Ken Colburn: Would You Pay The Ransom On Your Computer?

With packaging that looks like beer and cigarettes, water is positioning itself as your next vice. Last summer, a new beverage brand hit the market. Accompanying the product release was a two-minute promotional video with some eye-catching details: a man in a skull mask cracking open a cold one to some death metal, a bikini-clad woman emerging from a lagoon in front of an industrial plant, and some seemingly intoxicated shenanigans in a kiddie pool.

Ashish Kothari is the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad, a company launched in 2022 with the mission of helping people integrate the art and science of happiness into their lives. Previously, he spent 25 years in consulting, most recently as a partner at McKinsey & Company where he organized efforts in leadership, well-being, and […] Ashish Kothari is the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad, a company launched in 2022 with the mission of helping people integrate the art and science of happiness into their lives.

The German sportswear giant is preparing for the inevitable downward trend in Samba sales this year. As Adidas aims to build on hot demand for its three-striped white and black Samba and multicolored Gazelle sneakers, it’s also taking steps to prevent the shoes from becoming victims of their own success.

Large cities such as New York, Miami, Denver, and Boston are struggling to house new arrivals and meet their basic needs. Immigration has become a defining issue in the 2024 elections and a major challenge in many U. S. cities. Over the past several years, wars and armed conflict, violent persecution and desperate poverty have displaced millions of people worldwide and propelled the arrival in the U.

Enlarge (credit: Kuzmik_A/Getty Images) Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the web’s most prolific—and increasingly dangerous—scammers. Thousands of people are members of dozens of Yahoo Boy groups operating across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, a WIRED analysis has found.

Enlarge / Artist impression of a glory on exoplanet WASP-76b. (credit: ESA) Do rainbows exist on distant worlds? Many phenomena that happen on Earth—such as rain, hurricanes, and auroras—also occur on other planets in our Solar System if the conditions are right. Now we have evidence from outside our Solar System that one particularly strange exoplanet might even be displaying something close to a rainbow. Appearing in the sky as a halo of colors, a phenomenon called a "glory" occurs when light hits clouds made up of a homogeneous substance in the form of spherical droplets.