Security, Spoken

Like many reporters and editors in DC or New York, I have been yelled at by Michael Cohen. It's been almost a rite of passage for anyone writing about Donald Trump over the past decade. There was no bone too small for his long-time lawyer and fixer to pick when it came to published criticisms of the real estate developer. My turn came in June 2012, when he called to yell at me over an item the magazine I then edited had written about Trump's forthcoming hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Over the past 18 months, revelations about wireless carriers selling smartphone location data to third parties have forced telecoms to promise reform. Worryingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, these user protections have been slow to actually materialize. Even if carriers shape up, though, an attacker can still track a smartphone's location and snoop on phone calls thanks to newly discovered flaws in 4G and even 5G protocols.

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The security world's paranoiacs have long cautioned that if a computer falls into a stranger's hands, it shouldn't be trusted again. Now one company's researchers have demonstrated how, in some cases, that maxim applies just as strongly to a class of machine that never touches your hands in the first place: cloud servers.

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The breaking news hit a snowy Washington on Wednesday: Newly installed attorney general William Barr appears to be preparing to announce the end of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

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The phony Facebook pages looked just like the real thing. They were designed to mimic pages that service members use to connect. One appeared to be geared toward a large-scale, military exercise in Europe and was populated by a handful of accounts that appeared to be real service members. In reality, both the pages and the accounts were created and operated by researchers at NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, a research group that's affiliated with NATO.

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The Mueller investigation has lasted so long, it's easy to forget that it'll end at some point. In fact, according to recent reports, it may wrap up as early as next week. But what does that mean exactly? We took a look at seven distinct possibilities, from fizzle to fireworks. As though the border wall "national emergency" wasn't enough to worry about.

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If New Yorker writer George Packer hadn’t already taken the title, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe’s new book might be best titled The Unwinding.

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After years of promises about a physical wall stretching along the United States-Mexico border, president Donald Trump declared a state of emergency last week in an attempt to secure wall funding in spite of Congressional opposition. But physical barriers alone have always been both ineffective and expensive.

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Ten years ago, Roman Dobrokhotov sat down in the front row of a Kremlin auditorium, surrounded by a polite audience of journalists and dignitaries attending a speech by Russia’s then-president Dmitri Medvedev. Medvedev was only a few minutes into his address on the importance of the country's constitution—which he had just amended to allow Vladimir Putin to serve as president again—when Dobrokhotov stood up, turned around, and addressed the audience himself.

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On Wednesday, Facebook introduced a new privacy setting for Android users. Previously, if you had Location History turned on, the app could track you in the background. In other words, even if you didn’t have the app open, it knew where you were. Now, you can stop it from doing so. And you should.

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