If you’ve done any wireless earbuds shopping lately, you’ve likely noticed a new design category cropping up everywhere. They’re called open earbuds (or open-ear buds, depending on the brand), and just about every audio brand has a pair (or three). They come in a slew of styles, but most either loop around your ears like older Beats buds, or they clip on like funky-futuristic earrings. Whatever the style, they’re designed to deliver satisfying sound while keeping your ear canals open to the sounds of the world around you.

Open earbuds are a natural fit for staying aware during outdoor activities like jogging, hiking, and especially cycling, where the tiny microphones in traditional buds are rendered useless by wind. They don’t sound as full or detailed as regular earbuds, but the best open earbuds can sound quite good.

Buying such a specified item might seem extravagant when buds with noise-canceling and transparency modes work in the vast majority of scenarios. That was my stance at first, too. Like many things in life, sometimes you need to try something in real life to see if you’ll like it. Over the last year or so, I’ve gone from open earbuds skeptic to evangelizer—and now I can’t imagine living without them.

That New Sound

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

“Occlusion” is mostly a foreign word outside audio circles, but it describes that plugged-up feeling you get from traditional earbuds. The best wireless earbuds counter occlusion with venting and other design factors, but you can’t fully out-swerve physics, and most of us get tired of blocking our ear canals after a few hours.

Open earbuds (along with solutions like bone conducting headphones) fix the occlusion problem, with sound that seems to pop into your head like magic. The airy designs of my favorite pairs from brands like Bose and Soundcore are so comfy I can wear them all day, often forgetting they’re on.

Comfort alone wasn’t enough to sell me on an entire genre of buds you can’t use in loud places, but as it turns out, that’s rarely a problem. As WIRED’s primary open earbuds reviewer, the more time I spend with these buds, the more use cases seem to unfold before me. From the complications of life to my ever-fraying attention span, open earbuds meet me where I live.

My main use case is probably also yours: I love using them for outdoor activities, from keeping in touch with my neighborhood while enjoying Comedy Bang Bang on a dog walk to blissfully grooving to my favorite yacht-rock playlist on an ebike test ride. But that’s actually just the beginning.

It’s about that time. Apple is gearing up for a slew of hardware announcements that will include upgrades for the entry-level iPad, iPad Air, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, according to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter. In line with what we’ve seen in recent years, Gurman reports, “A product launch is currently slated for as early as the week of March 2.”

Apple unveiled the M5 MacBook Pro in October, bringing the chip first to the 14-inch model. With the coming announcements, we should see the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips finally arrive. Gurman notes that new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are on the way, along with a new MacBook Air. We’re also likely to see new iPads soon. A new entry-level iPad will be able to support Apple Intelligence thanks to the inclusion of the A18 chip, and the iPad Air will be getting the M4, according to Gurman.

Updates to the Mac Studio and Studio Display are expected to follow, as well as a Mac mini refresh down the line this year. As Gurman previously reported, Apple is also said to be releasing its first “low-cost MacBook” sometime in the very near future.

Rome’s “La Sapienza” university has been targeted by a cyberattack that impacted its IT systems and caused widespread operational disruptions at the educational institute.

The university first disclosed the incident in a social media post earlier this week, saying that its IT infrastructure “has been the target of a cyberattack.”

“As a precautionary measure, and in order to ensure the integrity and security of data, an immediate shutdown of network systems has been ordered,” the organization said.

The university, which is Europe’s largest by number of in-campus students, with over 112,500 enrolled, notified the authorities of the incident and formed a technical task force to initiate remediation and restoration procedures.

As of writing, the university’s website remains offline, and new status updates published on Instagram reflect a continued effort to recover from the cyberattack.

As of yesterday’s announcement, temporary “infopoints” have been set up for students to provide information accessible through digital systems and databases that are currently unavailable.

Although the university has not disclosed much information about the attack type or the perpetrators, Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera claims that the incident is a ransomware attack perpetrated by a pro-Russian threat actor called Femwar02 and resulted in data encryption.

The outlet released the information based on malware characteristics and operational patterns, which are similar to the Bablock/Rorschach ransomware.

This is a ransomware strain that first appeared in 2023, featuring fast encryption speeds and extensive customization options. Cybersecurity company Check Point estimated that it was a project built from bits of the leaked sources of Babuk, LockBit v2.0, and DarkSide.

According to Corriere Della Sera’s sources, a ransom exists, but the university staff has not opened it to avoid triggering the 72-hour timer. Hence, the ransom amount hasn’t been specified.

Currently, the university’s technicians are working together with Italian CSIRT and specialists from Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (ACN) and the Polizia Postale to restore the systems from backups, which have reportedly not been impacted.

Although Rorschach does not operate an extortion portal on the dark web, stolen data could be disseminated or sold to data extortion groups, so the risk of it ending up online remains significant.

Given the situation, students and staff at Sapienza University of Rome should remain on high alert for phishing attacks, avoid clicking links in unsolicited communications, and monitor accounts for suspicious activity.

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This story was published by a Voices of Change fellow. Learn more about the fellowship here.

Over the past two years, I have noticed that when I teach students about any issue in the U.S. or around the world, they express noticeable apathy and disinterest. When our current president was elected, I asked a Latina student how she felt, and she said she likes him because he will “teach her how to make money.” When I pushed back on this and brought up undocumented immigrants, she responded by saying, “Hold up. I’m a citizen, that’s not my problem.”

Recently, a similar problem came up with another student who is Black; he responded to our discussion on genocide by saying he “doesn’t care” and “only wants to make money.”

I care deeply about my students. For me, the apathy and individualism I’m seeing from them are legitimate and concerning. In their eyes, the only things that make life easier are money and power. I feel for them, but what breaks my heart is that this money and power are not, and historically have never been, in the hands of people like my students. Historically, opportunities for marginalized folks have come from working together as a community to fight for the lives and resources we need.

But as of late, I don’t believe our schools are structured to facilitate meaningful opportunities for our students to organize and build community. I am grateful that I was trained to be a content expert in English Language Arts using the most recent research, such as grading for equity, culturally responsive teaching and universal design for learning (UDL). From a curricular standpoint, the practices each of these frameworks offers have helped me create some memorable moments of enduring understanding. Still, these extreme times necessitate more than thoughtful rubrics, scaffolded assignments and culturally representative instruction. I worry that no amount of revelatory critical theory will galvanize my students, most of whom are working-class, to see the value of intellectual rigor.

As the years go on, and our political climate becomes more polarized, I, too, am breaking down. I am increasingly focusing on myself just to survive. If this is my story, with the opportunities I’ve been given and the books I’ve read, then my students are definitely experiencing this tenfold. And on top of that, they come to school to shuffle around between classes, sit down at desks, and learn information that we tell them will free their minds, but then they leave and the conditions don’t change.

The traditional factory schooling model is no longer holding up, and I believe it will one day collapse under the weight of its own obsolescence. When that happens, how do we create an educational experience that centers empathy and galvanizes action? While I don’t necessarily have an answer to this question, I think it’s worth exploring some ideas.

Bringing in Community-Based Organizations

Community-based organizations that support students after school in learning how to organize should be empowered to come to the classroom and lead workshops regularly. The end goal should be students leaving the building on several guided field trips to demonstrate, protest and volunteer.

The challenge with this approach is that I believe it should be done weekly during school hours. If working-class students can’t organize or volunteer due to the innumerable responsibilities they face once they leave our school building, then the only time we have with them to get involved will be during school hours. Therefore, it is our responsibility to create opportunities for community engagement.

Organizing as Project-Based Learning

While project-based learning is an exceptional approach to producing work, what would it be like for students to organize? They pick an issue, and we teach them how to rally for that cause by canvassing, visiting people affected by it or conducting interviews. The goal here is to produce an organizing plan for a cause that interests them. The grade comes from the success of the process, but the work is geared toward addressing social issues in real ways and not just reading about them.

School-Wide Practices

What if, every year, students were expected to organize in some capacity and produce reflections that explicitly ask them to explain how their empathy has increased through their organizing? The only way I see schools continuing is if they are transformed into sites of resistance — thinking hubs for revolutionary action — that takes place during school hours. We cannot, under these current conditions, presume that our students have the time, energy and resources to think about anything we teach them once the bell rings for dismissal.

Teacher Preparation

Teacher education programs would have to be transformed so that, in addition to content mastery, we are trained on how to organize and teach organizing. If schools do not become sites of resistance, I don’t see a future in which our young people will think of school as anything other than a chore they must take on to survive in a world built to keep them feeling small. Unless we teach them their power through collective action, they will grow to facilitate the same dangers that led to their individualism.

I often think about Gil Scott-Heron’s words, “The revolution will not be televised.” When asked what this meant, he responded, “The revolution has to happen here,” pointing to his head. The most valuable learning happens when no one is watching.

Personally, one of my greatest achievements in life has been learning to love myself as I am. But it took years of reading books that explained to me how and why the world was set up to make me hate myself. I came out the other end feeling better about myself — all because of reading and writing. But at the end of the day, I am bound up in the same system of exploitation and poverty that makes my students focus exclusively on themselves. Books freed my mind, but they did not free me from my conditions.

Our ancestors taught us that the structures in place were not built for our most marginalized. As a result, they organized. They saw each other as the resources needed to be free, and more often than not, they did it outside the classroom.

I am increasingly disillusioned by the concept and reality of a classroom as a site of transgression, when the structure of school itself ensures that any transgression can only exist in the mind and not manifest in the real world. The only way to transgress within this schooling system is to create structured, meaningful opportunities to step outside the four walls of our classrooms. We cannot simply read about revolutionary action; we must become it.

The ills of social media are pretty well-known, and the impacts are so well-documented that Meta, YouTube, and TikTok are now facing a lawsuit for making their platforms addictive. Australia has already banned social media for teens under 16 years of age, and multiple other countries are considering similar restrictions. And let’s face it: social media can lead you into a doomscrolling spiral that is an utter waste of time and energy.

Enter Pankaj Tanwar, a developer who just created a Chrome extension that will make you scream at your computer in order to unblock social media sites. “A productivity tool that blocks social media websites and makes you say embarrassing things to unlock them,” says the extension’s description on Google’s web store. But screaming at your PC or Mac is not the whole solution.

This is pretty cool

First, you must hit the loudness threshold while screaming, “I am a loser.” Next, you must increase the tempo of your embarrassing scream to unlock the time for which a blocklisted site becomes accessible. Based on how desperately loud you are, you might unlock a few seconds or minutes worth of social media surfing time.

I tried. I failed.

The open-source tool is aimed at students, at-home workers, and basically any person with a computer who gets distracted quickly and ends up losing valuable time to mindless X or Instagram browsing. By default, the extension blocks X, Instagram, and Facebook. However, if you have other digital vices, ahem, you can simply add the URL and block those sites, too.

I desperately needed it

Once you set up the extension, which also works well in other Chromium-based browsers such as ChatGPT Atlas, you will run into a full-screen blocker every time you try to visit the distracting sites. There’s even a visualizer where you can see the loudness levels of your screen, and a timer underneath that shows you the duration for which the sites will be unlocked.

This won’t be the first project of its kind. Rhys Kentish, a software engineer at a UK-based company, developed an app called Touch Grass that will require you to go out, literally touch grass, and click a snapshot as evidence to unlock distracting apps on your phone.