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Thirsty and power hungry: Australia is in the middle of a datacentre boom – but not everyone is convinced

The Guardian

There are about 160 datacentres operating in Australia, with another 90 proposed. There are about 160 datacentres operating in Australia, with another 90 proposed. They're a key part of the digital and AI economy, but they come at a high environmental cost and offer few operational jobs Sun 21 Jun 2026 11.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 21 Jun 2026 11.01 EDT On Mamre Road, in Sydney's outer western suburbs, there are plans to build a "hyperscale" datacentre that will be one of the biggest in the world. If approved, the 52-hectare site will include six four-storey buildings that stretch 40 metres high, alongside 936 cooling units and 852 diesel backup power generators. The Mamre Road project is part of an estimated $155bn investment pipeline over the coming decade, amid a worldwide rush to build the infrastructure enabling the artificial intelligence revolution.


The Best Art TVs

WIRED

After you're done bingeing your favorite movies, these art televisions are designed to liven up your wall. I have watched so many times I've lost count. For years, the Andrew Wyeth painting took a prominent place in my living room. Art televisions--the category of TV pioneered by Samsung's Frame and now rapidly expanding with models from many of the major TV producers --combine my passion for movies and shows with an even greater interest in art and photography. When it comes to their performance as televisions, even the best art TVs don't have quite the same punchy colors and speedy refresh rates found on similarly priced standard televisions. However, when the movie is finished, art TVs look a lot better in a room, displaying art and photos on a matte screen with a pristine clarity in a space otherwise wasted by a black box. Art televisions are typically just a little more expensive than a normal 4K TV.


The Best Fitness Trackers of 2026: Garmin, Google Fitbit, and More

WIRED

Find the right wearable for your lifestyle, workouts, and goals. Like every piece of gear you wear on your body day in and day out, fitness trackers are incredibly personal. The right tracker for you should be comfortable, accurate, and tailored to your lifestyle, including your preferred workouts and health goals. Do you bike, row, or strength train? Do you run on trails for hours at a time, or do you just want a reminder to stand up every hour? Do you want to wear it on your wrist or your finger, or tuck it into your sports bra? No matter what your needs are, there's never been a better time to find a powerful, sophisticated tool to help optimize your workouts or jump-start your routine. We test dozens of fitness trackers every year while running, climbing, hiking, or just doing workout videos on our iPads at night, to bring you these picks. For more wearables, check out our guides to the Best Smartwatches, Best Smart Rings, and Best Sleep Trackers . Garmin makes some of the most accurate fitness trackers on the market, and the Vivoactive 6 is the best midrange option for most people.


Samsung The Frame Pro 2026 Review: Pricey But Worth It

WIRED

Samsung's 2026 update to The Frame Pro brings meaningful upgrades to the company's already excellent art television line. Paywalled art work requires monthly subscription. The market for art televisions is hot right now. Hisense and TCL also make low-cost models. But if you want the best, Samsung's The Frame Pro is still king.


Fit the Distribution: Cross-Image/Prompt Adversarial Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable achievements in recent years, they remain vulnerable to adversarial examples that result in harmful responses. Existing attacks typically focus on optimizing adversarial perturbations for a certain multimodal image-prompt pair or fixed training dataset, which often leads to overfitting. Consequently, these perturbations fail to remain malicious once transferred to attack unseen image-prompt pairs, suffering from significant resource costs to cover the diverse multimodal inputs in complicated real-world scenarios. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a novel adversarial attack on MLLMs based on distribution approximation theory, which models the potential image-prompt input distribution and adds the same distribution-fitting adversarial perturbation on multimodal input pairs to achieve effective cross-image/prompt transfer attacks. Specifically, we exploit the Laplace approximation to model the Gaussian distribution of the image and prompt inputs for the MLLM, deriving an estimate of the mean and covariance parameters. By sampling from this approximated distribution with Monte Carlo mechanism, we efficiently optimize and fit a single input-agnostic perturbation over diverse image-prompt pairs, yielding strong universality and transferability. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the strong adversarial capabilities of our proposed attack against prevalent MLLMs spanning a spectrum of images/prompts.


I Found 22 Early Prime Day Deals That Are Worth Shopping Now

WIRED

We've trawled the depths of Amazon to find the best deals on gear we've tested. Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner. This year the deals officially kick off June 23 and ru through midnight Friday, June 26, but there are already some good early deals going on. Whether you need a new laptop, an Alexa speaker, or some noise-canceling earbuds, you can shop today. Microsoft just announced an update to the Surface line, and yes, it'll be slightly faster, but it's also significantly more expensive, especially with this deal happening now.


Interactive. Violent. Gross. Inside Fishtank, the Unhinged Future of Reality TV

WIRED

WIRED goes on location--and on camera--with the cult hit. On March 16, 2026, at 5:45 pm in a leafy suburb of Atlanta called Sandy Springs, police pound on the door of a neglected French Country-style mansion, rifles at the ready, bodycams rolling. Minutes earlier, a distress call came from someone claiming to be hiding from a gunman in the mansion's downstairs bathroom. The dispatcher heard a gunshot ring out in the distance, then the line disconnected. "Open the door!" an officer yells. A calm young man with a mullet and woolly eyebrows steps out, hands raised. The police ask him who else is in the house. "Just my friends," he replies, as seven other young people, men and women, silently file out behind him, less evidently relaxed. They remain outside while two officers search the house. Inside the mansion there are no immediate signs of a massacre, but the decor alone arouses suspicion. All of the windows are frosted over, so only a chilly light leaks in. The place is a mess, and the walls are adorned with lurid, seemingly AI-generated art: a frowning baby holding an assault rifle, a rubber ducky bobbing in a mug of what looks like black coffee, a lidless and levitating eyeball crying into a martini glass. The rooms are painted primary colors, grass green and cherry red, like a kindergarten class. A vape dangles from a doorframe by a chain, suspended at mouth level. The pantry is practically empty. The bedroom is a dormitory featuring seven identical twin beds. No one is hiding in the bathroom. The call, it seems, was a prank. The police return to the driveway and ask, "What is it that you guys are doing here?" "We're just livestreaming," says a man in a camo hat named Matt. "You guys don't have any firearms or anything inside the house?" There are guns in the house, Matt says, for self-defense. Fans of their livestream can be obsessive, he explains, and tend to have perverse ideas about jokes. The officer asks to see their weapons, and they go downstairs. The room is cluttered with ergonomic swivel chairs, desks strewn with takeout containers and energy drinks, two flatscreen TVs, and a dozen computer monitors.


One Climate Change Innovation: Just Look Up

WIRED

To build one family's dream house on a flood-prone Mississippi bayou, AD100 architect Tom Kundig decided the sky's the limit. Tom Kundig absorbed lessons in resilience before he even knew the word. As a child, he saw many of the industrial and agricultural buildings of the rural Pacific Northwest abandoned but still standing, the harsh winter conditions no match for their steel columns. That background came in handy when he was asked to design a house for a young family on a coastal Mississippi site susceptible to severe flooding. The clients, Joel and Jill Kavanaugh, had fallen in love with a plot bordering the Gulf Islands National Seashore in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.


Designing the Dream House of an 87-Year-Old Tech Visionary

WIRED

An icon of Silicon Valley's counterculture, Stewart Brand is confronting his final years in a home that embodies the self-sufficient, DIY ethos of his famous Whole Earth Catalog. The three-building cluster in Petaluma where Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan live. The new studio is in the center. This past January, Stewart Brand published a book, "Maintenance is what keeps everything going," he begins. "It's what keeps life going." Brand's life has been going for 87 years, but lately the going has been tough. The man known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog --the 1960s countercultural guide to self-sufficiency that Steve Jobs was fond of --has an incurable disease and is down to 130 pounds, an alarming weight for a nearly 6-footer. Brand's mind is sharp as ever; you can't talk to the man for five minutes without learning something. But his once-nimble movements are now cautious, and he's never far from an oxygen tank. Stewart Brand's body, in other words, requires constant maintenance.


Traditional Home Insurance Is Collapsing. Here's What Could Fill the Gap

WIRED

Traditional Home Insurance Is Collapsing. A new, AI-assisted model of insurance is quietly exploding in disaster-prone areas--and may be coming for FEMA too. Is it the answer to climate change, or a trap? In 2019, when the worst flooding in recorded history spread across the entire Mississippi River basin, Colin Wellenkamp's phone rang for weeks. Wellenkamp runs a nonprofit called the Mississippi River Cities & Towns Initiative, which coordinates between mayors' offices in more than 100 river communities from northern Minnesota to southern Louisiana. As he describes it, his headquarters served as "one big virtual situation room" for relief agencies and municipalities up and down the central US.