that can point to your true identity. No matter how hard you try to hide, a dedicated sleuth with the right resources can find you.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior cybersecurity writer and author of the book Tracers in the Dark digs into all the ways investigators, government agents, and hackers can track down criminals online by “following the money” exchanged in cryptocurrency transactions.

Show Notes:

Andy’s book is Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. You can read two excerpts from the book on WIRED.com: the six-part AlphaBay saga and the feature about the takedown of a website for sharing child sex abuse materials.

Recommendations:

Andy recommends the deliberately frustrating game Getting Over It. Lauren recommends Andy’s WIRED story about the animal activists whose spy cams revealed the grim realities of pork slaughterhouses. Mike recommends the book Art Is Life by the art critic Jerry Saltz.

Andy can be found on Twitter @a_greenberg. 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.

This show originally aired on February 9, 2023. Here's the full transcript.

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Artificial intelligence continues to seep into every aspect of our lives: search results, chatbots, images on social media, viral videos, documentaries about dead celebrities. Of course, it’s also seeping into our ears through our podcast clients.

A new class of emerging AI-powered services can take audio clips from voice recordings and build models off them. Anything you type into a computer can be spit out as an impression of that person’s voice. Proponents of AI voice cloning see these tools as a way to make life a little easier for content creators. The robo-voices can be used to fix mistakes, read ads, or perform other mundane duties. Critics warn that the same tools can be weaponized to steal identities, scam people, and make it sound like someone has said horrible things they never did.

This week, we ask our producer Boone Ashworth, who is also a staff writer for WIRED, to sit down in front of the microphone and bring his AI voice clone experiments with him.

Show Notes:

Read Boone’s story about AI voice clones. Read all of our recent coverage of artificial intelligence.

Recommendations:

Boone recommends the Arte Concert Passengers playlist on YouTube. Mike recommends dilla-hip-hop-detroit.html">The New York Times Presents: The Legacy of J Dilla, a documentary on FX and Hulu. Lauren recommends starting Succession—From the beginning! Very important!—if you haven’t. It’s on HBO.

Boone Ashworth can be found on Twitter @BooneAshworth. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to the Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, about how she plans to address the city’s problems, from homelessness to crime to abandoned downtowns, and how the changes she's proposing could shape not just San Francisco, but the cities of the future.

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It used to be that when you bought a car, you just picked out the model and color you wanted and selected the optional extras. When the dealer rang up the total, that’s all you had to pay. Now, it’s becoming more common to pay a base price for a car and then subscribe to those extras. Big stuff like driver assistance features or fast-charging capability and even smaller stuff like heated seats and dash cams can be unlocked in a new car by paying the automaker a yearly or monthly fee. This trend has been quickly adopted by the auto industry for new cars, and it’s now making its way into used cars too. 

This week, we welcome WIRED staff writer Aarian Marshall back to the show. We talk about the overall trend of pay-to-unlock features in cars, and how automakers are adapting it for the second-hand vehicle market.

Show Notes:

Read Aarian’s story about subscription-based services in used cars. Also read her other auto industry stories, including reports about how cars can monitor your behavior behind the wheel, and how online sales have changed the process of buying a car. Read all of WIRED’s automotive coverage.

Recommendations:

Aarian recommends recipes from Bon Appétit, especially if you’re hosting Passover seder. Lauren recommends the documentary about photographer Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Mike recommends the new WIRED podcast, Have a Nice Future, which Lauren cohosts.

Aarian Marshall can be found on Twitter @AarianMarshall. 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.

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Amazon has sold a lot of connected devices, and now it’s putting those devices to work. Millions of Ring cameras and Echo speakers sitting in homes across the US have the potential to share a little bit of their internet bandwidth with other Amazon devices that need it. This network, made up almost entirely of consumer gadgets installed in people’s homes, is called Amazon Sidewalk. The company has been bolstering Sidewalk for years, adding device after device to this sleeper army of bandwidth-sharing speakers and cameras. Sidewalk has gotten big enough to reach 90 percent of the US population, and it’s poised to grow even bigger now that the company has opened up Sidewalk to developers. As more companies build more products that can join the Sidewalk network, the full scale of Amazon's plan will come into focus.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk about Amazon Sidewalk and how the company quietly built up a network that reaches nearly everyone in the US.

Show Notes:

Read Mike’s story about the Amazon Sidewalk developer kit. Also read Amazon’s amazon.com/images/G/01/sidewalk/final_privacy_security_whitepaper.pdf">privacy and security white paper for Sidewalk. Oh and here’s how to turn off Amazon Sidewalk.

Recommendations:

Mike recommends the social site Mastodon. Lauren recommends making almond milk with a nut bag, and not adding too much salt.

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.

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If you're reading this, you can thank a semiconductor. Phones, tablets, computers—really any device more digital than pen and paper—all depend on the tiny chips inside them to function. The semiconductor industry is massive, and at the center of it all is one massive firm that makes the bulk of the chips we all rely on: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The company, known widely as just TSMC, is not only the most important enterprise in the chip industry, but it’s also a powerful and stabilizing force in the geopolitical standoff between Taiwan and China that, if ignited, would affect the whole world. TSMC’s untouchable status has earned it an amusing nickname: The Sacred Mountain of Protection.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED contributor Virginia Heffernan talks about her trip to the TSMC facility in Taiwan. She tells us how chips are made and explains how the semiconductor industry—TSMC in particular—drives innovation while remaining largely invisible.

Show Notes:

Read Virginia’s story about her trip to the TSMC factory in Taiwan.

Recommendations:

Virginia recommends the show Seven Seconds on Netflix. Mike recommends the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s podcast How to Fix the Internet, specifically the episode “So You Think You’re a Critical Thinker.” Lauren recommends the Apple TV show Bad Sisters.

Virginia Heffernan can be found on Twitter @page88. 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.

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Our smartphones rule our lives. We love them, we hate them. Somewhere deep down inside, we hope they never go away. But, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones—so bored in fact that we’re buying far fewer of them than we used to.

This week, we talk about what the future looks like for smartphones. They’ll likely get more foldable, their voice features could grow chattier, and they might even come with a chip to recognize AI-generated nonsense and block it like spam. WIRED senior editor and noted techno-grouser Jason Kehe joins our conversation about the future of the phone and the future of our souls.

Show Notes:

Read Lauren’s interviews with five prominent technologists as they predict the phone’s future. The story is part of our WIRED 30 package celebrating our 30th anniversary as a publication.

Recommendations:

Jason recommends Anaximander and the Birth of Science by Carlo Rovelli. Lauren recommends swimming and men-with-podcasts.html">not podcasting. Mike recommends Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright.

Jason Kehe can be found on Twitter @jkehe. 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.

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The worst part of going to school is all the homework. Nothing strikes dread in a student’s heart quite like facing down a deadline on a seven-page essay. That’s why some of them may find it tempting to turn those hours of work into a task that can be breezed through in a matter of seconds by an AI-powered app. Generative tools like ChatGPT have wormed their way into the school system, causing panic among teachers and administrators. While some schools have banned the tech outright, others are embracing it as a tool to teach students how to tell the difference between reality and science fiction.

This week, we're bringing you a special show about the perils and opportunities of AI in the classroom. This episode is a collaboration between WIRED and the NPR show 1A. It's the second episode in a series called “Know-It-All,” which focuses on all the ways AI is affecting our world.

Show Notes

Listen to every episode of Know It All: 1A and WIRED’s Guide to AI. Read more from WIRED about how chatbots are coming for the classroom.

Pia Ceres can be found on Twitter @lapiaenrose. 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.

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The modern internet is powered by recommendation algorithms. They're everywhere from Facebook to YouTube, from search engines to shopping websites. These systems track your online consumption and use that data to suggest the next piece of content for you to absorb. Their goal is to keep users on a platform by presenting them with things they'll spend more time engaging with. Trouble is, those link chains can lead to some weird places, occasionally taking users down dark internet rabbit holes or showing harmful content. Lawmakers and researchers have criticized recommendation systems before, but these methods are under renewed scrutiny now that Google and Twitter are going before the US Supreme Court to defend their algorithmic practices.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI who studies recommendation systems online. We discuss how recommendation algorithms work, how they’re studied, and how they can be both abused and restrained.

Show Notes:

Read all about Section 230. Read Jonathan Stray and Gillian Hadfield’s story on WIRED about their engagement research. Read more about the two cases before the US Supreme Court.

Recommendations:

Jonathan recommends the book The Way Out by Peter Coleman. Mike recommends the novel Denial by Jon Raymond. Lauren recommends Matt Reynolds’ WIRED story about how you’ve been thinking about food all wrong, and also getting a bag to make nut milk.

Jonathan Stray can be found on Twitter @jonathanstray. 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.

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The promise of streaming TV was that you could watch whatever you wanted, when you wanted. And for a while, that was mostly true. But recently, streaming services have started to dial back the nice-guy stuff and reel in the freebies. Companies across the stream-o-sphere are tweaking subscription tiers, raising prices, and canceling unprofitable shows. Netflix has introduced an ad-supported tier to its formerly ad-free service, and even started cracking down on people sharing account credentials. And corporate shake ups at HBO Max have resulted in gobs of stuff being removed from that platform entirely.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior editor Angela Watercutter joins us to talk about why the streaming ecosystem has grown so complicated and hostile toward its customers.

Show Notes

Read WIRED’s series about why we hate streaming. Listen to WIRED and 1A’s series about AI, Know It All.

Recommendations

Angela recommends the cinematic masterpiece Cocaine Bear. Lauren recommends Marc Maron’s stand-up special From Bleak to Dark on HBO. Mike recommends the film EO, which is about a donkey.

Angela Watercutter can be found on Twitter @WaterSlicer. 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.

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