Security, Spoken

As happens infrequently—but definitely not never—Apple wrestled with an embarrassing and problematic security bug this week in its iOS FaceTime group calling feature. The flaw was bad enough that Apple took the drastic step of pulling group FaceTime functionality altogether. A full fix will come next week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When hackers breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years—stealing 71 and 117 million passwords, respectively—they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more into a gargantuan, unprecedented collection of 2. Learn mor...

For the past three years, Facebook has paid consumers as young as 13 to download a “Facebook Research” application that gives the company wide-ranging access to their mobile devices, according to a TechCrunch investigation published Tuesday. In order to allow people with iPhones to participate, Facebook sidestepped the strict privacy rules imposed by Apple in its App Store by taking advantage of a...

For years, critics have taken aim at Facebook's privacy missteps, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to this week's revelation that Facebook has paid people—including minors—to let it spy on all of their online activity, potentially even including their encrypted private messages. Which makes it a potentially very big deal that over the last several weeks, the company has quietly hired three pro...

At its annual worldwide threat assessment hearing on Tuesday, top national security officials gave the Senate Intelligence Committee a rundown from top intelligence officials of the dangers the United States will face in 2019 and beyond. The adversaries were familiar, with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran mentioned alongside evolving situations like Brexit and the power struggle in Venezuela....

In September, members of Google's Chrome security team put forth a radical proposal: Kill off URLs as we know them. The researchers aren't actually advocating a change to the web's underlying infrastructure. They do, though, want to rework how browsers convey what website you're looking at, so that you don't have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs—and the fraud that has spru...

It’s often hard to tell just how seriously to take reports of a new vulnerability. The jargon is inscrutable, and the skills needed to pull off the attacks are possessed only by highly skilled professionals. But a bug afflicting Apple’s FaceTime chat has no such ambiguity. How bad is it? Rather than risk exposing people to it, Apple pulled the plug on FaceTime group chats altogether. Learn more ab...

Technology has never limited its effects to those its creators intended: It disrupts, reshapes, and backfires. And even as innovation's unintended consequences have accelerated in the 21st century, tech firms have often relegated the thinking about its second-order effects to science fiction and the occasional embarrassing congressional hearing, scrambling to prevent unexpected abuses only after t...

In an effort led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has plans to rearchitect WhatsApp, Instagram direct messages, and Facebook Messenger so that messages can travel across any of the platforms. The New York Times first reported the move Friday, noting also that Zuckerberg wants the initiative to "incorporate end-to-end encryption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Close observers of Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia have long wondered when, exactly, Roger Stone would be indicted. The answer came Friday, when FBI agents arrested Trump’s longtime friend and advisor on seven counts, including obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering. Garrett Graff breaks down the...

Roger Stone’s pre-dawn arrest in Florida Friday, a raid executed by FBI agents working without salary during the government shutdown, had long seemed a matter of when, not if. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been deeply interested in Stone for months, and at least nine of the political operative’s associates have appeared before Mueller’s grand jury, including talk radio host Randy Credico and...

It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room in a luchador mask he picked up on the family’s ho...

Each January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists greets the new year with a readout of its Doomsday Clock, an allegorical timepiece created in 1947 to illustrate our species’ proximity to the apocalypse. The announcement of the time—with human civilization in its eleventh hour—tends to arrive amid considerable fanfare, especially in these tempestuous times. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Kyle L. Learn mor...

Dozens of Nest camera owners this week heard a disembodied voice insist that they subscribe to PewDiePie's YouTube channel. On Sunday, a voice emanating from a Nest security camera told a family of three that North Korean missiles were en route to Ohio, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In December, a couple was startled out of bed when they heard sexual expletives coming from their baby's room over a mon...

The threat of a nuclear missile strike on United States soil has felt more tangible over the past few years, thanks to North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile testing and oscillating relationships between the two countries. Against that backdrop, President Donald Trump announced plans on Thursday for the next generation of missile defense on land, sea—and in space. Learn more about your a...

The current federal government shutdown, the longest in United States history, is in its fourth week, with no clear path to resolution. With 800,000 federal employees on full or partial leave as a result, cybersecurity experts raised an early alarm about how the shutdown would impact US cybersecurity. Those early concerns have since compounded, and evolved into a mounting crisis. Learn more about...

Stochastic Terrorism n. Acts of violence by random extremists, triggered by political demagoguery. When President Trump tweeted a video of himself body-slamming the CNN logo in 2017, most ­people took it as a stupid joke. For Cesar Sayoc, it may have been a call to arms: Last October the avowed Trump fan allegedly mailed a pipe bomb to CNN headquarters. No one told Sayoc to do it, but the fact tha...

Late Thursday night, Buzzfeed published a report that President Donald Trump instructed his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. If true, it means impeachment can’t be far off. In fact, Trump’s behavior has been so broadly suspect, Garrett Graff argues, that he’s either a Russian agent or the biggest “useful idiot” in history. Or both. In other government news, we took a look...

With Netflix's recent price hike announcement, you may be taking stock of all the streaming accounts you pay for every month. It's no secret that the easiest way to cut down without sacrificing Blue Planet is to share logins with friends, family, or your neighbor's cousin's coworker. The Greatest Generation had party lines, and millennials have communal cord-cutting. No judgment here if you're vol...

As the government shutdown neared the one-month mark, the political landscape shifted under Washington’s feet Thursday night, dramatically and perhaps permanently altering the path of our nation’s politics. BuzzFeed’s duo of Russia probe reporters posted a blockbuster report that President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow Project. Learn more about your a...

The secure messaging app Telegram is significant for two very different reasons. One is that the app is a go-to encrypted communication tool for hundreds of millions of users around the world, particularly those looking to duck government surveillance and censorship in countries like Russia and Iran. The other is that many cryptography experts have cast doubt on the integrity of Telegram's encrypt...

They kept the kids in cages. And Excel spreadsheets. And more than 60 other government files and databases that made it nearly impossible to track the thousands of children who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration while trying to enter the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are breaches, and there are megabreaches, and there’s Equifax. But a newly revealed trove of leaked data tops them all for sheer volume: 772,904,991 million unique email addresses, over 21 million unique passwords, all recently posted to a hacking forum. The data set was first reported by security researcher Troy Hunt, who maintains Have I Been Pwned, a way to search whether your own email o...

Fortnite topped 200 million registered players at the end of 2018, continuing its run of massive growth and dominance in online gaming. But huge platforms also inevitably have huge targets on their backs. Fortnite has already dealt with its share of digital security issues, particularly scams like imposter Android apps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you use social media, you've probably noticed a trend across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of people posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Kate O'Neill is the founder of KO Insights and the author of Tech Humanist and Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces. Instead of joining in, I po...