Security, Spoken

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A New Way to Track Down Bugs Could Help Save IoT Jan 19, 2018

Show notes

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.

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Crime-Predicting Algorithms May Not Fare Much Better Than Untrained Humans Jan 18, 2018

Show notes

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.

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Tech Companies Are Complicit in Censoring Iran Protests Jan 17, 2018

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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 32 people have been killed and at least 3,700 have been detained since the protests began.

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Congress Renews Warrantless Surveillance—And Makes It Even Worse Jan 17, 2018

Show notes

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.

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The Astrophysicist Who Wants to Help Solve Baltimore's Urban Blight Jan 16, 2018

Show notes

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 their patterns.

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Security News This Week: Google Pulls 60 Malicious Apps With Millions of Downloads from Play Store Jan 16, 2018

Show notes

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.

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How Hawaii Could Have Sent a False Nuclear Alarm Jan 15, 2018

Show notes

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.

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The Hidden Toll of Fixing Meltdown and Spectre Jan 15, 2018

Show notes

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.

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A Clever Radio Trick Can Tell If a Drone Is Watching You Jan 12, 2018

Show notes

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.

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Skype's Rolling Out End-to-End Encryption For Hundreds of Millions of People Jan 12, 2018

Show notes

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.

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