SecurityTikTok. Harmless fun? Or existential threat to the United States? The answer you get depends on who you ask. This week we have a special guest to help us discuss the question in depth — and we’ll get into the larger issues with apps, user data, and digital privacy.
TikTok, apps, and your privacy
In recent weeks, the popular video-sharing app TikTok has made headlines for its practice of monitoring iOS pasteboard data. The pasteboard — kind of a system-wide clipboard for iOS that lets apps access the information copied there — …
July 17, 2020 •
19 min read
SecurityThis week, we dive a bit deeper into some WWDC20 announcements with developer Brett Terpstra
July 9, 2020 •
10 min read
SecurityIn the movies, bad guys are often taken down by a tech vulnerability. This week, we revisit our look at how best practices could make bad guys better at being bad.
July 2, 2020 •
1 min read
SecurityOn this week’s Checklist, we cover the biggest Mac news to come out of Apple’s 2020 Worldwide Developer Conference, including a new macOS and Safari, a new processor for Macs and a new way to log in to websites.
June 24, 2020 •
8 min read
SecurityThe Checklist will return next week with coverage of WWDC 2020. In the meantime, we’ll catch you up on the latest cybersecurity news — and share several Checklists from the archives that shed light on these stories.
June 18, 2020 •
3 min read
SecurityThe Checklist is taking a short break as we gear up for WWDC 2020 — but we’ll be back with all new episodes very soon. To tide you over while you wait, we’re sharing several classic Checklists which provide essential background to the week’s news.
June 11, 2020 •
3 min read
SecurityThis week’s Checklist is all about staying safe in an unsafe world.
June 4, 2020 •
10 min read
SecurityThis week, we sit down with a special guest to discuss the ins and outs of encryption — touching on everything from iPhone passcodes and brute-force attacks to political posturing and quantum computing!
May 28, 2020 •
24 min read
SecurityThis week, we’ll bring you up to speed on Big Tech’s efforts to fight Covid-19.
May 22, 2020 •
6 min read
SecurityThis week on the Checklist, we cover:
Deeper analysis of Covid-19 scam domainsBank whose letters set off alarm bellsPossible GDPR problem for Germany’s Apple Stores
Coronavirus scam sites: a taxonomy
For the past couple of months, we’ve covered stories related to Covid-19 scams and security threats. One thing we noted early on was a surge in domain name registration for new websites related to the pandemic. While many of these were completely legitimate, initial research indicated that an unusual number of these new domains were malicious.
In an effort to better understand the threat …
May 14, 2020 •
8 min read
SecurityThis week on the Checklist, we sit down with a special guest to talk about passwords — plus we’ll update you on Google’s efforts to build a safer smart home.
Passwords for humans
If you’ve listened to the Checklist before, you know that the importance of good passwords is a favorite theme of ours — because it’s such a fundamental aspect of digital security and privacy.
This week, we sat down to talk with Bart Busschots, creator of xkpasswd, a web-based tool that helps users generate strong, unique passwords that are actually easy …
May 7, 2020 •
16 min read
SecurityThis week, we’ll highlight some big decisions about mobile contact tracing from around the world — and we’ll also let you know what’s going on over at Apple (spoiler: get ready to update iOS).
April 30, 2020 •
7 min read