INTRODUCTION Perhaps in no field do innovation and privacy collide as dramatically as healthcare. Treatments, medications, therapies — these might be the most intimate details of a person’s life, secrets that need safekeeping. At the same time, the wonders of modern medicine and the power of artificial intelligence promise to unlock [Keep reading]
Romance scams cost Americans $500 million each year, the FBI says. And the crime is soaring fast. Lonely people isolated at home during the pandemic are an attractive target for thee criminals. We’re currently exploring this awful phenomenon in a two-part podcast series at AARP’s The Perfect Scam. In last [Keep reading]
INTRODUCTION Americans have become less trusting in recent decades, plenty of surveys seem to agree. Yet trust is a funny thing. People say they don’t trust tech companies, particularly social media companies, but they hungrily gobble up Tweets and Facebook updates all same. Still, lack of trust in … seemingly everything…is hurting us, a [Keep reading]
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Your Evil Twin – Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic. At the time, many consumers hadn’t even heard of identity theft. Criminal imposters were just getting started. Today, it feels like ID theft is everywhere, hitting millions of consumers every year, roughly [Keep reading]
“De-platforming.” That’s the word of the week in tech-land, and it’s about time. After the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a criminal mob on Wednesday, a host of companies have cut off President Trump’s digital air supply. His Tweets and Facebook posts fell first; next came second-order effects, [Keep reading]
A group of federal agencies including the FBI and NSA said this week that the massive SolarWinds hack attack discovered late last year was “likely Russian in origin,” in a rate statement of attribution. The agencies have been “working non-stop” to gather evidence and insight into the cyberattack, which potentially [Keep reading]
Microsoft’s map of organizations hit by the SolarWinds hack. I keep hearing this from people I respect: It’s hard to overstate how serious the SolarWinds hack is. So, yes, it seems to be the Big One. I suspect we’ll be hearing about the damage for years. This piece is a [Keep reading]
Downdetector.com chart It’s been a bad few days for the Internet. Google, Amazon, security firm FireEye, and several federal agencies — like the Department of Commerce — have all suffered major incidents or outages recently. The government attack, involving widely-used management software named Solar Winds, gave hackers access to critical [Keep reading]
This report really is worth reading “After hearing that Facebook is saying that posting the Lord’s Prayer goes against their policies, I’m asking all Christians please post it. Our Father, who art in Heaven…” Someone posted this obvious falsehood on Facebook recently, and it ended up on my wall. Soon [Keep reading]
Georgia suffered major voting machine malfunctions, according to Election Integrity Foundation Chairman Harri Hursti. Voting machines were “incorrectly loaded,” according to WSB-TV. Hursti said there were a variety of malfunctions. In Spalding County, there was “100 percent failure in the beginning,” Hursti said. “People came ready to wait but…..clearly, they [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan