Security, Spoken

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Of all of the tech platforms that Russian trolls infiltrated during the run-up to the 2016 election in the United States, Reddit has been among the least forthcoming. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In privacy-focused, anti-establishment corners of the internet, going open source can earn you a certain amount of street cred. It signals that you not only have nothing to hide, but also welcome the rest of the world to help make your project better. For Ghostery though, the company that makes Edward Snowden’s recommended ad blocker, publishing all its code on GitHub Thursday also means clearing up some confusion about its past. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For anyone who has watched the last few years of cat-and-mouse games on the dark web's black markets, the pattern is familiar: A contraband bazaar like the Silk Road attracts thousands of drug dealers and their customers, along with intense scrutiny from police and three-letter agencies. Authorities hunt down its administrators, and tear the site offline in a dramatic takedown—only to find that its buyers and sellers have simply migrated to the next dark-web market on their list. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

An elite Russian hacking team, a historic ransomware attack, an espionage group in the Middle East, and countless small time cryptojackers all have one thing in common. Though their methods and objectives vary, they all lean on leaked NSA hacking tool EternalBlue to infiltrate target computers and spread malware across networks. Leaked to the public not quite a year ago, EternalBlue has joined a long line of reliable hacker favorites. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices