Security, Spoken

When an app wants to access data from your smartphone's motion or light sensors, iOS and Android require them to get your permission first. That keeps a fitness app, say, from counting your steps without your knowledge. But a team of researchers has discovered that those rules don't apply to websites loaded in mobile browsers, which can often often access an array of device sensors without any notifications or permissions whatsoever.

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For over half a decade, Cody Wilson has been a unique thorn in the side of anyone who advocates even the most minimal form of gun control. More than any person else on the planet, the creator of the world's first 3-D printed gun has advanced the dangerous idea that with digital DIY tools, anyone can make a deadly weapon at home.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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