This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about…

Deck out your room and make class a cinch with these WIRED-tested favorites.

Designing and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than synthetic chemistry (which are often used to…

On a gray, humid Saturday morning in central Florida, a little under a dozen people gathered outside the Spring Hill Branch Library to protest the construction of a hyperscale data center in their community. There was no immediate threat - the Hernando County commission had unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on such developments in June […]

GoPro's Wireless Mic System nails the basics, but it has some frustrating flaws.

Uber's global customer service network has been hit by layoffs in favor of AI.

When a new platform team set out on implementing their roadmap through forced workflows with poor documentation, developer experience declined. Success came from simplifying governance, prioritizing what matters, and rolling out compliance incrementally through prevention, detection, and communication. Empathy, focus, and shared purpose drove successful adoption. By Ben Linders

Cordless, handheld, robot, and traditional—we tested them all to find the vacuum that’s fantastic for fur.

Executive Leadership Focused on Growth and Innovation Discussion | Link

The resulting report is a near-random mixture of real problems and grievances.

Europe has hit Google with a $1 billion fine for illegally abusing its search engine dominance.

Hugging Face put up a blogpost saying that they reported the hacking to the authorities: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 It's not clear whether they mean authorities for their US HQ or the French authorities. But I can't find any announcement of the follow-up. Is there a case open against OpenAI the company? Is their management interviewed by the authorities? Anyone detained yet? I guess the people who left the model running unattended risk at least a suspended sentence h

New paper: “ Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the ‘Going Dark’ Debate “: Abstract : This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Governments around the world have proposed, and in some cases enacted, laws limiting E2EE for law enforcement and national security purposes. This Article explains the underlying technologies and market developments for a law and policy audience to assess those proposals critically. The Article proceeds in three parts tracking three rounds of the Going Dark Debate. Round 1 covers the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, when U.S. export controls on strong encryption ultimately fell in 1999. Round 2 covers the period roughly 2010 to 2015, when encryption-in-transit became widespread but lawful access remained available through cloud providers, giving rise to what the authors called a “golden age of surveillance” rather than a period of going dark. Round 3 addresses the current debate over E2EE, where no entity between sender and recipient can read the plaintext...

The slim and convenient magnetic wallets you’ll actually want stuck to the back of your phone.

Sure, maybe your clock has a backup battery, but mine has a deployment pipeline!