Step away from the microwave, iPhone owners. 
 
 While the newly released iOS 8 boasts several impressive features, including app extensions and improved keyboard options, the software upgrade does not — we repeat, does not — let it be wirelessly recharged in the microwave, contrary to a 4chan hoax. 
 
 See also: The 18 Most Important Features in iOS 8 
 
 The fake "Wave" ads, which have been circulating on Twitter and Reddit since the iOS update debuted last Wednesday, are simply untrue, trolling Apple users into ruining their phones by microwaving them for 60 to 70 seconds. 
 
 Reddit users are attributing the hoax to a 4chan thread. 
 
 This isn't the first time a microwaving-your-iPhone hoax has made the rounds. Videos on YouTube have touted the fake feature for years — and most likely, that's where 4chan users got the idea. 
 
 4chan has previously attempted similar hoaxes. Last year, a spoof attempted to convince Apple users that iOS 7 would make your phone waterproof. 
 
 It's unclear how many people fell for the Wave hoax — after all, everyone on the Internet lies and nothing is real and the world is upside down. But several people tweeted about the feature and later posted photos of fried iPhones and burned microwaves; we hope they were joking, too. 
 
 BONUS: What Is 4chan? ||||| Siri may be your personal assistant. But your voice is not the only one she listens to. As a group of French researchers have discovered, Siri also helpfully obeys the orders of any hacker who talks to her—even, in some cases, one who’s silently transmitting those commands via radio from as far as 16 feet away. 
 
 A pair of researchers at ANSSI, a French government agency devoted to information security, have shown that they can use radio waves to silently trigger voice commands on any Android phone or iPhone that has Google Now or Siri enabled, if it also has a pair of headphones with a microphone plugged into its jack. Their clever hack uses those headphones’ cord as an antenna, exploiting its wire to convert surreptitious electromagnetic waves into electrical signals that appear to the phone’s operating system to be audio coming from the user’s microphone. Without speaking a word, a hacker could use that radio attack to tell Siri or Google Now to make calls and send texts, dial the hacker’s number to turn the phone into an eavesdropping device, send the phone’s browser to a malware site, or send spam and phishing messages via email, Facebook, or Twitter. 
 
 ‘The sky is the limit here. Everything you can do through the voice interface you can do remotely and discreetly through electromagnetic waves.’ 
 
 “The possibility of inducing parasitic signals on the audio front-end of voice-command-capable devices could raise critical security impacts,” the two French researchers, José Lopes Esteves and Chaouki Kasmi, write in a paper published by the IEEE. Or as Vincent Strubel, the director of their research group at ANSSI puts it more simply, “The sky is the limit here. Everything you can do through the voice interface you can do remotely and discreetly through electromagnetic waves.” 
 
 The researchers’ work, which was first presented at the Hack in Paris conference over the summer but received little notice outside of a few French websites, uses a relatively simple collection of equipment: It generates its electromagnetic waves with a laptop running the open-source software GNU Radio, a USRP software-defined radio, an amplifier, and an antenna. In its smallest form, which the researchers say could fit inside a backpack, their setup has a range of around six and a half feet. In a more powerful form that requires larger batteries and could only practically fit inside a car or van, the researchers say they could extend the attack’s range to more than 16 feet. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Here’s a video showing the attack in action: In the demo, the researchers commandeer Google Now via radio on an Android smartphone and force the phone’s browser to visit the ANSSI website. (That experiment was performed inside a radio-wave-blocking Faraday cage, the researchers say, to abide by French regulations that forbid broadcasting certain electromagnetic frequencies. But Kasmi and Esteves say that the Faraday cage wasn’t necessary for the attack to work.) 
 
 Your browser does not support HTML5 video. 
 
 The researchers’ silent voice command hack has some serious limitations: It only works on phones that have microphone-enabled headphones or earbuds plugged into them. Many Android phones don’t have Google Now enabled from their lockscreen, or have it set to only respond to commands when it recognizes the user’s voice. iPhones have Siri enabled from the lockscreen by default, but the the new version of Siri for the iPhone 6s verifies the owner’s voice just as Google Now does.1 Another limitation is that attentive victims would likely be able to see that the phone was receiving mysterious voice commands and cancel them before their mischief was complete. 
 
 Then again, the researchers contend that a hacker could hide the radio device inside a backpack in a crowded area and use it to transmit voice commands to all the surrounding phones, many of which might be vulnerable and hidden in victims’ pockets or purses. “You could imagine a bar or an airport where there are lots of people,” says Strubel. “Sending out some electromagnetic waves could cause a lot of smartphones to call a paid number and generate cash.” 
 
 Although the latest version of iOS now has a hands-free feature that allows iPhone owners to send voice commands merely by saying “Hey Siri,” Kasmi and Esteves say that their attack works on older versions of the operating system, too. iPhone headphones have long had a button on their cord that allows the user to enable Siri with a long press. By reverse engineering and spoofing the electrical signal of that button press, their radio attack can trigger Siri from the lockscreen without any interaction from the user. “It’s not mandatory to have an always-on voice interface,” says Kasmi. “It doesn’t make the phone more vulnerable, it just makes the attack less complex.” 
 
 Of course, security conscious smartphone users probably already know that leaving Siri or Google Now enabled on their phone’s login screen represents a security risk. At least in Apple’s case, anyone who gets hands-on access to the device has long been able to use those voice command features to squeeze sensitive information out of the phone—from contacts to recent calls—or even hijack social media accounts. But the radio attack extends the range and stealth of that intrusion, making it all the more important for users to disable the voice command functions from their lock screen. 
 
 The ANSSI researchers say they’ve contacted Apple and Google about their work and recommended other fixes, too: They advise that better shielding on headphone cords would force attackers to use a higher-power radio signal, for instance, or an electromagnetic sensor in the phone could block the attack. But they note that their attack could also be prevented in software, too, by letting users create their own custom “wake” words that launch Siri or Google Now, or by using voice recognition to block out strangers’ commands. Neither Google nor Apple has yet responded to WIRED’s inquiry about the ANSSI research. 
 
 Without the security features Kasmi and Esteves recommend, any smartphone’s voice features could represent a security liability—whether from an attacker with the phone in hand or one that’s hidden in the next room. “To use a phone’s keyboard you need to enter a PIN code. But the voice interface is listening all the time with no authentication,” says Strubel. “That’s the main issue here and the goal of this paper: to point out these failings in the security model.” 
 
 1Correction 10/15/2015 12:00pm EST: An earlier version of the story stated that Siri doesn’t have verification of the owner’s voice. In fact, that feature was introduced with the iPhone 6s. Apologies for the error. ||||| The question “are we alone in the universe?” has fascinated people for centuries. In 1959 two Cornell University physicists described how we might answer that question through interstellar communication. Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Cocconi analyzed how two civilizations separated by many light years of space might use electromagnetic radiation to communicate. 
 
 Electromagnetic radiation is the general term for the more familiar light and radio waves, but also includes gamma rays, x rays, ultraviolet rays, and infrared. All of these forms of electromagnetic rays or waves travel at the speed of light, the fastest possible speed. The only difference between these types of electromagnetic waves is the length or the wave or the “wavelength.” Since the waves all travel at the speed of light, another way to characterize the wave is by the number of waves received per second. This is the frequency of the wave. 
 
 Morrison and Cocconi considered how well the types of electromagnetic waves passed through interstellar space. While space is usually described as a vacuum, it does contain some gas and dust. Over great distances that gas and dust absorb many types of radiation but radio waves pass through nearly unimpeded. For interstellar communication, a particular range of radio frequencies, “microwaves” from 1 GHz to 10 GHz, are particularly good choices. At lower frequencies our galaxy emits prodigious amounts of radio waves creating a loud background of noise. At higher frequencies the Earth’s atmosphere, and presumably the atmosphere of other Earth-like planets, absorbs and emits broad ranges of radio frequencies. The result is a quiet “Microwave Window” through which efficient radio communication is possible. 
 
 The Microwave Window has another interesting feature to recommend it as a place for interstellar communication: the “Water Hole.” Some atoms and molecules in space emit radio waves at particular frequencies. Hydrogen atoms emit at 1420 MHz (a wavelength of 21 cm). Hydroxyl molecules, composed of one atom of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen (OH), emit at four specific radio frequencies ranging from 1612 MHz to 1720 MHz. When a hydrogen atom combines with a hydroxyl molecule it forms a molecule of water, the most essential molecule for life as we know it. Thus, the range of frequencies from 1420 to 1720 MHz is called the Water Hole. It has been a popular frequency range for many SETI programs. 
 
 While the Microwave Window is a “cosmic quiet zone” the existence of the radio emission lines marking the Water Hole illustrates a problem: distinguishing communication signals from natural astrophysical emission. Most cosmic radio sources as “very broadband.” They “broadcast” over a very wide range of frequencies. For example, the radio emission from a quasar would span most of the diagram above and the amount of power would change very slowly over the frequency range. As mentioned above, hydrogen and hydroxyl emit radio waves at particular frequencies. The diagram below shows the power emitted by a cloud of hydroxyl (OH) molecules near a red giant star. The cloud rotates around the star so some of the molecules are moving toward us and some are moving away. The Doppler Effect shifts the frequency of the radio waves to higher (moving toward us) and lower (moving away) frequencies. The resulting spectrum (power vs. frequency) shows two peaks. These features are very narrow compared to most astrophysical sources. 
 
 Signals produced by technology for communication can be much narrower than any known astrophysical source. The bottom half of the diagram shows the spectrum of the signal from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. The frequency scale has been expanded by nearly a factor of 10. The narrow signal component on the left is further expanded by a factor of 100 to show the very narrow frequency components of the data in the signal. This illustrates a clear way to distinguish extraterrestrial communication signals for astrophysical signals: look for very narrow frequency components. Most SETI programs take this approach, breaking the radio spectrum into many millions of very narrow frequency channels 
 
 Where to Look 
 
 Searching for extraterrestrial signals can be likened to searching for a gold nugget buried in a field. We have identified the field that we will explore: the Microwave Window in the radio spectrum. We have a way to distinguish the gold nugget for other pieces of metal: look for very narrow bandwidth signals. But, with limited resources (telescope time, electronics, etc.) what is the best strategy to search through the field? 
 
 There are two basic strategies. We could examine the entire field but only sift through the top few centimeters of soil. If a gold nugget is near the surface anywhere in the field, we’ll have a good chance of finding it. We could study the chemistry and geology of the surface and select particulars spots where we will dig deep looking for gold. If the gold is buried well below the surface, this strategy has the best chance. 
 
 In SETI, there are two basic search strategies. Sky surveys sweep a telescope over large areas of the sky looking for strong signals that may come from any direction. Targeted searches point a telescope at the direction of selected stars. By dwelling on a star for long periods of time, a targeted search is sensitive to weaker signals. 
 
 We will pursue both strategies with SETI on the ATA.
– We're going to say what should be unnecessary: You cannot charge your iPhone in the microwave. Or, as victims of the latest scam from the darlings at 4Chan have found, you can try, but the results won't be much better than sticking it in your pocket and sitting on it. The hoax is billed as "Wave," reports Mashable, an apparent "iOS8 exclusive" in which you purportedly charge your phone "wirelessly through microwave frequencies ... using any standard household microwave." The slick-looking ad for Wave, which has been making the rounds on Twitter and Reddit, helpfully recommends "60 seconds at 700W or 70 seconds at 800W." It's completely unknown how many suckers fell for Wave, but Mashable notes that "photos of fried iPhones and burned microwaves" are circulating. And apparently enough of them that the LAPD got in on the action, reports the LA Times. "This #Wave capability is a #hoax. Don't be fooled into microwaving your #iPhone6. #Apple #Smartphone," they tweeted. Meanwhile, angry Apple users with crispy iPhones aren't the only ones torqued at 4Chan: Celebrities are apparently firing back, too.