Security, Spoken

As hard as it is to believe at this point, the week really did start with Apple's WWDC keynote. It feels like a lifetime ago! You can get a full recap here, but the two main security takeaways are that Safari is the best mainstream privacy browser now, and that it looks like Apple's going to slow down, take a breath, and try to release some major updates without quite so many bugs.

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British security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who was indicted and arrested last summer for allegedly creating and conspiring to sell the Kronos banking trojan, now faces four additional charges. Hutchins, also called MalwareTech and MalwareTechBlog, is well-known in the security community for slowing the spread of WannaCry ransomware as it tore through the world's PCs in May 2017.

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Facebook has found itself the subject of another privacy scandal, this time involving privacy settings. A glitch caused up to 14 million Facebook users to have their new posts inadvertently set to public, the company revealed Thursday. The bug, which reportedly occurred while Facebook was testing a new feature, went live on May 18.

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In January 2014, Google made a fundamental change to its search product: It started showing answers to user queries directly in so-called snippets, no further clicks required. But what started out as a time-saver has morphed into a repeated source of misleading and outright false information, thanks to Google's frequent reliance on untrusted sources.

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During a nearly four-hour grilling before Parliament Wednesday, Alexander Nix, former CEO of the now defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica, faced the ghosts of his past.

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At the end of June, digital credit card transactions are getting a mandatory encryption upgrade. It's good news—but not if you have an old device, or depend on a retailer that hasn't completed the transition. When data moves from one device to another, it needs to protection so it isn't intercepted and manipulated along the way. This defense is especially crucial, as you might imagine, for sensitive communications like financial transactions.

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After a weekend of rumors, Microsoft officially announced Monday that it will acquire the code repository site GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The platform is an important resource for some 28 million developers and home to billions of lines of open source code. It's in many ways a natural fit Microsoft, which has in recent years warmed up to open source. But the beloved developer platform may also introduce moderation headaches.

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Apple announced a slew of new software features at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, including an augmented reality upgrade and animojis that can stick out their tongues when you do. But the company's latest desktop and mobile operating systems contain a more subtle, yet more radical, innovation.

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When criminals are plotting, so are vigilant police departments. Officers are increasingly turning to software and ­predictive analytics to anticipate when and where misdeeds are likely to occur. But big data is just one component in a growing arsenal of high-tech policing tools. As agencies around the country push for faster, savvier law enforcement, they’re looking more and more like the precrime unit in Minority Report.

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This week we looked inward for change; if you ever wondered what it’s like to be a national technology and culture magazine that loses $100,000 in Bitcoin, have we got a story for you. If you'd rather an even wilder tale from around the globe, please read about how Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko faked his own death, and why some of his colleagues have cried foul.

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