What was already setting up to be one of the biggest, most consequential weeks of Trump’s presidency—as the commander-in-chief, in New York, chaired a meeting of the United Nations and, in Washington, the city braced for a showdown over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—saw the stakes appear to rise to historic levels by noon Monday, as news outlets raced to report the long anticipated denouement of deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein. It was not to be. Learn about your ad choices: doveta...
Sep 26, 2018•10 min
Though Chrome launched in 2008 as a scrappy upstart, it has for years been the dominant web browser, with over 60 percent market share on both desktop and mobile. So when Chrome adjusts its features or policies, it impacts a huge chunk of people worldwide. And a recent change to how Chrome treats logins has shown how poorly those alterations can go over. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 25, 2018•7 min
By now it's hopefully been drilled into you to enable two-factor authentication on your online accounts, giving you more protection than a password alone. And while the most ubiquitous second factor is a numeric code sent to your smartphone via an app, physical tokens that you plug into your computer have become increasingly popular. And now they're angling to make passwords obsolete. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 24, 2018•5 min
Cryptography schemes are complicated to understand and implement. A lot of things can go wrong. But when it comes to web encryption, a surprising number errors actually stem from a straightforward and seemingly basic mechanism: timekeeping. Synced clocks in operating systems may make digital timekeeping look easy, but it takes a lot of work behind the scenes, and doesn't always solve problems online. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 21, 2018•5 min
Blockchain phones are coming, that much is certain. The Sirin Labs Finney and the HTC Exodus are both expected by the end of the year, each with its own, sometimes vaguely defined sense of what exactly that term means. HTC’s Phil Chen, who spearheaded Exodus development, has at least started to fill in the blanks of how the Exodus will pull off its most important trick: keeping your cryptocurrency safe. The Exodus has loftier ambitions than mere storage, of course. Learn about your ad choices: d...
Sep 20, 2018•8 min
The fight for our right to repair the stuff we own has suffered a huge setback. As anyone who repairs electronics knows, keeping a device in working order often means fixing both its hardware and software. But a big California farmers’ lobbying group just blithely signed away farmers’ right to access or modify the source code of any farm equipment software. As an organization representing 2. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 20, 2018•8 min
On Monday evening, the White House released an order instructing the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify excerpts from an array of documents related to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference. He has every legal right to do so. But national security analysts and former intelligence officials say that such a demand isn't just largely unprecedented; it's potentially dangerous. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Sep 19, 2018•8 min
The three college-age defendants behind the creation of the Mirai botnet—an online tool that wreaked destruction across the internet in the fall of 2016 with unprecedentedly powerful distributed denial of service attacks—will stand in an Alaska courtroom Tuesday and ask for a novel ruling from a federal judge: They hope to be sentenced to work for the FBI. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 19, 2018•12 min
WIRED ICON Edward Snowden, NSA whistle-blower NOMINATES Malkia Cyril, Founder of the Center for Media Justice, cofounder of Media Action Grassroots Network October 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.Plunkett + Kuhr DesignersPeople generally associate the word radical with extreme. But I prefer to think of the word in reference to its Latin origin:radix, the root of the issue. My friend Malkia Cyril is a radical in the truest sense of the word. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 18, 2018•3 min
Facebook was a relatively early proponent of so-called bug bounties, paying out more than $6 million to security researchers who have spotted vulnerabilities in its platform since its program launched in 2011. But as the social network has faced a series of high profile and impactful controversies, its bug bounty increasingly doubles as an opportunity for Facebook to demonstrate maturation. That trend continues Monday, with the company's latest expansion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.pr...
Sep 18, 2018•6 min
If you want to secure the data on your computer, one of the most important steps you can take is encrypting its hard drive. That way, if your laptop gets lost or stolen—or someone can get to it when you're not around—everything remains protected and inaccessible. But researchers at the security firm F-Secure have uncovered an attack that uses a decade-old technique, which defenders thought they had stymied, to expose those encryption keys, allowing a hacker to decrypt your data. Learn about your...
Sep 17, 2018•8 min
The arc of innovation has reached aninflectionpoint: technological change now threatens to overwhelm us. Discovery is unstoppable, but it must be shaped for good. We ourselves—not just market forces—must manage it. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ash Carter, former US Secretary of Defense, is the Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and its project on Technology and Public Purpose. He is also an Innovation Fellow at MIT. Learn about your ad choices: doveta...
Sep 14, 2018•8 min
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would automatically impose sanctions against any person or group attempting to interfere in United States elections. "The proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity of the threat of foreign interference [to elections]," Trump writes in the order. "I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with this threat. Learn about your a...
Sep 13, 2018•5 min
On Tuesday, Arizona's governor appointed former Republican senator Jon Kyl to fill the US Senate seat vacated by the late John McCain. The appointment could spell even more government scrutiny for tech giants like Facebook and Google—even though Kyl has only committed to serving until the start of the next Congressional session in January, though he may stay through 2020. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 12, 2018•6 min
On Friday, British Airways disclosed a data breach impacting customer information from roughly 380,000 booking transactions made between August 21 and September 5 of this year. The company said that names, addresses, email addresses, and sensitive payment card details were all compromised. Now, researchers from the threat detection firm RiskIQ have shed new light on how the attackers pulled off the heist. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 11, 2018•6 min
Apple prides itself on prioritizing user security and privacy. It counts the iOS and Mac App Stores, where customers can download an array of trusted, vetted software, as cornerstones of that initiative. But while the approach does minimize situations where users get tricked into downloading something nasty on the open web, malware inevitably slips through. In this case, that appears to include one of the most popular offerings in the Mac App Store. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Sep 11, 2018•8 min
It's an unfortunate fact that the pricey pocket computers we carry around with us at all times are prime targets for thieves—as well as very easy to leave behind in subway cars or on coffee shop tables. Now that we all rely on our smartphones for so much, having one stolen or misplaced can feel like the end of the world. But it doesn't have to be, not quite. Here are the preparations you can take before the worst happens, and what to do if it does. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Sep 10, 2018•9 min
A screenshot of the suspicious text message began making the rounds on social media Wednesday. "Hi, it's Patsy here w/Beto for Texas. Our records indicate that you're a supporter," the text message read, purportedly coming from a volunteer for Texas Senate hopeful Beto O'Rourke's campaign. "We are in search of volunteers to help transport undocumented immigrants to polling booths so that they will be able to vote. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 10, 2018•8 min
Professional tragedy troll Alex Jones went to Washington Wednesday to claw back the attention he's lost since Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, and other tech giants booted him from their services last month. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 07, 2018•5 min
On the Monday morning before the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014, employees at the Culver City headquarters of Sony Pictures Entertainment found their computer screens taken over by an image of a red skeleton, and a message: “We’ve already warned you, and this is just a beginning. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 07, 2018•8 min
Bloviating conspiracy theorist Alex Jones whispered loudly in the front row with far-right media personality Jack Posobiec. Banned Twitter troll Chuck Johnson sat a few seats down giggling intermittently at who knows what. A man in a black shirt with the words “FBI used toddler for SEX" printed in red block print meandered in and out of the room. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 06, 2018•7 min
“Twitter could get us into a war.” That sentence, which appears in Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, about the Trump Administration, has shocked a lot of people. Not me. Because I just wrote a novel in which precisely that same thing happens. And let me tell you: It’s not far-fetched. Of course, we knew that Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, and his predecessor, Reince Priebus, both have tried to get the President’s tweeting under control. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 06, 2018•10 min
A lot of people may find it hard to remember a time before Chrome. But as Google's browser hits its 10th birthday Tuesday, it's worth noting one under-appreciated source of its popularity: how it made the web more secure. Google developers didn't invent every improvement that made Chrome a more secure alternative to established competitors like Internet Explorer and Safari when it debuted. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 05, 2018•11 min
Google's Chrome browser turns 10 today, and in its short life it has introduced a lot of radical changes to the web. From popularizing auto-updates to aggressively promoting HTTPS web encryption, the Chrome security team likes to grapple with big, conceptual problems. That reach and influence can be divisive, though, and as Chrome looks ahead to its next 10 years, the team is mulling its most controversial initiative yet: fundamentally rethinking URLs across the web. Learn about your ad choices:...
Sep 05, 2018•6 min
There are plenty of lawmakers who know next to nothing about technology. Senator Mark Warner isn't one of them. Long before the Virginia Democrat was sworn into the Senate in 2009, Warner built a career in the venture capital and telecom industries. That background has served the senator well since news broke that Facebook, Google, and Twitter all enabled foreign influence campaigns during the 2016 election. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 04, 2018•10 min
It may be the end of August, that time when a sticky malaise settles in, but hackers can wreak havoc even during summer vacation. Which is why WIRED’s security writers keep covering the news. Like this story of how Iran set up a global propaganda campaign targeting social media. Issie Lapowski lays out everything we know about the country's 2018 propaganda machine, like how they used fake profile photos to catfish targets, and they had a real thing for Bernie Sanders. Learn about your ad choices...
Sep 03, 2018•6 min
In June, privacy advocates celebrated the passage of a historic bill in California that gave residents of that state unprecedented control over how companies use their data. Two months later, the party's over. Lobbying groups and trade associations, including several representing the tech industry, immediately started pushing for a litany of deep changes that they say would make the law easier to implement before it goes into effect in January 2020. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Aug 30, 2018•9 min
Attorneys general from 20 states celebrated on Monday when a district court judge in Seattle extended an injunction against the sharing of 3-D printed gun blueprints online. But their victory lap was short-lived. On Tuesday afternoon, Cody Wilson, founder of the open-source gun-printing advocacy group Defense Distributed, announced he would begin selling the blueprints directly to people who want them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 30, 2018•9 min
It might feel like there's always a new smartphone on the market with next-generation features that make yours obsolete. But no matter how many iterations mobile devices go through, they're in many ways still based on decades-old electronics. In fact, antiquated 20th century telephone tech can be used to carry out decidedly 21st century attacks on many mainstream smartphones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 29, 2018•6 min
The hour of 4 pm Tuesday, potentially one of the most consequential hours in the history of the American presidency, made clear that history books will almost certainly note Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 election win with an asterisk. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 29, 2018•15 min
