It’s smaller and more portable than the brutish Move, yet large enough to sound much fuller than the pint-sized Roam. It can sit fixed on its charging cradle to rival the homebound Sonos Era 100, or follow you anywhere. In other words, it’s the epitome of Sonos versatility, and now that it’s working properly, it’ll be hard to pass up.

Play On

Opening the Play’s brown cardboard packaging feels equal parts Scandi minimalism and sustainability, in line with recent releases like the Arc Ultra soundbar. Inside, a white acoustic wrapping gives way to a stout tubular speaker with a rubberized loop attached, measuring 7.6 x 4.4 x 3 inches and weighing just under 3 pounds. You’ll also find simple setup instructions and a wireless charging stand, but no wall adapter. You’ll need one that can supply at least 9 volts and 2 amps (18 watts), but a 15-volt, 3-amp (45-watt) model is recommended for “optimal” charging. Sonos says the adapter omission is about reducing e-waste, but will happily sell you one for $29.

Otherwise, the Sonos app is all you need to get going. After the obligatory firmware update, my Play was streaming on my home network in minutes. Sonos hosts over 100 streaming services directly, and you can also stream over third-party services like Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Apple AirPlay, and more. You’ll find the speaker as its own “Room” on the app’s main page, where you can swipe up to group it with other Sonos products on your network, or go into the settings to tweak options like EQ, Room name (important if you have more than one Play), and Sonos Trueplay to auto-adjust the sound to your environment.

You’ll also find a Battery Saver toggle, which is set by default to shut down the power when it’s idle for too long. It’s this feature that, according to Sonos, caused my connection woes as I tested the speaker’s 24-hour battery claim. Sonos says it identified the root cause, and after the firmware update I’ve let the speaker power down multiple times, with no further network disruptions over a week of extra testing.

To use Area mode, you first have to define the boundaries of the area. This is done in the app via a process similar to what I’ve encountered on some competing hardware devices. You fire up the mapping mode, and the sprinkler engages. Then, using a simple remote-control system, you dial the water pressure to the appropriate level, aiming at the edge of your yard but not the fence; once the water is where you want it, you drop a pin to mark the boundary of the watering area. You then rotate the nozzle on top of the sprinkler a few degrees and repeat, setting the strength of the flow to cover the desired area. Repeat again and again until you’ve gone through 360 degrees and have dropped pins to visually represent the entirety of your yard. The company says the maximum supported area is a vast 4,800 square feet, with spray reaching up to 39 feet.

In the app, you can watch this area map being created in real time. The process is quite intuitive except for the final couple of points, where Aiper’s system makes it difficult to complete the 360-degree circuit. If you look at the completed map in the screenshot below, you’ll see a tiny sliver of yard that no amount of finagling could get Aiper to close up.

Watering runs can be initiated on demand or on a schedule, and you intriguingly define not an amount of time to run but a “water consumption limit,” measured in inches of water you want applied to the soil. While it’s nearly impossible to measure how accurate this is, qualitatively, those estimates felt about right in my testing.

In Area mode, the IrriSense 2 delivers water by spraying a jet in a single direction, rotating clockwise through its 360 degrees until it’s gone all the way around the map you’ve set before turning back and doing it again in a counter-clockwise direction, repeating this cycle until the desired irrigation depth has been reached.

While the IrriSense 2’s spray system is officially described as a gentle “mist,” it’s really more of a jet, particularly when it has to reach the far-away parts of the yard near the terminus of its range. That results in a lot more water being delivered to the edges of the yard than to the central portion of the mapped area, but that’s a common issue I’ve seen with rotary sprinklers like this. To account for this, the IrriSense 2 doesn’t just blast at full speed for the entirety of its run. Instead, repeated rotations reduce the pressure delivered bit by bit, until the final rotations are little more than a trickle of water hitting just a few inches away from the unit. (Note that canceling a run early means that only the outermost portions of the area will receive water.)

Photograph: Chris Null

A WIRED investigation based on Department of Homeland Security records this week revealed the identities of paramilitary Border Patrol agents who frequently used force against civilians during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago last fall. Several of the agents, WIRED found, appeared in similar operations in other states around the US.

Customs and Border Protection may want to remember to protect its sensitive facility information. Using basic Google searches, WIRED discovered flashcards made by users of the online learning platform Quizlet that contained gate codes to CBP facilities and more.

In a rare move, Apple this week released “backported” patches for iOS 18 to protect millions of people still using the older operating system from the DarkSword hacking technique that was found in use in the wild. Discovered in March, DarkSword allows attackers to infect iPhones that simply visit a website loaded with the takeover tools embedded in it. Apple initially pushed users to update to the current version of its operating system, iOS 26, but ultimately issued the iOS 18 patches after DarkSword continued to spread.

The US-Israel war with Iran careened into its second month this week, with Iran threatening to launch attacks against more than a dozen US companies, including tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, which have offices and data centers in the Gulf region. The deadly conflict, which has no clear end in sight, continues to wreak havoc on the global economy as shipping crews remain stranded in the Strait of Hormuz, a key trade route. Meanwhile, some are beginning to wonder what could happen if US strikes cause real damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities.

And that’s not all! Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Earlier this week, a security researcher flagged that Anthropic accidentally made the source code for its popular vibe-coding tool, Claude Code, public. Immediately, people began reposting the code on the developer platform GitHub. But beware if you want to try to download some of those repos yourself: BleepingComputer reports that some of the posters are actually hackers who have tucked a piece of infostealer malware into the lines of code.

Anthropic, for its part, has been trying to remove copies of the leak (malware-ridden or not) by issuing copyright takedown notices. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company initially tried to remove more than 8,000 repositories on GitHub but later narrowed that down to 96 copies and adaptations.

This isn’t the first time that hackers have capitalized on interest in Claude Code, which requires users who might not be as familiar with their computer’s terminal to copy and paste install commands from a website. In March, 404 Media reported that sponsored ads on Google led to sites that were masquerading as official Claude Code installation guides, which directed users to run a command that would actually download malware.

The FBI formally classified a recent cyber intrusion into one of its surveillance collection systems as a “major incident” under FISMA—a legal designation reserved for breaches believed to pose serious risks to national security. The determination, reported to Congress earlier this week, is understood to be the first time since at least 2020 that the bureau has declared a major incident on its own systems. Politico, citing two unnamed senior Trump administration officials, reported that China is believed to be behind the intrusion. If confirmed, the breach could mark a significant counterintelligence failure for the FBI.

The FBI said it detected “suspicious activities” on its networks in February. In a notice to Congress on March 4, reviewed by Politico, the bureau said the compromised systems were unclassified and held “returns from legal process,” citing, as examples, phone and internet metadata collected under court orders and personal information “pertaining to subjects of FBI investigations.” The intruders reportedly gained access through a commercial internet service provider, an approach the FBI characterized as reflecting “sophisticated tactics.” In its only public statement, the bureau said it had deployed “all technical capabilities to respond.”