Wired Security Spoken Edition

In 2013, Amy Krekelberg received an unsettling notice from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources: An employee had abused his access to a government driver’s license database and snooped on thousands of people in the state, mostly women. Krekelberg learned that she was one of them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Certain studies require sensitive datasets: the relationship between nutritious school lunch and student health, the effectiveness of salary equity initiatives, and so on. Valuable insights require navigating a minefield of private, personal information. Now, after years of work, cryptographers and data scientists at Google have come up with a technique to enable this "multi-party computation" without exposing information to anyone who didn't already have it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Not so long ago, companies that cracked personal devices on behalf of governments did so in secret, closely guarding even the descriptions of their capabilities. Now, it seems, they proudly tweet about their updated abilities to hack into new iPhones, like a video game firm offering an expansion pack. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At this point, you're probably keeping an eye out for possible phishing messages in your email. You know the drill: If you have any doubts, don't click links or download attachments. That's difficult enough to adhere to in practice. Now, thanks to new findings from the threat intelligence firm Kaspersky, along with phishing texts, phishing tweets, and phishing pop-ups, you need to worry about one more thing: phishing in your calendar. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Data breaches and exposures have been so rampant over the last few years that it's difficult to even keep track at this point, much less step back to mull a solution. But, perhaps out of necessity, researchers from the database giant MongoDB have spent the last two years developing a new database encryption scheme aimed squarely at reducing these damaging incidents. Their secret weapon? Radical simplicity. The idea of encrypting databases in various ways isn't new. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There's a new scam getting after your Google Calendar, you can now control TVs with your eyes, and it's time to get your smorgasbord of cell phone photos organized. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every week day? Sign up here! Today's Headlines A tricky scam plants phishing links in your calendar You hopefully already know to avoid phishing emails ... and texts ... and popups . Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There's a new battleground in the browser wars: user privacy. Firefox just made its Enhanced Tracking Protection a default feature, Apple continues to pile privacy-focused features into its Safari browser, and people are more aware than ever before of the sort of information they can reveal every time they set a digital footprint on the web. If you want to push back against online tracking, you've got several options to pick from when choosing a default browser. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s mid June, and according to tradition, the news cycle is supposed to be lethargic, cooling off in a hammock somewhere and taking it easy. Not so much this week. It started off well enough: On Sunday we explained how to actually, finally stop all those robocalls---or at least slow them down. But then Monday hit, and the US government confirmed that hackers had stolen a border agency database full of traveler photos. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon cloned an entire neighborhood, a dangerous hacker group takes aim at the US electrical grid, and the world remembers a running great. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In May 2018, the Middle East-focused free speech and information access group Majal suffered a major cyberattack. Someone had managed to infiltrate a Majal Amazon Web Services account, access a content repository and backups, and wipe out six months of user data and posts across the organization's various message boards and social media platforms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The internet-wide push to encrypt more web traffic has resulted in a wave of safer, snoop-proof connections. The next challenge, though, is completing that transition from using a mixture of unencrypted HTTP and protected HTTPS to requiring that baseline protection everywhere. And over the past year, Google has been publicly offering a simple and straightforward way for websites to eliminate these subtle weak spots. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a year ago, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the regulation was the “right to be forgotten”—an often-hyped and debated right, sometimes perceived as empowering individuals to request the erasure of their information on the internet, most commonly from search engines or social networks. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Darren Shou is vice president of research at Symantec. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the past 18 months, Google has pushed to improve Chrome extension security—a welcome goal given the sketchy morass of extensions that have been out there for years. But one proposed change related to this effort threatens to hobble ad blocking extensions. And the pending transition has set up a showdown between Google, ad blocker makers, and even other browsers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Radiohead owned some hackers, the T-Mobile/Sprint merger runs into some hiccups, and a Swedish mining town is being picked up and moved. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Tuesday, Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood made an announcement on Twitter and Facebook: The band had been "hacked," and the perpetrator attempted a $150,000 shakedown to prevent the public release of the files. In response? Radiohead dumped all of it online for free. You can stream it below for the next 18 days, or buy it on Bandcamp for about $23. All proceeds will go to a climate protest organization called Extinction Rebellion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For years, countries have spoken in vague terms about creating domestic internets that could be isolated from the world at will. Now, we’re seeing some begin to execute that vision. Last month, Iran announced its national information network, or its domestic internet, is 80 percent complete. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off the week, bringing with it some interesting security enhancements for iOS and macOS users. The company will start offering its own single sign-on option, competing with Google and Facebook but with enhancements those two currently don't offer. And it rejiggered its Find My feature using some very clever cryptography. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Five days ago, the internet had a conniption. In broad patches around the globe, YouTube sputtered. Shopify stores shut down. Snapchat blinked out. And millions of people couldn’t access their Gmail accounts. The disruptions all stemmed from Google Cloud, which suffered an prolonged outage—which also prevented Google engineers from pushing a fix. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Russian meddling that rocked the 2016 United States presidential election gave the public a full view of something election officials and advocates have warned about for years: weak voting infrastructure and election systems around the US, and a lack of political will and funding to strengthen them. Two and a half years later, real progress has been made in key areas. But with a new presidential election less than 18 months away, glaring systemic risks remain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Campaign finance laws prohibit businesses and even many nonprofits from directly contributing to political campaigns. They can’t even send pizza. Now, the United States Federal Election Commission may apply the same laws to block a cybersecurity firm from offering free or low cost defense services to campaigns, at a time when those protections are badly needed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices