Security, Spoken

Tuesday’s attack by Iran-backed Shiite militia supporters on the US Embassy in Baghdad, followed by Friday’s US killing of top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, sparked fears of an intense escalation of hostilities in the region. Analysts say US embassies and consulates are prime targets in the wake of these events, and personnel could be in jeopardy. “Iran isn’t going to let this go unanswered,” notes security analyst Brett Bruen, a former US diplomat. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facing growing scrutiny over censorship and security concerns, TikTok is borrowing a few pages from a playbook now standard at many American tech giants, in an effort to earn the trust of US users and lawmakers. The Chinese-owned video app said in October it would invite outside experts to review some of its content moderation policies, just as Facebook and YouTube have in the past. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When this decade began, the ideal of the internet as a freewheeling intellectual playground remained largely intact: A medium that, after years of bubbly anticipation, had finally reached the mainstream and fulfilled its hype, bringing with it online marketplaces with infinite selection, viral videos, long-lost friends on Facebook, and even the hopes for new forms of protest and dissent against authoritarian regimes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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For generations, millions of Star Wars fans have thought they were watching a good ol’ fashioned space opera. In fact, they’ve received a decades-long primer in geopolitics, warfare, and the tenets of leadership. This is on display again in the latest and final movie of the nine-film franchise, The Rise of Skywalker. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Internet-connected gadgets like lightbulbs and fitness trackers are notorious for poor security. That's partly because they’re often made cheaply and with haste, which leads to careless mistakes and outsourcing of problematic parts. But it’s also partly due to the lack of computing power in the first place; it's not so easy to encrypt all that data with limited resources. Or at least that’s how the conventional wisdom goes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1986, Cliff Stoll’s boss at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs tasked him with getting to the bottom of a 75-cent accounting discrepancy in the lab’s computer network, which was rented out to remote users by the minute. Stoll, 36, investigated the source of that minuscule anomaly, pulling on it like a loose thread until it led to a shocking culprit: a hacker in the system. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One of the most popular features of Facebook-owned WhatsApp is group messaging, which turns the app's end-to-end encrypted chats into social groups that can include up to 256 participants. But recent stumbles in group chat security—including a bug that could have let a hacker crash the app entirely—have shown that WhatsApp may need to keep a closer eye on these communal hubs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google's password checking feature has slowly been spreading across the Google ecosystem this past year. It started as the "Password Checkup" extension for desktop versions of Chrome, which would audit individual passwords when you entered them, and several months later it was integrated into every Google account as an on-demand audit you can run on all your saved passwords. Now, instead of a Chrome extension, Password Checkup is being integrated into the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome 79. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There's been a lot of creepy and concerning news about how Amazon's Ring smart doorbells are bringing surveillance to suburbia and sparking data-sharing relationships between Amazon and law enforcement. News reports this week are raising a different issue: hackers are breaking into users' Ring accounts, which can also be connected to indoor Ring cameras, to take over the devices and get up to all sorts of invasive shenanigans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices