Latest news with #DavidNield
WIRED
22-07-2025
- WIRED
How to Spot and Guard Against Wrong Number Scams
Jul 22, 2025 7:00 AM Ever gotten a text from a number you didn't recognize? These communications are not as innocent as they might seem. Photo-Illustration:Something you can be sure of when it comes to scams and swindles is that the methods used to try to part you from your data, your money, or both are constantly changing—which of course makes it more difficult to spot scenarios where someone is attempting to trick you. One simple scam that's continuing to get more common starts off with text from someone who has apparently messaged the wrong number. There's no mistake though: Your number is being deliberately targeted by a fraudster. A wrong number scam can lead in multiple directions. The aim might be to con you out of money or to get into some of your most important digital accounts—either belonging to you or your company. Here's how to spot these scams and how to make sure you don't get taken in. How a Wrong Number Scam Works Wrong number texts can take many forms. David Nield The US Federal Trade Commission says wrong number scams are on the rise, but they're an old trick. Quite simply, you get a text message that appears to be for someone else. They might pretend to be confirming a delivery order or asking if you are free to work a shift tomorrow. They could even be from a family member telling you about their 'new' number. Sometimes, the message is a simple 'hey' or 'hello,' while in other cases it will seem to be following up on a previous conversation—something like 'did you get the documents I sent over?' or 'are we still OK to meet up tomorrow?' The original message will be designed to seem as innocuous as possible. There are lots of variations, which makes them more difficult to spot. The manipulation doesn't really get started until you reply. That confirms to the scammer that the number is active and that there's another person on the line. If you do reply, expect further messages to follow, trying to establish some kind of relationship. The follow-up messages can take many forms, just like the original text. You'll most likely get a few questions, the answers to which will be used to try to gain your trust. The trick is sometimes called pig butchering, because the intended and unfortunate victim is being 'fattened up' and ready to be exploited. Most often, once some kind of friendship or even romantic connection has been established, you'll be asked for money. Maybe your new contact is in a bit of trouble, finance-wise, and just needs a quick loan; or maybe they've found a fantastic investment opportunity for you, though you'll need to act very quickly to take advantage of it. How to Spot and Respond to Wrong Number Scams Don't respond to messages, and block the sender. David Nield First and foremost, you need to be on the lookout for any kind of unexpected contact over a messaging app. You might think that's easy to spot, but fraudsters (and the AI they use) are very good at sounding convincing. They may even offer up photos and videos to help prove they are who they say they are. Remember that the people you're communicating with may well have done their homework on you. They may claim to be a friend of someone you actually know, or be part of an organization you used to volunteer for, in order to seem more believable. You should definitely double-check any claims like this. Ideally, don't respond at all, because this will mark you out for future scam attacks. If you feel like the message could be genuine—people do get numbers wrong, after all—run as many checks as you possibly can before replying. For example, if it's related to something happening at work, check around with your colleagues. If you are taken in by the first message, the scam should get easier to spot as the exchange progresses. The bots and the people at the other end of the conversation will try to engage you in chatting, perhaps by asking questions or maybe sharing photos and videos. Some kind of attempt to grab money or data will then follow, as the FBI warns. Whenever you realize you're being targeted by scammers, just stop replying. In the US, you can forward the messages to 7726 to report them as fraudulent. You can also block future messages from the number: In Google Messages on Android, tap the three dots (top right in the chat) then Block and report spam. In Messages on an iPhone, tap the header at the top of the chat, then Info and Block Caller.
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WIRED
08-06-2025
- WIRED
The Best Read-It-Later Apps for Curating Your Longreads
Jun 8, 2025 8:00 AM With the popular app Pocket going away, you'll need a new way to catch up on those articles you've been meaning to read. Here are the best options. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. It's not easy keeping up with everything that's written on the web, especially not if you've got a dozen open browser tabs vying for your attention. This is where read-it-later apps come in. These apps let you siphon off articles you want to get back to later, at a more leisurely pace, when the work of the day is done. You can catch up on your reading in bed, on the subway, over breakfast, or whenever you like. Sadly, we just lost one of the more capable read-it-later apps: Mozilla is shutting down Pocket as it focuses its efforts on its Firefox browser, and Pocket data will be permanently deleted on October 8. If you're looking for a new home for your archive of articles, or you're keen to see what read-it-later apps are capable of doing for the first time, you'll find our pick for the best options below. Instapaper Instapaper offers a clean, calm interface. Courtesy of David Nield Instapaper is one of the oldest and most comprehensive read-it-later apps out there, and it does a fine job of turning chaotic webpages into calm, orderly blocks of text that look like they're displayed on an e-reader. Articles can be added straight from your browser, pasted in manually, or added via email, and there are apps for reading saved articles in the web browser and on your mobile devices. There are lots of neat little features hidden away in Instapaper, like the ability to organize articles with folders and tags. If you decide you like Instapaper enough, there's a paid tier too: For $6 a month it adds features including the option to have articles read out to you, a ''speed read'' mode that displays one word at a time, and the ability to send articles to an Amazon Kindle. Instapaper (freemium) for web, Android, iOS Feedly Use Feedly to track your favorite sites on the web. Courtesy of David Nield Feedly can help you keep up with everything being published on your favorite sites, and curate a read-it-later list of articles you want to get back to when you have the time. You get a host of features for sorting the incoming deluge of posts, from filters and keyword searches to folders for organization and a choice of list layouts across your devices. Articles can be saved or shared with a click or a tap, and as your read-it-later section is built up, it appears in the main navigation pane. You can either read simplified articles in Feedly, or click out to the originals on the web. A Feedly Pro subscription ($7 a month) lets you monitor more feeds and access more advanced features like integrations with apps like OneNote, Evernote, and LinkedIn. Feedly (freemium) for web, Android, iOS Matter Matter supports multiple content types. Courtesy of David Nield Matter is fully aware that Pocket is shutting down, and is offering Pocket users half-price on a premium plan (the normal price is $15 a month). There is a free tier, but if you pay, you get access to features such as text-to-speech for articles, and options for annotating saved posts. Matter can also import all your saved Pocket articles, so switching over is pretty seamless. The idea is you can pull in all kinds of content, including web articles, PDFs, newsletters, and social media threads. Everything is presented through a polished, elegant interface, with options for sharing links and tagging articles to keep them organized. Another nice touch are the reading recommendations that pop up in various places around the app. Android users take note, Matter is for iPhones and iPads only. Matter (freemium) for web, iOS Use to track everything you want to read. Courtesy of David Nield describes itself as a bookmarks manager, but that's really just a read-it-later service under another name. It runs across the web and mobile, accepts article submissions via any browser, and comes with a whole host of integrations across apps like Evernote (for adding bookmarks to notes) and Google Drive (for backing up bookmarks). As well as saving articles, you can store video and audio links in too, and everything is accessible through a clean, intuitive interface that's easy to get around and organize. Sign up for a Pro account, which will set you back $3 a month, and you get access to extras including article annotations, reminders, and full-text search for your bookmarks. (freemium) for web, Android, iOS Readwise Reader Readwise Reader is packed with read-it-later features. Courtesy of David Nield Readwise Reader packs in just about every feature you could want from a read-it-later service, including not just the ability to save articles, but also support for videos, social media posts, PDFs, and emails. There's text-to-speech here, article annotations, Kindle support, and comprehensive search and sorting tools to help manage your archive. This doesn't come cheap though: Readwise Reader will set you back $13 a month, which also gets you everything in Readwise, a full featured note-taking app. You can however test the service out for free for 30 days to see if you like it before paying, and there is an import option for Pocket, so you can bring all of your existing articles along with you. Readwise Reader ($13 a month) for web, Android, iOS
WIRED
17-05-2025
- WIRED
How to Reduce the Battery Drain Caused by Your Web Browser
May 17, 2025 8:00 AM Your browser can suck up a lot of battery life if you're not careful. Tweak those settings to surf on your laptop longer. Photo-Illustration:When you're using your laptop away from its charging cable, every bit of battery life matters—it can make the difference between just managing to finish that important email or essay, or not. One of the ways you can make sure you eke out as much time between charges as possible is to look at your browser settings. The web browser is most probably where you're going to spend most of your computing time, so any battery life savings you can make here will quickly add up. There are a number of tricks to try to reduce the energy demands from loading up all those web pages, videos, social media feeds, and web apps. Applying just one or two of these tricks—together with some more general battery-saving tips—can give you a significant boost in battery life and make sure you get to the end of the working day without needing a recharge. Google Chrome You can enable Energy Saver in Chrome's settings. Courtesy of David Nield Google Chrome comes with a dedicated Energy Saver setting, which turns off some background tasks to reduce the load on your laptop. Browsing might be slightly slower in some circumstances, but there's a positive trade-off in battery life. Click the three dots in the top-right corner of any Chrome tab, then choose Settings > Performance. You can toggle the Energy Saver feature on and off from this screen. You can also instruct Chrome to turn it on automatically, either whenever your laptop is unplugged or whenever your laptop's battery life drops below 20 percent. There's another toggle switch here: Memory Saver. Enabling this reduces the memory load of inactive tabs until you switch back to them. While it's not as directly related to battery life as Energy Saver, it can also reduce the demands of Chrome on your system. Microsoft Edge You have two levels of Efficiency Mode to choose between. Courtesy of David Nield Microsoft Edge has something similar to Chrome's Energy Saver in the form of Efficiency Mode. Its primary function is to snooze inactive tabs that you've haven't visited in a while, which then means Edge is hogging fewer system resources, and from there drawing less energy from the battery. Click the three dots in the top-right corner of any Edge tab, then click Settings. Open the System and Performance tab, and you'll see an Efficiency Mode toggle switch. Alongside it are some related settings, including how long Edge should wait before putting tabs to sleep, and whether or not you want Efficiency Mode to kick in automatically whenever your laptop is running on battery power. There's also a Maximum savings option you can switch to, if you want to prioritize battery life savings over everything else. Edge doesn't specify exactly what additional actions are taken, but notes that "you may experience some visible slowdowns" when browsing if you turn on Maximum savings. Opera Opera comes with a built-in Battery Saver feature. Courtesy of David Nield The Opera browser isn't quite as well known as Chrome or Edge, but it does offer plenty of useful features, including a handy Battery Saver mode. With this mode enabled, the browser is more selective when it comes to allowing background tasks to run. Opera says you can expect up to an hour of extra battery life with Battery Saver enabled. You can find it on Windows by clicking the Opera button (a red O) in the top-left corner of the browser, then choosing Settings. On macOS, open the Opera menu, then pick Settings. The Battery Saver toggle switch is under the Features tab, and you can also opt to have the mode kick in automatically whenever you're on battery power, or whenever your laptop's battery drops below a certain point. Farther down the same settings screen is a Snooze inactive tabs to save memory toggle switch: While this isn't strictly part of the Battery Saver feature, it can help reduce the demands of the browser a little more. Other Browsers You can also turn on dark mode for certain browsers, including Firefox. Courtesy of David Nield There are no dedicated battery saving modes in the other popular web browsers—perhaps their developers would rather not fess up to the issue of significant battery drain—but there are still a couple of ways you can maximize battery life while navigating the web, and they apply to pretty much any browser you might use. First and foremost, keep your open tabs to a minimum. Every tab your browser has to open adds to the work it has to do and the demands on your laptop's battery. If you find you're not great at managing this yourself, enlist the help of an extension to organize your tabs: something like Tab Stash for Firefox or OneTab for Chrome. Switching to dark mode in your browser can also help cut down on the energy use of your display. By default, browsers will usually follow the lead of your operating system when choosing how to display content, but several browsers have a separate setting too. In Firefox, for example, click the three-line menu button (top right) in Windows or the Firefox menu in macOS, then choose Settings to find Automatic, Light, and Dark options.
WIRED
27-04-2025
- WIRED
How To Use Gemini AI To Summarize YouTube Videos
Looking for the highlights of a lengthy YouTube video? This Gemini feature could be worth a try. Photograph:The big AI companies are continually promising that their tech will save us time and boost our productivity—albeit with big questions about copyright abuse, illegal content, and skyrocketing energy use hanging rather inconveniently around in the background. But if you're looking to put more time back into your busy schedule, AI can be a useful tool, and maybe in some ways you haven't even thought about. One of those might be summarizing YouTube videos. AI has already shown it can be a fairly reliable summarizer (although not always ), and if you just need to extract a few salient points from a series of videos that are 15 or 30 minutes long, the time saved can quickly add up. Google Gemini has a new AI model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which can plug into Google apps including Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube. The model is available to all Gemini users, paying or not, and we tested it out on a selection of clips using Gemini's web interface. How to Find the Feature The new model is available to all Gemini users. Photograph: David Nield If you open up Gemini on the web, start a new chat, and go to the model picker in the top left corner, you should see one labeled 2.0 Flash Thinking (experimental). This is the one with the Google app connections built in, though most of the time you need to specify which app you want to use (when looking up a place on Google Maps, for instance). The model isn't difficult to find in the Gemini apps for Android or iOS either: If you tap the drop-down menu at the top of a new conversation (which should be labeled with the model you're currently using), you'll see the 2.0 Flash Thinking (experimental) option available for selection. You'll probably find the feature a little easier to use on the web, where you can drag YouTube URLs between browser tabs for analysis, but you can get to it on mobile too. Besides analyzing YouTube videos, you can search for new content: Try asking for YouTube for videos about baseball highlights or science explainers, for example. Summarize Match Highlights Gemini didn't get everything right about Super Bowl LIX. Photograph: David Nield To begin with, we put Gemini to work on a highlights package of last year's Super Bowl LIX highlights—almost 20 minutes of action—to see what the AI would make of it. To begin with we just asked 'What's happening in this game?' and in a few seconds we had details of the teams and who won (which the AI got right), and some key highlights. A follow-up question about the final score was answered correctly, but Gemini got the name of the scorer of the first touchdown wrong: The AI suggested it was Johan Dotson. Dotson was shown getting a touchdown in the highlights with the scores at 0-0, but it was ruled out—an example of the nuances that AI doesn't necessarily pick up on. Gemini did successfully identify when the Kansas City Chiefs got their first points, and even included a timestamp linking straight to the touchdown in the YouTube clip. It also got the name of the scorer right. It seems Gemini is heavily reliant on the commentary for sports clips, which isn't surprising. Summarize Video Contents The AI can pick out video details—if they're mentioned in the audio. Photograph: David Nield Next, we tried putting Gemini up against a behind-the-scenes featurette for The Grand Budapest Hotel, directed by Wes Anderson. The clip runs to four-and-a-half minutes, and Gemini fired back some replies almost instantly: It identified the name of the film being talked about, and the main beats of the clip's narrative. However, it's all reliant on the audio (or the transcript) again—there doesn't seem to be any analysis of the actual video contents. The AI couldn't say who the talking heads were in the video, even though their names were shown on screen, and wasn't able to say who the director was (even though this was also mentioned in the video description). On the plus side, Gemini did do an impressive job of summing up the audio of the video. It correctly identified some of the filmmaking challenges that were mentioned throughout, and provided timestamps to them — from looking for a set to represent the Grand Budapest, to filling it with extras. Summarize Interviews Gemini can provide timestamps for the specified video. Photograph: David Nield Finally, we tried Google Gemini with an interview: Channel 4 in the UK speaking to Charlie Brooker and Siena Kelly about the latest series of Black Mirror (perhaps appropriate for an article on AI). Gemini proved itself very capable at picking out the talking points, and adding timestamps, though of course the whole video is mostly talking. Again though, there's no context about anything outside of the audio or the transcript. Gemini AI couldn't say where the interview took place, or how the participants were acting, or anything else about the visuals of the video—which is worth bearing in mind if you use it yourself. For videos where the answers you want are in the audio of a YouTube video, and its associated transcript, Gemini works really well at summarizing and providing accurate answers (provided the commentators mention when a touchdown is ruled out, as well as when one is scored). For any kind of visual information, you're still going to have to watch the video yourself.
WIRED
15-04-2025
- WIRED
There's AI Inside Windows Paint and Notepad Now. Here's How to Use It
AI tools have arrived in two of the most basic and long-serving Windows utilities. Here's what they do and how you can turn them off if you prefer. Tech companies aren't holding back when it comes to stuffing artificial intelligence capabilities into every app and piece of hardware they can, and even the most basic software tools are getting their own AI upgrades—such as the long-serving Windows utilities Paint and Notepad. These two programs cover the two main bases of the generative AI revolution: image generation and text generation. If you need some AI-powered assistance in these venerable Windows apps, here's how you can access it. AI in Windows Paint Copilot will imagine anything you want in Paint. Courtesy of David Nield Windows Paint has traditionally stuck to the basics when it comes to image creation and image editing, but if you load up the application in Windows now, you'll see a Copilot button that leads you to three AI options: Image Creator (for generating new images), Generative Erase (for erasing parts of an image), and Remove Background (for taking away the background behind the main subject in an image). Choose Image Creator from the list, and you get a text prompt box you can use to describe what you want to see: anything from a giraffe on a beach to a spaceship in the shape of a pineapple. The more detail you include in your prompt, the better the match is likely to be. When your prompt is done, pick an image style from the drop-down menu, and click Create—then choose one of the AI generated thumbnails to apply it to the current image. Pick Generative Erase from the Copilot menu, and you can wipe objects and people out of your picture—maybe a pole that's ruining a view, for example. Select the + (plus) button to add to the selection, and the - (minus) button to take away from it, and use the slider on the left to change the size of your selection brush. When the selection is complete, click Apply—Paint will try to remove the selection using the surrounding pixels as clues for what the background should look like. Finally, there's the Remove Background option from the Copilot menu. This simply turns everything white, besides the main subject of your image—there are no tools or settings to play around with in this case. As you would expect, it works better for images where the main subject is more obvious, but the results can be impressive—and can save you a lot of manual image editing time. Note that while Generative Erase and Remove Background can be used for free, Image Creator uses up AI credits associated with your Microsoft account. You can't buy these separately, they come as part of a subscription to Microsoft 365 or Copilot Pro subscriptions, so use them wisely. You can read more about AI credits and how they work here. AI in Windows Notepad Get some Copilot help with your compositions in Notepad. Courtesy of David Nield Notepad is perhaps better known as a code editor than a word processor, but in recent years Microsoft has added more features in the way of formatting and auto-save. If you open it in Windows, you'll see these features as well as a Copilot button in the top-right corner of the interface. You can't use Copilot inside Notepad to generate new text, as you can in Copilot on the web or in other tools like ChatGPT. Instead, the feature lets you rewrite and tweak what you've already written—so before you click on the Copilot button, you need to put some text into Notepad and then select it. With the selection made, click the Copilot button, and you get a range of options: Make shorter and Make longer can obviously be used to change the length of the selected text, and you've also got a Change tone option if you want to make the text more inspirational, formal, casual, or humorous. There's also Change format, which lets you put the selected text into a different structure: A list, marketing speak, or poetry, for example. You can also choose Rewrite from this menu for a more comprehensive set of options—and to see previews of the rewritten text before it's applied. A new pop-up window appears, giving you more options for changing the length, tone, and format. You also get different variations to choose between in each case. When you find something you like, click Replace to swap it out for the existing text. At the time of writing, it seems Notepad is giving everyone a few AI-powered rewrites for free—but as with Image Creator in Paint, you're going to need some AI credits with a Microsoft 365 or Copilot Pro subscription to use this extensively. Of course, if you'd rather not use these AI tools and don't want to see the Copilot button hanging around, you can turn it off altogether: Click the gear icon (top right), then turn off the Copilot toggle switch.
