A fancy new imaging technique sees through old booby-trapped letters

PLUS: Microsoft's decentralized IDs, the last installment of 2034, and the future of survival games. View this email in your browser  |  Manage newsletter subscriptions  03.02.21   Microsoft's Dream of Decentralized IDs Enters the Real World BY LILY HAY NEWMAN The company will launch a public preview of its identification platform this spring—and has already tested it at the UK's National Health Service.   BOOK EXCERPT 2034, Part VI: Crossing the Red Line BY ELLIOT ACKERMAN AND ADMIRAL JAMES STAVRIDIS "Eventually, the Americans would find them. But by then it would be too late." This is the final installment in our six-part fiction series, 2034: A History of the Next World War. Start at the beginning and get every chapter emailed to you by signing up here. SIGN UP   WIRED Q&A Valheim Is Changing How We Play Survival Games BY REECE ROGERS The CEO behind the viral success discusses how it became the top-selling game on Steam—and the game's biggest weakness moving forward.   BETWEEN THE LINES Sleuths Read Old Booby-Trapped Letters Without Opening Them BY MATT SIMON People once folded their correspondence in intricate ways, known as "letterlocking," to keep out snoops. A fancy new imaging technique sees right through it.   SPONSORED CONTENT A Must-Read for Understanding the Human Metabolism Evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer, PhD, shares his groundbreaking research into how our bodies actually work and why the key to losing weight and improving health is less about exercise and more about the calories we burn. GET WIRED Get 1 year of WIRED access for less than $1 a month. Tech news and analysis you won't find anywhere else. Subscribe now.   MICROSOFT Strap on a HoloLens and Step Into the AR Conference Room BY LAUREN GOODE Microsoft's new Mesh software platform helps faraway coworkers meet up and interact in mixed reality. The results are, well, still mixed.   OPINION Vaccine Passports Can Help the US Reopen—or Further Divide Us BY ALBERT FOX CAHN Overly restrictive "yellow cards" could end up disproportionately excluding Black and Latinx citizens from jobs, schools, or even the neighborhood market.   TELEVISION What Do TV's Race Fantasies Actually Want to Say? BY JASON PARHAM Shows like Bridgerton and Hollywood alter the past in the name of inclusion. It would benefit us more to write the world as it was, as it is.   OPINION Email and Slack Have Locked Us in a Productivity Paradox BY CAL NEWPORT From PCs to smartphones, office tech has always promised to make us more productive. But time and again, it's come with unexpected side effects.     This e-mail was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book.   View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe or Manage your newsletter subscriptions