We’re bringing you a WWDC outtake: an off-the-cuff, practically off-mic discussion of WWDCs past — as well as the roles Apple execs play.

TikTok. 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 — …

This week, we dive a bit deeper into some WWDC20 announcements with developer Brett Terpstra

In 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.

On 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.

The 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.

This week’s Checklist is all about staying safe in an unsafe world.

This 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!

This week, we’ll bring you up to speed on Big Tech’s efforts to fight Covid-19.

This 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 …

This 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 …

This 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).

This week, a special guest talks about the Apple/Google contact tracing tool (and the one proposed by France and Germany), plus we’ll share an important warning about a new text messaging scam.

This week, Ken looks at the Apple/Google team-up on contact tracing, Apple’s use of Maps data to fight the spread of COVID-19, and a story about brand phishing that’s not coronavirus related. Mostly.

Apple has released updates for a number of apps and OSes over the past couple of weeks. In this Checklist, we’ll take you through the most important of these — covering new features as well as security fixes.

The Checklist is taking a break this week, but with all that’s going on in the world, and with so many new changes to the way we live and work, we wanted to point you to some resources that can help keep you safe and happy.