Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency announced this week that it discovered large batches of unused software licenses as it continues to hunt for examples of waste in Washington. On Monday, DOGE alleged that the General Services Administration has 37,000 licenses for the file compression and encryption tool WinZip, even though the agency has only

Over the past couple of decades, a number of US government officials have left their roles for lucrative jobs at tech companies. Plenty of tech executives have also departed to take leadership positions inside federal agencies. But four experts who track the federal workforce tell WIRED they were stunned last week by a development unlike

The volunteer cartographers who power the maps on platforms like Facebook, Lyft, and Strava have been intensely debating over the past week about whether to honor US president Donald Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. When should they update? Will the change affect all of the gulf, or just

Panic over the US TikTok ban increased usage and downloads of a slew of alternative social media apps, including Texas-based Clapper, Chinese-owned RedNote, and Likee, a little-known platform out of Singapore with an AI-powered video feed similar to TikTok’s, according to new market research. People in the US could not access TikTok for about 14

AirNow’s fire map includes data from PurpleAir sensors (represented by small circles on the map), and Watch Duty, a nonprofit app for tracking fires, also displays PurpleAir data. But likely due to different calculations and processing delays, the air quality index reported by the same sensors can vary greatly from map to map. For what’s