Rope-a-dope. The U.S. Justice Department charged seven Russian military intelligence officers with a number of hacking-related crimes on Thursday. The Russian spies allegedly ran a disinformation campaign—including wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering—that targeted hundreds of athletes and anti-doping officials in retaliation for the exposure of a Russian state-sponsored doping program. “All of this was done to undermine those organizations’ efforts to ensure the integrity of the Olympic and other games,” said Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division John Demers at a news conference.
A piece of the puzzle. Jigsaw, an Alphabet unit that builds security, privacy, and anti-censorship tools, has released a new app called Intra. The app is designed to block DNS manipulation attacks, a censorship tactic that certain nation-states, like Venezuela and Turkey, have used to intercept and block or redirect website visits by their populations. Jigsaw said the tool will be embedded by default into the next version of Google’s mobile operating system, Android Pie.
No fly zone. Google CEO Sundar Pichai paid a quiet visit to the Pentagon following the tech giant’s decision not to renew a contract supplying AI tech to a military program, The Washington Post reports. Pichai supposedly sought to smooth over tensions after his company backed out of the defense deal, which involved analyzing video captured by drones. Thousands of employees had objected to the program, dubbed Project Maven.
Please re-enter password. California has signed into a law a bill that will require manufacturers of Internet-connected devices to create unique passwords for each device made or sold in the state. In other words, manufacturers of said devices can no longer use generic, pre-programmed passwords like “admin” or “password” to secure their products. If they do, customers have the right to sue for damages.
From masterpiece to master pieces.
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