Security, Spoken

Arguably the biggest news in security this week was also the strangest; a company barely a year old announced a series of AMD vulnerabilities, giving the chip company only a day or so advance notice before making the results public. And despite the hype, the bugs themselves were of questionable severity. It was almost as hard to make sense of as YouTube's decision to add Wikipedia links to controversial videos. Almost.

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Hacker Adrian Lamo died at the age of 37, according a Facebook post from his father. “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son,” Mario Lamo wrote in a post to the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Facebook Group. The cause of death is not yet known, but a coroner in Sedgwick County, Kansas confirmed the news to ZDNet.

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In the early morning of September 9, 2016, Bill Moore, CEO of the Austin-based walkie-talkie app company Zello, contacted the Middle East Media Research Institute. He was seeking a copy of a report MEMRI had recently published describing how ISIS members and supporters were using Zello, which allows people to send voice messages to each other in private and also public channels. Moore had learned about the findings through a Google Alert.

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In its first 14 months, the Trump administration has earned a reputation for being soft on the Kremlin, even as the extent of the chaos Russia's hackers and trolls have inflicted online becomes increasingly clear. But more recently, the White House's rhetoric towards Russia has begun to shift. And now the executive branch has not only called out the Kremlin for a broad collection of rogue actions online, but finally meted out a concrete financial punishment.

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In 1995, a bipartisan pair of senators wrote a bill to address growing concerns over minors accessing pornography on the internet. President Bill Clinton would eventually sign the Communications Decency Act in 1996, criminalizing the online transmission of “obscene or indecent” materials to anyone known to be under the age of 18.

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After the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February, the top trending video on YouTube wasn’t a news clip about the tragedy but a conspiracy theory video suggesting survivor David Hogg was an actor. The video garnered 200,000 views before YouTube removed it from its platform. Until now, the company hasn’t said much about how it plans to handle the spread of that sort of misinformation moving forward. On Tuesday, however, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki detailed a potential solution.

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There’s no such thing as the US criminal justice system. There are, instead, thousands of counties across the country, each with their own systems, made up of a diffuse network of sheriffs, court clerks, prosecutors, public defenders, and jail officials who all enforce the rules around who does and doesn’t end up behind bars.

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When the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were revealed in millions of processors earlier this year, those deep-seated vulnerabilities rattled practically the entire computer industry. Now a group of Israeli researchers is outlining a new set of chip-focused vulnerabilities that, if confirmed, would represent another collection of flaws at the core of computer hardware, this time in a processor architecture designed by AMD.

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Distributed denial of service attacks, in which hackers use a targeted hose of junk traffic to overwhelm a service or take a server offline, have been a digital menace for decades. But in just the last 18 months, the public picture of DDoS defense has evolved rapidly. In fall 2016, a rash of then-unprecedented attacks caused internet outages and other service disruptions at a series of internet infrastructure and telecom companies around the world.

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Routers, both the big corporate kind and the small one gathering dust in the corner of your home, have long made an attractive target for hackers. They're always on and connected, often full of unpatched security vulnerabilities, and offer a convenient chokepoint for eavesdropping on all the data you pipe out to the internet.

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