Derek Mead
derek.mead@vice.comWeWork’s Implosion Shows How SoftBank Is Breaking the World
Venture capital subsidizes unprofitable businesses like WeWork and Uber. Society pays the price.
Inside the Phone Company Secretly Run By Drug Traffickers
Crime blogger Martin Kok was assassinated while leaving a sex club. It turned out MPC, one of his clients, was not an ordinary phone company.
At the Times, a Hesitance to Hyperlink
Journalists at the New York Times and its own standards editor say that getting continually dragged by other journalists for not giving credit is embarrassing.
How Twitter Sees Itself
Multiple current and former Twitter employees, including executives, explain how Twitter really positions itself and its responsibilities around moderating speech.
The Indian Government Is Trying to Erase the Citizenship of Millions. Climate Change Might Get There First
An entire community of Bengali Muslims faces an uncertain future amidst rising anti-Muslim sentiment in India, which has only been made worse by the threat of their land being washed away.
Researchers Say They Uncovered Uzbekistan Hacking Operations Due to Spectacularly Bad OPSEC
A new threat actor Kaspersky calls SandCat, believed to be Uzbekistan’s intelligence agency, is so bad at operational security, researchers have found multiple zero-day exploits used by the group, and even caught malware the group was still developing.
New Video May Signal Dangerous Change For Neo-Nazi Terror Cell
A new propaganda video showcases Atomwaffen’s "intention to enter a new violent phase,” says an expert.
What's in Trump's Super Classified Server and Why Is He Hiding Things There
Putting a politically-damaging phone call with Ukraine on the "codeword-classified" system is highly inappropriate and would give Trump "maximum control over who sees it."
How Google Changed the Secretive Market for the Most Dangerous Hacks in the World
For five years, Google has funded Project Zero, a team of hackers with the sole mission of finding bugs in whatever software they wanted to research, be it Google’s or somebody else’s. Are they making the internet safer?
Municipal Borders Have a Huge Impact on Millions of People’s Daily Lives. Here Are a Few of America’s Starkest.
Piedmont, California; Grosse Pointe, Michigan; and Roxbury, Massachusetts, may be separated by thousands of miles, but they've been shaped by the same man-made forces.
Climate Change Could Erase Human History. These Archivists Are Trying to Save It
Climate change making the word hotter, more humid, and more stormy—all conditions that put sensitive paper archives at risk. This problem is forcing us to ask, which histories will we choose to remember?
This Company Built a Private Surveillance Network. We Tracked Someone With It
Repo men are passively scanning and uploading the locations of every car they drive by into DRN, a surveillance database of 9 billion license plate scans accessible by private investigators.