From targeted wiretaps to bulk surveillance dragnets, phone companies have been at the center of privacy concerns for decades—and their time in the limelight isn't over yet. On Friday, telecom giant AT&T announced that it recently suffered a data breach impacting call and text messaging records of “nearly all” its …
Read More »Pressure Grows in Congress to Treat Crypto Investigator Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed in Nigeria, as a Hostage
When Tigran Gambaryan was first invited in February to meet with the Nigerian government in order to settle a dispute with his employer, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Nigerian officials detained him against his will, stripped him of his passport, and told him he was a “guest” of the state. He's …
Read More »Notorious Hacker Kingpin ‘Tank’ Is Finally Going to Prison
For more than a decade, Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov—a Ukrainian who used the online hacker name “Tank”—managed to evade cops. When FBI and Ukrainian officials raided his Donetsk apartment in 2010, the place was deserted and Penchukov had vanished. But the criminal spree came to a juddering halt at the end …
Read More »Google Is Adding Passkey Support for Its Most Vulnerable Users
The password killers known as “passkeys” are now available to users of Google's Advanced Protection Program, which works to add an additional layer of account protection for people who fear that they could face targeted digital attacks. The company is more than a year into supporting passkeys for all regular …
Read More »The $11 Billion Marketplace Enabling the Crypto Scam Economy
As the crypto scam commonly known as “pig butchering” has exploded into a full-blown criminal industry that steals tens of billions of dollars a year, an entire ecosystem has formed around it. That sub-industry offers tools and data for finding and tricking targets, money laundering services to help liquidate stolen …
Read More »AI-Powered Super Soldiers Are More Than Just a Pipe Dream
The day is slowly turning into night, and the American special operators are growing concerned. They are deployed to a densely populated urban center in a politically volatile region, and local activity has grown increasingly frenetic in recent days, the roads and markets overflowing with more than the normal bustle …
Read More »Hackers Leaking Taylor Swift Tickets? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, launched an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Docs, seeking to compete with the cloud giant on privacy. We broke down how Apple is taking a similar approach with its implementation of AI, using a system it calls Private Cloud Compute in its new Apple …
Read More »The World’s Most Popular 3D-Printed Gun Was Designed by an Aspiring Terrorist
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Every year, on Easter Sunday, Irish republicans commemorate their martyrs, remembering lives lost during the 1916 Easter Rising and in the years since. Such events have a pattern: a street parade, speeches, and flowers at the cemetery. The …
Read More »How Apple Intelligence’s Privacy Stacks Up Against Android’s ‘Hybrid AI’
At its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, Apple announced a late but major move into AI with “Apple Intelligence,” confirming months-long rumors that it would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to iPhones. Elon Musk, one of the cofounders of OpenAI, was quick to respond on X, branding ChatGPT-powered …
Read More »Proton Is Launching Encrypted Documents to Take On Google Docs
When particle physicist Andy Yen launched the privacy-focused email service Proton Mail as an ambitious crowdfunding campaign in 2014, the ultimate goal was to make it easier for people to be private online. Now, more than a decade on, his Switzerland-based company, Proton, is in the process of taking one …
Read More »