Security, Spoken

It happened again. Facebook went down in several pockets around the world for several hours Wednesday, as did Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp. The outage inspired the usual existential jokes—and rush to news sites, to fill the void—but also gave rise to conspiracy theories that hackers were the cause. As is almost always the case, those theories are wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the last decade, license plate readers have become an increasingly popular tool for law enforcement around the United States. One federal agency that has aggressively pursued this data is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, through a $6.1 million contract with a private firm called Vigilant Solutions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You’ve got no shortage of ways to send encrypted messages, and at least as many cloud services for sending large files. But the Venn diagram for the two remains surprisingly, inconveniently small. That’s the beauty of Mozilla’s Firefox Send, a free, intuitive, web-based service that lets you share large encrypted files, no strings attached. Send began in 2017 as an experiment, part of Firefox’s since-discontinued Test Pilot program. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Venezuela's massive, nationwide power outages, which began on Thursday, have so far resulted in at least 20 deaths, looting, and loss of access to food, water, fuel, and cash for many of the country's of 31 million residents. Late Monday, the United States said its diplomats would leave the US embassy in Caracas, citing deteriorating conditions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, RSA, one of the biggest cybersecurity conferences of the year took place in San Francisco. Researchers demonstrated lots of new reasons to freak out about your data security, but they also highlighted new techniques for staying safe. There’s the clever new tool that can protect Macs using Apple’s video game logic engine. And the NSA even made an appearance, revealing an open-source version of a powerful cybersecurity tool that agency had developed in house. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Aric Toler’s face is illuminated only by the glow of the video playing on his laptop. It’s dashcam footage, supposedly captured by a driver in the town of Makiivka in eastern Ukraine, showing a Russian military convoy on its way to shoot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 on July 17, 2014. At least, that’s the theory. Toler just has to prove it. To the untrained eye, the video is awfully dull. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the endless booths of this week's RSA security trade show in San Francisco, an overflowing industry of vendors will offer any visitor an ad nauseam array of "threat intelligence" and "vulnerability management" systems. But it turns out that there's already a decent, free feed of vulnerability information that can tell systems administrators what bugs they really need to patch, updated 24/7: Twitter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

By this point, you've hopefully gotten the message that your personal data can end up exposed in all sorts of unexpected internet backwaters. But increased awareness hasn't slowed the problem. In fact, it's only grown bigger—and more confounding. Last week, security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered an unprotected, publicly accessible MongoDB database containing 150 gigabytes-worth of detailed, plaintext marketing data—including 763 million unique email addresses. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Yesterday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg presented an entirely new philosophy. For 15 years, the stated goal of Facebook has been to make the world more open and connected; the unstated goal was constructing a targeted advertising system built on nearly infinite data. Yesterday, though, Zuckerberg pronounced that the company was reversing course. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's a familiar playbook for Google and Alphabet: Offer high-quality products like Gmail or Chrome, build a massive user base, and then capitalize on that reach to paternalistically promote safer practices across the tech industry. So far, this strategy has generally proved to be extremely effective. Now Chronicle, a company born last year out of X, Alphabet's "moonshot factory," is going to try it for defending corporate networks. On Monday, Chronicle announced its first product: Backstory. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices