Security, Spoken

In March, police in an Atlanta suburb embarked on a surveillance experiment they hoped would reduce crime in the area. Along public roads near the local Six Flags amusement park, officers from the Cobb County Police Department installed 13 solar-powered automatic license plate readers from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based startup on a mission to “eliminate non-violent crime. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Politicians are bickering and NASA is tinkering, but first: a cartoon tackling the problem of robot discrimination. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It should go without saying: Don’t round up a bunch of your buddies and jostle your way into a highly secured government facility uninvited. But that's exactly what a group of Republican congressmen proudly did this morning. “BREAKING,” representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) tweeted at 11:32 am, “I led over 30 of my colleagues into the SCIF where Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The security community generally agrees on the importance of encrypting private data: Add a passcode to your smartphone. Use a secure messaging app like Signal. Adopt HTTPS web encryption. But a new movement to encrypt a fundamental internet mechanism, promoted by browser heavyweights like Google Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox, has sparked a heated controversy. The changes center around the Domain Name System, a decentralized directory that acts essentially as the internet's address book. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The first thing you should read about cybersecurity this week, if you somehow haven't already, is this in-depth look at Olympic Destroyer, the malware that plagued the Pyeongchang Olympics. An excerpt from WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg's upcoming book Sandworm, the feature from our November issue details how investigators figured out who was behind the attack—a trickier puzzle to solve than you might think. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Posting an update to Instagram doesn't have to mean sharing your life with every single person you've befriended there. In fact, all of the major social apps give you more granular control than you might realize. If you want to set up a private, select group of people to show off photos of your baby to—or to keep your most raucous nights out a secret from—you can do so without resorting to emails or group chats. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Deception has always been part of the hacker playbook. But it's one thing for intruders to hide their tracks, and another to adopt an invented identity, or even frame another country for a cyberattack. Russia's hackers have done all of the above, and now gone one step further: In a series of espionage cases, they hijacked another country's hacking infrastructure, and used it to spy on victims and deliver malware. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are lots of ways to hack a PC. You can exploit software vulnerabilities. You can put malware on a USB drive and drop it in a parking lot for some unsuspecting office worker to pick up and plug in. Or you can turn an operating system's features against itself, strategically manipulating them to gain control. But an expanding threat now has Microsoft rethinking some of its most foundational PC defenses. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On August 12, an unidentified whistle-blower filed a complaint, addressed to the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, concerning the behavior President Donald Trump. Ever since that report became public a week ago, Trump and his defenders have done their best to discredit both its contents and the author. But underneath the increasingly large pile of misinformation, misinterpretation, and outright fabrication sits one simple truth: The whistle-blower did nothing wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you looked across the tarmac at the Great Falls, Montana airport in April, you likely would have been surprised to see a fully marked Russian Air Force jet parked nearby. Its mission that week would have been even more puzzling: The unarmed Tupolev Tu-154Mspent four days flying over some of the most sensitive military bases in the United States, including the complex in the Nevada desert known as “Area 51. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices