Security, Spoken

Yesterday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg presented an entirely new philosophy. For 15 years, the stated goal of Facebook has been to make the world more open and connected; the unstated goal was constructing a targeted advertising system built on nearly infinite data. Yesterday, though, Zuckerberg pronounced that the company was reversing course.

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It's a familiar playbook for Google and Alphabet: Offer high-quality products like Gmail or Chrome, build a massive user base, and then capitalize on that reach to paternalistically promote safer practices across the tech industry. So far, this strategy has generally proved to be extremely effective. Now Chronicle, a company born last year out of X, Alphabet's "moonshot factory," is going to try it for defending corporate networks. On Monday, Chronicle announced its first product: Backstory.

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Daniel Crowley has a long list of software platforms, computers, and Internet of Things devices that he suspects he could hack. As research director of IBM’s offensive security group X-Force Red, Crawley’s job is to follow his intuition about where digital security risks and threats may be lurking, and expose them so they can be fixed. But so many types of computing devices are vulnerable in so many ways, he can’t chase down every lead himself.

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The National Security Agency develops advanced hacking tools in-house for both offense and defense—which you could probably guess even if some notable examples hadn't leaked in recent years. But on Tuesday at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, the agency chose for the first time demonstrated Ghidra, a refined internal tool that it has chosen to open source.

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When Google's team of ninja bug-hunting researchers known as Project Zero finds a hackable flaw in somebody else's code, they give the company responsible 90 days to fix it before going public with their findings—patched or not.

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The 2018 midterm elections were hardly a glowing reflection on the state of America’s voting technology. Even after Congress set aside millions of dollars for state election infrastructure last year, voters across the country still waited in hours-long lines to cast their ballots on their precincts’ finicky, outdated voting machines.

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Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, is something like Q for the Defense Department. He formerly ran the Strategic Capabilities Office, a secretive military skunkworks designed to figure out how to fight future wars. While there, he helped design swarms of tiny unmanned drones; he helped create Project Maven; and he tried to partner the Defense Department with the videogame industry.

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When the lip-syncing app Musical.ly first exploded in popularity nearly four years ago, it was best-known for being a teen sensation. But according to the Federal Trade Commission, the app also illegally collected information from children under the age of 13. The agency announced Wednesday that Musical.ly, now known as TikTok, has agreed to pay a $5.

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The bombshells and not-so-surprising surprises, both legal and those just plain embarrassing, come on almost every page of Michael Cohen’s 20 pages of prepared testimony for the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

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A much-touted two-day summit between Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un failed to reach the finish line Thursday, as talks collapsed and Trump returned to Washington, DC. It’s unclear exactly what unraveled the process; Trump says Kim asked for the lifting of all economic sanctions in exchange for closing the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Complex, while North Korea reportedly says it had asked for relief on some, but not all.

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