Julian Assange was back in the news this week, but so was a group called Distributed Denial of Secrets that has in many ways taken up the WikiLeaks mantle. Over the last year and a half, DDoSecrets has released troves of sensitive leaked data from anonymous contributors. And this week it published a dump called BlueLeaks—269 gigabytes of police files, largely from centralized “fusion centers,” that included law enforcement emails, audio recordings, and memos.
At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple announced that it will take more aggressive steps in Safari and iOS 14 overall to stop digital ad tracking and protect user privacy. Meanwhile, Google said on Wednesday that after much criticism it will now default to deleting your data, like “Web and App Activity” and location information, after 18 months instead of storing it indefinitely. The default will only show up on new Google accounts, though, or accounts that enable retention for the first time. Most current Google users will still need to manually set 18-month or three-month auto-delete.
This week we looked at a class of attacks that use “side channels” for clever and unexpected hacking. We walked through the process of bringing your old Signal messages with you to a new phone. And just to make you feel a little better about the chaos in your email inbox, we caught up with an engineer who is always drowning in messages meant for other people, thanks to an address he created 16 years ago that turned out to be boobytrapped.
And there’s more. Every Saturday we round up the security and privacy stories that we didn’t break or report on in depth but think you should know about. Click on the headlines to read them, and stay safe out there.
The United States Department of Justice announced a superseding indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday that exp