Wired Security Spoken Edition

During a nearly four-hour grilling before Parliament Wednesday, Alexander Nix, former CEO of the now defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica, faced the ghosts of his past. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the end of June, digital credit card transactions are getting a mandatory encryption upgrade. It's good news—but not if you have an old device, or depend on a retailer that hasn't completed the transition. When data moves from one device to another, it needs to protection so it isn't intercepted and manipulated along the way. This defense is especially crucial, as you might imagine, for sensitive communications like financial transactions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After a weekend of rumors, Microsoft officially announced Monday that it will acquire the code repository site GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The platform is an important resource for some 28 million developers and home to billions of lines of open source code. It's in many ways a natural fit Microsoft, which has in recent years warmed up to open source. But the beloved developer platform may also introduce moderation headaches. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Apple announced a slew of new software features at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, including an augmented reality upgrade and animojis that can stick out their tongues when you do. But the company's latest desktop and mobile operating systems contain a more subtle, yet more radical, innovation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When criminals are plotting, so are vigilant police departments. Officers are increasingly turning to software and ­predictive analytics to anticipate when and where misdeeds are likely to occur. But big data is just one component in a growing arsenal of high-tech policing tools. As agencies around the country push for faster, savvier law enforcement, they’re looking more and more like the precrime unit in Minority Report. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week we looked inward for change; if you ever wondered what it’s like to be a national technology and culture magazine that loses $100,000 in Bitcoin, have we got a story for you. If you'd rather an even wilder tale from around the globe, please read about how Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko faked his own death, and why some of his colleagues have cried foul. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

James Clapper was eating lunch in Muscat, Oman, on November 9, 2016, when at 2:31 am EST Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election. Clapper was on one of his final trips abroad at the end of a 54-year-long career in the military and intelligence, working with allies to shore up US interests overseas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Marcellino Ornelas had been in and out of juvenile hall seven times by the time he finally went to prison at the age of 19 for assault with a firearm. He'd already been kicked out of high school and was working, he says, as the "local drug dealer," with a side gig at a Ross department store. In the past, every time he got out, he'd start dealing soon after. "It was like, this is how I make money. This is who my friends are," Ornelas says. "That always brought me back to the same situation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's a truism by now that the federal government struggles with cybersecurity, but a report recent report by the White House's Office of Management and Budget reinforces the dire need for change across dozens of agencies. Of the 96 federal agencies it assessed, it deemed 74 percent either "At Risk" or "High Risk," meaning that they need crucial and immediate improvements. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Papua New Guinea, a small, island nation that shares a border with Indonesia, may soon turn off Facebook. The nation's communication minister suggested Tuesday that the government restrict access to the site for one month while it conducts research into issues like fake profiles, misinformation, and pornography. PNG will also reportedly explore creating its own, government-run alternative to Facebook. When the news reached Western outlets Tuesday, some people applauded. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the beginning of the year, revelations about a new type of processor vulnerability had far-reaching implications for devices all over the world, and this week researchers disclosed yet another of these so-called "speculative execution" flaws in Intel, AMD, and ARM chips. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Michael Caputo’s favorite novel is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the story of the Devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s and all the oddball characters who surround him. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you've been in a large crowded place with a fair amount of security, you've probably seen bomb-sniffing dogs at work. (You may have even petted the puppers.) Dogs have long been used for detecting contraband and explosives, but attackers have made advances in body-worn explosive technology, forcing law enforcement to evolve too. This means enlisting a new type of canine defense: Vapor Wake dogs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in 2013, when you could still mine bitcoins at home, WIRED was sent a small, sleek mining device manufactured by the now-defunct Butterfly Labs. We turned on the Roku-looking machine in our San Francisco offices and allowed it to do its job. A small fortune was soon amassed, now worth around $100,000. Then, we lost the money. Forever. Here's what happened to WIRED's 13 Bitcoins—and to the millions of others that have faced the same fate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Thursday, Seattle news station KIRO 7 published a disconcerting story. A Portland family discovered that a snippet of private conversation had been recorded by an Amazon Echo and sent to a random person in their contact list. The report instantly sparked concern and outrage that Amazon's Echo smart speaker is listening to and recording much more than the company claims. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Home routers have become the rats to hackers' bubonic plague: An easily infected, untreated and ubiquitous population in which dangerous digital attacks can spread. Now security researchers are warning that one group of sophisticated hackers has amassed a collection of malware-infected routers that could be used as a powerful tool to spread havoc across the internet, or simply triggered to implode networks across the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Law enforcement agencies including the FBI have long criticized data encryption as a threat to their ability to fight crime. They argue that encryption allows bad actors to "go dark," impeding agents’ ability to access the data of suspects, even with court orders or warrants. After years of raising the alarm about the going dark problem, though, officials have yet to convince privacy advocates that undermining encryption protections would do more good than harm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Good news for those looking to secure their Facebook accounts: The social network says users can now sign up for two-factor authentication using apps like Duo and Google Authenticator, which will strengthen people's security on the site. Previously, you could only sign up for the feature with a phone number, though you could also enable tools like physical security keys and Facebook's own code generator that lives within the app itself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As is often the case, it was a week of mixed messages in security, with the White House eliminating its top cybersecurity policy roles at a crucial moment in geopolitics and the evolution of cyberwar. WIRED took a deep look at Robert Mueller's military service in Vietnam and his first year as special counsel, examining the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are plenty of guides available on how to protect your data, how to secure yourself online, and how to stop digital snoops from tracking you across the web and then profiting from that intrusion. (Sorry, “monetization”.) You should do these things. But if a cascading series of revelations this past week has taught us anything, it's that all of those steps amount to triage. The things you can control add up to very little next to the things you can’t. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices