Security, Spoken

Facebook has taken down 32 fake pages and accounts that it says were involved in coordinated campaigns on both Facebook and Instagram. Though the company has not yet attributed the accounts to any group, it says the campaign does bear some resemblance to the propaganda campaign run by Russia's Internet Research Agency in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Facebook is now working with law enforcement to determine where the campaign originated.

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Imagine you're a human rights activist, pulling up to a border crossing. The on-duty customs agent requests that you hand over your phone and unlock it, without a warrant—an increasingly common practice for US Customs and Border Protection. Your phone holds sensitive photographs documenting abuses abroad, but the agent can't find them. At most, he might notice that you've deleted some files recently.

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Until yesterday, unless you had a family member or friend inside prison, you most likely had never heard of JPay. That’s because all of its services are directed towards people inside the nation’s prisons—and their family members.

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Amazon touts its Rekognition facial recognition system as “simple and easy to use,” encouraging customers to “detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.” And yet, in a study released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the technology managed to confuse photos of 28 members of Congress with publicly available mug shots.

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Several weeks ago, my friend Jeff signed up for an online Twitter application that promised to delete his old tweets. It was advertised merely as a simple way to clear your online presence, but after Jeff used it, he noticed that his account began retweeting spam. Out of an abundance of caution, he deleted his Twitter account entirely. On Tuesday, Twitter announced steps it was taking to curb this exact sort of abuse.

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A year ago this week, the credit bureau Equifax saw signs of a problem on its network of a problem. A really big problem. Hackers had entered the company’s network, stealing the personal and financial data of more than 147 million people in the United States, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, and some driver's license numbers and credit card numbers.

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Nearly two years ago, Google made a pledge: It would name and shame websites with unencrypted connections, a strategy designed to spur web developers to embrace HTTPS encryption. On Tuesday, it finally follows through. With the launch of Chrome 68, Google will now call out sites with unencrypted connections as “Not Secure” in the URL bar. The move flips the convention of how Chrome displays the security of sites on its head.

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On Saturday, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by several news outlets and conservative group Judicial Watch, the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of releasing the (heavily redacted) application to wiretap former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. In a series of eight tweets fired off over the next two days, Trump reveled in the document, declaring it evidence of “an illegal scam,” and further proof of the “witch hunt” against him.

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This week started with a controversial, widely derided meeting between President Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and ended with… an invite for round two! And yes, all manner of craziness managed to happen in between. That includes yet more denials on Trump’s part that Russia interfered—and continues to—with US democracy, a stance that has serious repercussions, however many times he walks it back.

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Hopefully by now you’ve heeded the repeated warnings from your friends and loved ones (and friendly, beloved internet writers) to use two-factor authentication to secure your digital accounts. That’s where access to Facebook or Twitter or your online bank—anything that supports it, really—requires not just a password but also a special code. Not all two-factor is created equal, however. For better protection, you’re going to want an authenticator app.

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