Keep in mind the old saw, don't ascribe to malice that which is explained by incompetence. Any site with a bunch of scripting buttons and "partner content" and AJAXy stuff laboriously glued on by legions of mediocre and outsourced developers over multiple years will find itself prone to screwing up the browser history accidentally. And when it happens, it's not anybody's job responsibility to fix it or even care about fixing it.
That said, yeah Wired may be doing it on purpose, but we don't know either way, unless someone uncovers some too-clever-to-be-a-mistake behavior in the code.
That said, yeah Wired may be doing it on purpose, but we don't know either way, unless someone uncovers some too-clever-to-be-a-mistake behavior in the code.