Security, Spoken

There's a new scam getting after your Google Calendar, you can now control TVs with your eyes, and it's time to get your smorgasbord of cell phone photos organized. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every week day? Sign up here! Today's Headlines A tricky scam plants phishing links in your calendar You hopefully already kn...

There's a new battleground in the browser wars: user privacy. Firefox just made its Enhanced Tracking Protection a default feature, Apple continues to pile privacy-focused features into its Safari browser, and people are more aware than ever before of the sort of information they can reveal every time they set a digital footprint on the web. If you want to push back against online tracking, you've...

It’s mid June, and according to tradition, the news cycle is supposed to be lethargic, cooling off in a hammock somewhere and taking it easy. Not so much this week. It started off well enough: On Sunday we explained how to actually, finally stop all those robocalls---or at least slow them down. But then Monday hit, and the US government confirmed that hackers had stolen a border agency database fu...

Amazon cloned an entire neighborhood, a dangerous hacker group takes aim at the US electrical grid, and the world remembers a running great. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In May 2018, the Middle East-focused free speech and information access group Majal suffered a major cyberattack. Someone had managed to infiltrate a Majal Amazon Web Services account, access a content repository and backups, and wipe out six months of user data and posts across the organization's various message boards and social media platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...

The internet-wide push to encrypt more web traffic has resulted in a wave of safer, snoop-proof connections. The next challenge, though, is completing that transition from using a mixture of unencrypted HTTP and protected HTTPS to requiring that baseline protection everywhere. And over the past year, Google has been publicly offering a simple and straightforward way for websites to eliminate these...

When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a year ago, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the regulation was the “right to be forgotten”—an often-hyped and debated right, sometimes perceived as empowering individuals to request the erasure of their information on the internet, most commonly from search engines or social networks. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Darren...

Over the past 18 months, Google has pushed to improve Chrome extension security—a welcome goal given the sketchy morass of extensions that have been out there for years. But one proposed change related to this effort threatens to hobble ad blocking extensions. And the pending transition has set up a showdown between Google, ad blocker makers, and even other browsers. Learn more about your ad choic...

Radiohead owned some hackers, the T-Mobile/Sprint merger runs into some hiccups, and a Swedish mining town is being picked up and moved. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Tuesday, Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood made an announcement on Twitter and Facebook: The band had been "hacked," and the perpetrator attempted a $150,000 shakedown to prevent the public release of the files. In response? Radiohead dumped all of it online for free. You can stream it below for the next 18 days, or buy it on Bandcamp for about $23. All proceeds will go to a clim...

For years, countries have spoken in vague terms about creating domestic internets that could be isolated from the world at will. Now, we’re seeing some begin to execute that vision. Last month, Iran announced its national information network, or its domestic internet, is 80 percent complete. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off the week, bringing with it some interesting security enhancements for iOS and macOS users. The company will start offering its own single sign-on option, competing with Google and Facebook but with enhancements those two currently don't offer. And it rejiggered its Find My feature using some very clever cryptography. Learn more about your ad choic...

Five days ago, the internet had a conniption. In broad patches around the globe, YouTube sputtered. Shopify stores shut down. Snapchat blinked out. And millions of people couldn’t access their Gmail accounts. The disruptions all stemmed from Google Cloud, which suffered an prolonged outage—which also prevented Google engineers from pushing a fix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

The Russian meddling that rocked the 2016 United States presidential election gave the public a full view of something election officials and advocates have warned about for years: weak voting infrastructure and election systems around the US, and a lack of political will and funding to strengthen them. Two and a half years later, real progress has been made in key areas. But with a new presidenti...

Campaign finance laws prohibit businesses and even many nonprofits from directly contributing to political campaigns. They can’t even send pizza. Now, the United States Federal Election Commission may apply the same laws to block a cybersecurity firm from offering free or low cost defense services to campaigns, at a time when those protections are badly needed. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the company debuted a slew of products and services, including a new Mac Pro that's part raw computing power, part cheese grater. But one new feature, mentioned in passing, could have an outsized impact on user security and privacy for years to come. Apple now has its own single-sign-on scheme—and it's a major reimagining of how such a mechanis...

When Apple executive Craig Federighi described a new location-tracking feature for Apple devices at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote Monday, it sounded—to the sufficiently paranoid, at least—like both a physical security innovation and a potential privacy disaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple (the company) is rolling out a new sign-on feature, the Big Apple (the city) is pushing a groundbreaking privacy law, and Hot Wheels cars are being put to the test. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines New York is set to pass a landmark privacy law Just last week, California passed a historic privacy bill that gave people the power to know how their dat...

Two hours into his keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer's Conference last June, senior vice president Craig Federighi revealed a new privacy feature in MacOS Mojave that forces applications to ask the user if they want to "allow" or "deny" any request to access sensitive components and data, including the camera or microphone, messages, and browsing history. The audience dutifully applauded. Lea...

In 1999, Apple released a slew of new features with Mac OS 9, calling it "the best internet operating system ever." The idea was to unlock the full potential of the turquoise plastic iMac G3—the Internet Mac!—released in 1998. But 12-year-old Joshua Hill didn't have an iMac. To take advantage of all the new connectivity from his parents' mid-'90s Mac Performa, he needed a modem that would plug int...

Returning to work after a long weekend is always rough—especially if you have to deal with a looming worm attack or yet another disinformation operation on your networks! Which was the case in the security world this week. Despite dire warnings and an urgent update issued from Microsoft, customers are taking too long to patch a critical vulnerability that still remains in approximately 900,000 Win...

One of the most difficult things about detecting manipulated photos, or "deepfakes," is that digital photo files aren't coded to be tamper-evident. But researchers from New York University's Tandon School of Engineering are starting to develop strategies that make it easier to tell if a photo has been altered, opening up a potential new front in the war on fakery. Learn more about your ad choices....

Two weeks have passed since Microsoft warned users about a critical vulnerability in a common Windows protocol that could enable a hacker to remotely take over machines without even a click from their owners, potentially allowing an infectious worm to rip through millions of PCs. That bug might be fading from the headlines, but it still lingers in at least 900,000 computers. Learn more about your...

After years of issues with rogue Chrome extensions, hijacks, and malware, Google announced a slew of new policies Thursday to ensure the little browser applets are secure. The improvements come as part of a wider company push to evaluate how much user data third-party applications can access. Google launched the audit, known as Project Strobe, in October alongside an announcement that Google+ had...

Last August, researchers from the threat intelligence firm FireEye uncovered a vast social media influence campaign, conducted by a network of inauthentic news outlets and fake personas with ties to Iran. Their findings were a stark reminder that these kinds of tactics aren't limited to Russia. Now FireEye has published a sequel of sorts, documenting the evolving methods of disinformation actors a...