Security, Spoken

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In the early days of Android, co-founder Andy Rubin set the stage for the fledgling mobile operating system. Android’s mission was to create smarter mobile devices, ones that were more aware of their owner’s behavior and location.“If people are smart,” Rubin told Business Week in 2003, “that information starts getting aggregated into consumer products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...

This week, Hawaii reeled after an emergency text alert about an impending nuclear missile attack triggered panic—and then turned out to be a false alarm. Researchers provided more details about the sophisticated Triton malware that targets industrial control systems and impacted a real-world plant last year. The anti-fascist far-left movement known as Antifa gets some of its intelligence from a co...

A recent digital attack on the control systems of an industrial plant has renewed concerns about the threat hacking poses to critical infrastructure. And while security researchers offered some analysis last month of the malware used in the attack, called Triton or Trisis, newly revealed details of how it works expose just how vulnerable industrial plants—and their failsafe mechanisms—could be to...

On a clear day this summer, security researcher Ang Cui boarded a boat headed to a government biosafety facility off the northeastern tip of Long Island. Cui's security company, Red Balloon, will spend the next year studying how its Internet of Things threat-scanning tool performs on the building control systems of Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

The American criminal justice system couldn’t get much less fair. Across the country, some 1.5 million people are locked up in state and federal prisons. More than 600,000 people, the vast majority of whom have yet to be convicted of a crime, sit behind bars in local jails. Black people make up 40 percent of those incarcerated, despite accounting for just 13 percent of the US population. Learn mor...

The world is witnessing the biggest protest movement in Iran since the 2009 Green Movement uprising. Over the last two weeks, there has been unrest in nearly every major Iranian city and dozens of smaller towns. Corruption, economic mismanagement, and neglect are the protesters’ primary grievances, though the chants quickly turned political. Predictably, the government has cracked down: More than...

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was legally collecting millions of Americans’ phone calls and electronic communications—including emails, Facebook messages, and browsing histories—without a warrant. Congress has now decided not only to reauthorize these programs, but also to expand some of their most invasive techniques. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

Vacant buildings have their own sort of gravitational pull. When a home gets boarded up on one block, you can almost bet another will follow nearby. Often, they pull whole neighborhoods into their orbit, driving down the local housing market in ever-expanding clusters. Which at least begins to explain why Baltimore has tapped Tamás Budavári, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, to study...

The fallout of the widespread Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities continued this week. WIRED took an in-depth look at the parallel sagas that caused four research teams to independently discover the bugs within months of each other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the citizens of Hawaii came out of hiding in their bathtubs and basements Saturday morning, after learning that the emergency alert they had received, warning of an imminent nuclear missile attack, was a false alarm, their fear and panic transformed into rage. "I'm extremely angry right now. People should lose their jobs if this was an error," Hawaii State Representative Matt Lopresti told CNN....

In the early days of 2018, the engineering team at the mobile services company Branch noticed slowdowns and errors with its Amazon Web Services cloud servers. An unexpected round of AWS server reboots in December had already struck Ian Chan, Branch's director of engineering, as odd. But the server slowdowns a few weeks later presented a more pressing concern. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

As flying, camera-wielding machines get ever cheaper and more ubiquitous, inventors of anti-drone technologies are marketing every possible idea for protection from hovering eyes in the sky: Drone-spotting radar. Drone-snagging shotgun shells. Anti-drone lasers, falcons, even drone-downing drones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Skype has more than 300 million monthly users, making it one of the most popular chat platforms in the world. Now, they'll all be able to benefit from a crucial privacy protection: Microsoft announced Thursday that Skype will offer end-to-end encryption for audio calls, text, and multimedia messages through a feature called Private Conversations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

On Wednesday, in the wake of Russia's December ban from the 2018 Winter Olympics, a Russia-linked group calling itself "Fancy Bears" published a set of apparently stolen emails. They purportedly belong to officials from the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and third-party groups associated with the organizations. It's not the first time Russia has lashed out at...

When WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption to every conversation for its billion users two years ago, the mobile messaging giant significantly raised the bar for the privacy of digital communications worldwide. But one of the tricky elements of encryption—and even trickier in a group chat setting—has always been ensuring that a secure conversation reaches only the intended audience, rather than som...

In 2013, 18-year-old Tadrae McKenzie robbed a marijuana dealer for $130 worth of pot at a local Taco Bell in Tallahassee, Florida. He and two friends had used BB guns to carry out the crime, which under Florida law constituted robbery with a deadly weapon. McKenzie braced himself to serve the minimum four years in prison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, a pair of vulnerabilities broke basic security for practically all computers. That's not an overstatement. Revelations about Meltdown and Spectre have wreaked digital havoc and left a critical mass of confusion in their wake. Not only are they terrifically complex vulnerabilities, the fixes that do exist have come in patchwork fashion. With most computing devices made in the last two de...

Ads that automatically redirect you from your daily browsing to a flashy sweepstakes have long been an incredibly annoying facet of the internet. But the versions that have evolved on the mobile web are particularly vexing, because they can trap you with a pop-up "notification" and nowhere to go. And a recent surge in these mobile pop-ups, even on reputable sites, has left people more frustrated t...

On a cold Sunday early last month in the small Austrian city of Graz, three young researchers sat down in front of the computers in their homes, and tried to break their most fundamental security protections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s not every week that you have a once-in-a-generation security disaster. You know, definitionally. So let’s lead off with Meltdown and Spectre, a pair of attacks that impacts the processors inside most computers today. It’s quite a mess! While technically complicated, Meltdown and Spectre are best understood in terms of scale. Every Intel processor since 1995 is impacted, along with AMD and ARM...

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It might seem like nightmare scenario. A terrorist organization or nefarious nation state decides to derail the global internet by faulting the undersea fiber optic cables that connect the world. These cables, which run along the ocean floor, carry almost all transoceanic digital communication, allowing you to send a Facebook message to a friend in Dubai, or receive an email from your cousin in Au...

Ever since the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, laws requiring voters to show identification when they vote have speckled the nation, popping up in states from Rhode Island to Arizona. Almost as quickly, voting rights advocates have taken states like Texas and Alabama to court, arguing that these laws intentionally discriminate against minority voters. Learn m...

You're sick of hearing this. The exhortations didn't work in 2013 and they're not going to work now. Sure. But the truth is that you need a password manager, and it's worth it to take the time to set one up. At this point, even their shortcomings prove how vital they are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices