They hacked McDonald's ice cream machines—and started a cold war

PLUS: More of WIRED's best longreads from this week.

View this email in your browser  |  Manage newsletter subscriptions  04.25.21 There are more than 13,000 McDonald's restaurants in the US, and at any given time somewhere between 5 and 16 percent of their ice-cream-making machines are on the fritz. And therein hangs a tale. This week on Backchannel, senior writer Andy Greenberg tells the story of the startup that set out to help McDonald's franchisees fix their oft-broken soft-serve dispensing equipment. As Greenberg writes, "the McDonald's ice cream meme has come to represent everything disappointing about modern technology, capitalism, and the human condition." It's a David and Goliath saga complete with heroes, villains, hacking, greed, and betrayal. You'll come for the McFlurrys but stay for the right to repair. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED   The Cold War Over Hacking McDonald's Ice Cream Machines BY ANDY GREENBERG | 22-MINUTE READ Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald's notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.   NFTs and AI Are Unsettling the Very Concept of History BY RICK PRELINGER | 8-MINUTE READ Non-fungible tokens and artificial intelligence make tracing the origins of a digital object more fragile. What are the world's archivists to do?   Nations Need Ambassadors to Big Tech BY ALEXIS WICHOWSKI | 5-MINUTE READ Governments see that companies have country-like powers, but they can't figure out how to deal with their un-country-like structures. Diplomats could help.   Hackers Used to Be Humans. Soon, AIs Will Hack Humanity BY BRUCE SCHNEIER | 7-MINUTE READ Like crafty genies, AIs will grant our wishes, and then hack them, exploiting our social, political, and economic systems like never before.   Help! How Do I Plan a Virtual Work Hang That's Actually Fun? BY MEGAN GREENWELL | 3-MINUTE READ Online office events are never going to be a blast. But Megan has a few ideas for how to make them suck less.   After Us the Deluge Captures Images of a Sinking World BY LAURYN HILL | 4-MINUTE READ Kadir van Lohuizen photographed nations affected by climate change. His book documents the present, but offers a glimpse of the future. GET WIRED Spring Sale: The Sequel! Ending Soon: Get WIRED for $10 $5. You can't see into the future, but you can subscribe to WIRED. Subscribe now.         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   Copyright © Condé Nast 2021. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.