Security, Spoken

West Virginia and Oregon have both recently deployed mobile a voting app called Voatz to facilitate absentee voting. But Voatz now turns out to have major security flaws, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—including vulnerabilities that could let a hacker manipulate results. The newly unearthed bugs could allow an attacker to reveal someone's votes, block votes from being submitted, or even manipulate them.

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In an age of hyper-partisanship, Americans increasingly get their news from sites that align with their political beliefs. But more separates those right and left-leaning sides of the web than their opposite ideologies. According to a new study, the right end of the fractured online news industry also tracks its audience far more aggressively than the left does.

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Last month, the cryptographer and coder known as Moxie Marlinspike was getting settled on an airplane when his seatmate, a midwestern-looking man in his 60s, asked for help. He couldn't figure out how to enable airplane mode on his aging Android phone. But when Marlinspike saw the screen, he wondered for a moment if he was being trolled: Among just a handful of apps installed on the phone was Signal.

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Malign foreign influence operations during the 2016 United States presidential election season raised awareness about the need for tighter security within campaigns. And while the 2020 presidential campaigns have shown some improvement, many are still seriously lagging—and facing real threats—with nine months left before election day. Now Google is trying to help move the needle.

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Well, here we are again. Even years later, it's still hard to fully grasp the degree to which Yahoo failed at protecting the data of billions of people across multiple breaches in the 2010s. But now, thanks to a class action suit against Yahoo that has reached a proposed settlement, you have until July 20 to file a claim if you were impacted. Don't miss out on your chance for a $100 apology.

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Despite its best damage control efforts, Facebook is still dogged by its checkered past on data privacy. But at least some of the security mechanisms the company has put in place are catching problems—and helping them get fixed. Facebook said on Friday that in 2019 its bug bounty saw its largest number of accepted bugs since the program launched nine years ago, paid out its highest single reward ever, and began inviting select researchers to evaluate new features before they launched.

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The week kicked off with the Iowa caucuses, which went very poorly, in so many ways! We'll talk about a few of them below, but the main takeaway is that adding unvetted technology to the voting process—or anything—rarely makes things better. Other states, please take note! Actually, Nevada and New Hampshire already have. It's a start. In another unwelcome technological evolution, ransomware has started targeting industrial control systems, which bodes poorly for critical infrastructure.

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Welcome to a dark day in America’s modern experiment with democracy. Despite becoming the first president ever to receive votes from both parties to convict and remove him from office in an impeachment trial, President Donald Trump today woke up in the White House unbound.

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Almost three years ago, artist Simon Weckert noticed something unusual at a May Day demonstration in Berlin: Google Maps showed there was a massive traffic jam, even though there were zero cars on the road. Soon enough, Weckert realized that it was the mass of people, or more specifically their smartphones, that had inadvertently tricked Google into seeing gridlock on an empty street. And then he decided to do it himself.

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Kaliya Young doesn’t want to break up Facebook. She wants to make it obsolete. She was an Olympic-level water polo player for Canada, but in 2002 was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Freshly graduated from university and living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she went through months of radiation and chemotherapy that sapped her physical strength. In her mid-twenties, far from home, no longer an athlete, Young felt intensely alone. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

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