All posts tagged: longreads

The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine

The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine

Published by skeptic

If those posts could be interpreted in any way as threats, Eversole would contact their hometown police, multiple security team sources say. “He would take it upon himself to reach out to someone somewhere and introduce himself as the CSO of Madison Square Garden and demand that the local PD take action,” the security veteran adds. One teenager posted a tweet, and MSG security asked local law enforcement to visit him. “They scared the crap [poop emoji] out of some 14 year old kid in Colorado,” one MSG security staffer texted in a message we reviewed. Cops would at times ignore Eversole’s demands. He and his deputies would then “freak the fuck out when a PD somewhere would not play ball,” the second veteran continues. Eversole would also allegedly push his subordinates to act more like municipal cops. He’d urge them to patrol the streets surrounding MSG, which is located in one of Manhattan’s more derelict neighborhoods, functionally acting as a second, ersatz police force—without formal permission of New York’s real one. “On many occasions, …

The Gamblers Behind One of Chess’s Weirdest Unsolved Cheating Mysteries Have Been Unmasked

The Gamblers Behind One of Chess’s Weirdest Unsolved Cheating Mysteries Have Been Unmasked

Published by skeptic

The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. Both the hair and the name were phony. The real Von Neumann was a prominent mathematician and computer scientist who died in 1957. The fake Von Neumann had a suspicious buzzing bulge in his pocket, fought a grandmaster to a draw, then fled before anyone could work out who he was. A Boston Globe columnist called it “one of the strangest cheating episodes in chess history.” Chess.com recorded the “Von Neumann incident” as “the earliest known case of a potential computer cheater.” This was decades before chess pros started getting expelled from tournaments for using smartphones, and a lifetime before the recent buzzing anal beads scandal. (Google it, but not at work.) It was years ahead of Garry Kasparov’s defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue, in an era when humans still imagined themselves to be smarter than machines. The identity of the …

How the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple

How the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple

Published by skeptic

To roll out its new mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, Apple devised a plan almost as intricate as the device itself. In January 2024, Apple summoned hundreds of retail employees to its campus in Cupertino to train them on the Vision Pro’s features. The company asked them to sign nondisclosure agreements swearing them to secrecy about the device, and even about where in Cupertino the training occurred. While on Apple’s campus, they were required to place their phones in GPS-blocking Faraday bags. Employees who had completed a day or two of the training were not allowed to describe the experience to other retail employees who were about to receive their first demo, so as not to step on the novelty. It all heightened the romance when the workers finally tried out the headset. Corporate officials showed off the way the device could transport them to an assortment of landscapes, seascapes, and moonscapes, or re-create the sensation of watching movies on a big screen. “Coming back from Cupertino, it was genuinely the coolest fucking thing I’ve …

Snake Bros Keep Getting Bitten by Their Lethal Pets. Only Zoos Can Save Them

Snake Bros Keep Getting Bitten by Their Lethal Pets. Only Zoos Can Save Them

Published by skeptic

Early editions of the index were a tabbed notebook. “I still have some of the original versions of it,” Boyer says. “You would go through, laboriously, by hand, turning the pages, and it would say ‘see page 27,’ like one of those find-your-own-ending books, and then you would put in a phone call, because the last section in the Antivenom Index was the home phone numbers of zookeepers.” In 2006, Boyer and Steven Seifert, then a medical toxicologist at the University of Nebraska, partnered to bring the index online, where it remains today. Now, nearly 90 zoological organizations list their wares. When Chris Gifford was bitten by his deadly green mamba, he was lucky to receive antivenom from South Carolina’s Riverbanks Zoo. Courtesy of Chris Gifford Gifford, the North Carolina man, had been comparatively lucky, as only one of his mamba’s fangs had pierced his skin. By the time he reached a nearby hospital, Gifford’s hand was swelling and creeping paralysis was causing his eyelids to droop. The Antivenom Index was activated, and South Carolina’s …

Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life

Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life

Published by skeptic

Listening to this implausible scheme added to my growing sense that Concepcion was fraying around the edges. Aside from dealing with his routine mental-health issues, he was now under tremendous financial pressure: unemployed, yet on the hook for upwards of $3,000 a month in AI subscriptions and hosting services. “Last night I just laid down and cried,” he said to me during one vulnerable moment. “I was like, fuck, this has been a tough thing, this whole not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing where the next paycheck’s going to come from.” People in Concepcion’s orbit know he tends to let his better angels blot out his common sense. Curt Hedges, an executive at a health supplements company who befriended Concepcion years ago, once contributed a large sum to Concepcion’s charitable effort to purchase equipment for a group of Laotian photographers. “He doesn’t have a moderate switch—it’s either all in or all out,” he says. Yet Hedges has seen how Concepcion’s passions, however noble, can lead to personal problems, including massive credit-card debt. And …

At Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the War Isn’t Over

At Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the War Isn’t Over

Published by skeptic

In early December, Ahmed recalls, “we heard tanks advancing from the edge of the yellow line.” Soon, a 14-year-old girl was rushed into the ICU with a shrapnel wound to the abdomen. The girl needed 250 milliliters of blood, “a precious resource” at Al-Shifa, and a splenectomy. Even with minimal supplies, even amid an attack that was not supposed to happen, the doctors at Al-Shifa saved her life. By the time Ahmed left, the girl was discharged, “smiling.” Her wounds were so severe that the doctors used some of their gauze allotment on her. But the girl had no choice but to return to her family’s tent, hardly a stable environment for recovery. Even before she was admitted to Al-Shifa, she was “so malnourished.” The return of some amounts of food to the shelves has been little help to her family, who cannot afford to pay inflationary prices. Ahmed, full of worry for the girl, remains in touch. On December 11, Ahmed recorded a four-minute voice note to memorialize her thoughts on her last day …

Anduril Wants to Own the Future of War Tech. Mishaps, Delays, and Challenges Abound

Anduril Wants to Own the Future of War Tech. Mishaps, Delays, and Challenges Abound

Published by skeptic

A couple of weeks later, Muzaffar arrived for his first check of McHenry. He pointed out frustrations and warned of changes. A second management exodus followed in late 2025, several people say. The new head of production, months into the job, was among the cuts. “There’s no clear direction, and it’s difficult to steer the ship when you’re offing the captain,” says one ex-worker. By the end of last year, staff at McHenry had yet to finalize standard operating procedures across the mass production line, two people say. Basic safety measures remained outstanding: Workers on the 470-acre campus communicated emergencies over Slack messages or phone calls, according to several people familiar with the issue, though thick blast walls made mobile service a no-go in Roberto. One of the people says a central alarm system was to be prioritized as soon as Roberto started working with explosive propellant. Employees had to first walk inside production facilities to get protective gear, several people say. A goal of delivering inert motors for ground-launched bombs to Swedish aerospace company …

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

Published by skeptic

The design students didn’t start out in the field or on a hunting range. “You start in your Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “ Go right in digitally, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was a lot of guesswork. There wasn’t really a reliable measurement for testing the effectiveness of camo. “ The human eye and the user and the guy in the field know what’s good or bad, but to make that be a test that you could replicate across different forces would be very, very hard,” Thompson says. And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their concept for multi-environment camo to the United States military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around that same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was …

Arm’s CEO Insists the Market Needs His New CPU. It Could Piss Everyone Off

Arm’s CEO Insists the Market Needs His New CPU. It Could Piss Everyone Off

Published by skeptic

Rene Haas is half-prone on a couch in his office in San Jose, California. A basketball rests in his hand, partly obscuring his face. Haas had grimaced when WIRED’s photographer first asked him to assume this position. The headlines came to him immediately: “People are going to say ‘Arm’s CEO sleeps on the job,’” he says. Still, Haas obliges. He gives us 46 minutes of his time, then shoos us out so he can hop on a call with Masayoshi Son, the Softbank CEO and chairman of Arm’s board. I’m meeting with Haas just days before the chip firm’s momentous announcement that it’s launching its own silicon. For a company that’s made its fortunes licensing its architectures to other chip companies and never fabricating its own, the move is a huge bet. Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Qualcomm all make or sell chips based on Arm, either licensing the chip designs or paying royalties to the firm. It’s been estimated that there are three Arm chips ​​for every human on Earth. Seen another …

‘Get Down! Get Down! They’re Gonna See Us!’: Six Months of Hiding From ICE

‘Get Down! Get Down! They’re Gonna See Us!’: Six Months of Hiding From ICE

Published by skeptic

The ICE raids in Chicago that have terrorized immigrant neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s have been both highly performative and extremely random. Six weeks earlier, on September 9, Greg Bovino, the G.I. Joe look-alike who previously served as ICE’s “commander-at-large,” arrived in town with a caravan of unmarked, black-tinted vans to patrol Chicago’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Three days later, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, an undocumented father of two from Mexico who worked as a line cook, and who had no criminal record, after he tried to drive away from them. ICE officers began lurking on sidewalks, downtown, at grocery stores, at the Cook County courthouses, in parking lots, at intersections, in alleys, and in neighborhoods like Ava and Sam’s. By the end of September, allegedly following a “tip” about reported gang activity—later found to be a complaint about squatters—ICE agents swarmed a South Side apartment building in the middle of the night, rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter and patrolling the sidewalk outside with masks and rifles, arresting 37 people. They …