Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.
Accessing the internet isn't normally a problem when you're inside the confines of your own home—it's secure, it's easy to connect to, and it's relatively uncongested—unless the whole family is streaming Netflix on five separate devices. When you venture out though, it's a different story. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
As the threat of cyberattacks on the United States launched by foreign adversaries grows, the federal government has been slow to respond. But changes announced Tuesday at the Department of Homeland Security, along with a new bipartisan bill aimed at shoring up DHS cybersecurity initiatives, could give newfound purpose to defenses against critical infrastructure hacking. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Reddit said in a blog post Wednesday that a hacker broke into the company's systems in June and gained access to a variety of data, including user emails, source code and internal files, and “all Reddit data from 2007 and before.” And it likely could have been avoided if some Reddit employees were using two-factor authentication apps or physical keys instead of their phone numbers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Voting systems in the United States are so woefully hackable, an eight-year-old could do it. At least, that’s the conceit of a competition co-sponsored by the Democratic National Committee at next week’s Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas. The contest will include children, ages eight to 16, who will be tasked with penetrating replicas of the websites that secretaries of state across the country use to publish election results. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
The Fin7 hacking group has leeched, by at least one estimate, well over a billion dollars from companies around the world. In the United States alone, Fin7 has stolen more than 15 million credit card numbers from over 3,600 business locations. On Wednesday, the Justice Department revealed that it had arrested three alleged members of the group—and even more important, detailed how it operates. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
A belated legal scramble to stop public access to 3-D printed gun blueprints has succeeded, at least for now. Late Tuesday, a federal judge granted a temporary nationwide injunction against Defense Distributed from making its designs available online. Several hours after the ruling, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson has finally complied. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
For the last half decade, 3-D printed pistols and metal-milled "ghost guns" have only rarely caught the attention of lawmakers, and have barely registered in the mainstream of America's gun control debate. But now, a controversial legal settlement may have unlocked a new era of digitally fabricated, DIY guns. It's also unleashed a political backlash unlike anything seen in the five years since the first 3-D printable firearm appeared online. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Facebook has taken down 32 fake pages and accounts that it says were involved in coordinated campaigns on both Facebook and Instagram. Though the company has not yet attributed the accounts to any group, it says the campaign does bear some resemblance to the propaganda campaign run by Russia's Internet Research Agency in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Facebook is now working with law enforcement to determine where the campaign originated. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....
Imagine you're a human rights activist, pulling up to a border crossing. The on-duty customs agent requests that you hand over your phone and unlock it, without a warrant—an increasingly common practice for US Customs and Border Protection. Your phone holds sensitive photographs documenting abuses abroad, but the agent can't find them. At most, he might notice that you've deleted some files recently. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Until yesterday, unless you had a family member or friend inside prison, you most likely had never heard of JPay. That’s because all of its services are directed towards people inside the nation’s prisons—and their family members. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Amazon touts its Rekognition facial recognition system as “simple and easy to use,” encouraging customers to “detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.” And yet, in a study released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the technology managed to confuse photos of 28 members of Congress with publicly available mug shots. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Several weeks ago, my friend Jeff signed up for an online Twitter application that promised to delete his old tweets. It was advertised merely as a simple way to clear your online presence, but after Jeff used it, he noticed that his account began retweeting spam. Out of an abundance of caution, he deleted his Twitter account entirely. On Tuesday, Twitter announced steps it was taking to curb this exact sort of abuse. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
A year ago this week, the credit bureau Equifax saw signs of a problem on its network of a problem. A really big problem. Hackers had entered the company’s network, stealing the personal and financial data of more than 147 million people in the United States, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, and some driver's license numbers and credit card numbers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nearly two years ago, Google made a pledge: It would name and shame websites with unencrypted connections, a strategy designed to spur web developers to embrace HTTPS encryption. On Tuesday, it finally follows through. With the launch of Chrome 68, Google will now call out sites with unencrypted connections as “Not Secure” in the URL bar. The move flips the convention of how Chrome displays the security of sites on its head. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
On Saturday, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by several news outlets and conservative group Judicial Watch, the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of releasing the (heavily redacted) application to wiretap former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. In a series of eight tweets fired off over the next two days, Trump reveled in the document, declaring it evidence of “an illegal scam,” and further proof of the “witch hunt” against him. Learn about your ad choice...
This week started with a controversial, widely derided meeting between President Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and ended with… an invite for round two! And yes, all manner of craziness managed to happen in between. That includes yet more denials on Trump’s part that Russia interfered—and continues to—with US democracy, a stance that has serious repercussions, however many times he walks it back. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Hopefully by now you’ve heeded the repeated warnings from your friends and loved ones (and friendly, beloved internet writers) to use two-factor authentication to secure your digital accounts. That’s where access to Facebook or Twitter or your online bank—anything that supports it, really—requires not just a password but also a special code. Not all two-factor is created equal, however. For better protection, you’re going to want an authenticator app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.or...
With primaries underway and less than four months to go until this year's midterm elections, early signs of attack have already arrived—just as the US intelligence community warned. And yet Congress has still not done everything in its power to defend against them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump appeared to downplay Russia’s efforts to interfere with US democracy for a third time this week. The first had come during a joint press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, a 45-minute exercise in kowtowing to a hostile foreign leader. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Perhaps one of the most surprising parts of Monday's jaw-dropping joint press conference between United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is that it compelled a Democratic and a Republican member of Congress to admit, in front of a room full of press and international lawmakers, that they actually agree with each other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Amazon Web Services is the world's biggest cloud provider. As a result, its security directly influences that of countless websites and online services. And those concerns aren't just theoretical; dangerous lapses happen all the time. Customers store all sorts of datasets and raw information in AWS repositories, which then become part of their own infrastructure. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Over the course of a roughly 45-minute press conference Monday, President Donald Trump stood beside Russian leader Vladimir Putin both physically and metaphorically. He repeatedly, pointedly declined to acknowledge that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, contrary to the assessment of every relevant US intelligence agency and a fistful of detailed indictments from special counsel Robert Mueller. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
When we met in early March, Jonathan Albright was still shrugging off a sleepless weekend. It was a few weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had killed 17 people, most of them teenagers, and promptly turned the internet into a cesspool of finger pointing and conspiracy slinging. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Like many parents in the United States, Rob Glaser has been thinking a lot lately about how to keep his kids from getting shot in school. Specifically, he’s been thinking of what he can do that doesn’t involve getting into a nasty and endless battle over what he calls “the g-word.” It’s not that Glaser opposes gun control. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
After four months of relative quiet from the special counsel's office, Robert Mueller Friday indicted a dozen Russians for their role in hacking the DNC, DCCC, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. It's unlikely they'll ever actually get arrested, but it's safe to say we know a lot more about Russian intelligence than we did last week. And speaking of Russian intelligence, this week it also became apparent that Facebook gave Russian internet giant Mail. Learn about your ad choices: d...
Three weeks into his new job as commanding officer of Manhattan’s 20th precinct, Captain Timothy J. Malin stared at a map on his computer screen, puzzled. It showed his jurisdiction carved up by streets and parks, with the southern edge encased in an ominous shade of red. For decades, the New York Police Department has used real-time statistics to chart spikes in violence and calibrate police activity across the city. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
In some ways, special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for their hacking and attack on the 2016 presidential election is Mueller’s least surprising move yet—but it might also be his single most significant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
In 2010, a suspected cocaine smuggler named John Krokos bought encrypted BlackBerry devices from an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent. That sort of federal subterfuge is par for the course. But in this case, the DEA held onto the encryption keys—meaning that when the government moved on Krokos and his alleged collaborators a few years later, they could read the emails and messages that passed to and from the phone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
A Wednesday Congressional hearing on the Meltdown and Spectre chip vulnerabilities had all the technobabble and painful misunderstanding you might expect. But the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation also raised an important practical concern: No one informed the US government about the flaws until they were publicly disclosed at the beginning of January. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Since March, when news broke that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used a Facebook app to amass data on as many as 87 million people without their consent, the social networking giant has been forced to repeatedly answer for how it has given away user data and who it's given that data to. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
