Kaveh Waddell

Despite broad efforts to crack down on misinformation ahead of the 2020 election, the primary season so far has been chock full of deceptive messages and misleading information.  More sophisticated tactics that have emerged since 2016 threaten to derail the democratic process by further polluting online debate. And the seemingly unending influx of fakery could plant enough suspicion and cynicism to throw an otherwise legitimate election into question. "Far more people have gotten the idea that you can throw a U.S.

For all the talk of antitrust investigations, the bigger threat to tech platforms like Google and Facebook is an intensifying call from Congress to revamp a law that shields them and other web companies from legal liability for users' posts. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff joined a group of policymakers calling to reconsider the legal protections afforded to tech platforms.

An interview with Francine Berman, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a longtime expert on computer infrastructure.

In October, when malware called Mirai took over poorly secured webcams and DVRs, and used them to disrupt internet access across the United States, I wondered who was responsible. Not who actually coded the malware, or who unleashed it on an essential piece of the internet’s infrastructure—instead, I wanted to know if anybody could be held legally responsible. Could the unsecure devices’ manufacturers be liable for the damage their products? Right now, in this early stage of connected devices’ slow invasion into our daily lives, there’s no clear answer to that question. That’s because there’s no real legal framework that would hold manufacturers responsible for critical failures that harm others. As is often the case, the technology has developed far faster than policies and regulations.

Pairs of Android apps installed on the same smartphone have ways of colluding to extract information about the phone’s user, which can be difficult to detect. Security researchers don’t have much trouble figuring out if a single app is gathering sensitive data and secretly sending it off to a server somewhere. But when two apps team up, neither may show definitive signs of thievery alone. And because of an enormous number of possible app combinations, testing for app collusions is a herculean task. A study released recently developed a new way to tackle this problem—and found more than 20,000 app pairings that leak data.

When you cross into or out of the United States, whether in a car or at an airport, you enter a special zone where federal agents have unusual powers to search your belongings—powers they don’t have elsewhere in the country. The high standard set by the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches, is lowered, and the Fifth Amendment, which guards against self-incrimination and prevents the government from demanding computer passwords or smartphone PINs, is rendered less effective. The rules around what information can be retained after Customs and Border Protection inspections—and for how long—aren’t entirely clear-cut.

Civil conversation in the comment sections of news sites can be hard to come by these days. Whatever intelligent observations do lurk there are often drowned out by obscenities, ad-hominem attacks, and off-topic rants. Some sites, like the one you’re reading, hide the comments section behind a link at the bottom of each article; many others have abolished theirs completely. For those outlets who can’t hire 14 full-time moderators to comb through roughly 11,000 comments a day, help is on the way. Jigsaw, the Google-owned technology incubator, released a tool that uses machine-learning algorithms to separate out the worst comments that people leave online.

The tool, called Perspective, learned from the best: It analyzed the Times moderators’ decisions as they triaged reader comments, and used that data to train itself to identify harmful speech. The training materials also included hundreds of thousands of comments on Wikipedia, evaluated by thousands of different moderators.

A US-born scientist was detained at the Houston (TX) airport until he gave customs agents the passcode to his work-issued device.

Less than a month before he was elected president, Donald Trump promised to make cybersecurity “an immediate and top priority for my administration.” He had talked about technology often on the campaign trail—mostly to attack Hillary Clinton for using a private e-mail server when she was Secretary of State. But less than two weeks into his presidency, it’s Trump and his team who have struggled to plug important security holes, some of which are reminiscent of Clinton’s troubles. Rather than sparking an uproar, the problems have largely been buried the by other changes and crises of the Trump administration’s first days. But even without the distracting firehose of executive orders, announcements, and tweets, half of America wouldn’t blink at the new president’s computer-security shortcomings. That’s because cybersecurity, like just about everything else, has become burdened with political baggage.

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan 27 issuing a temporary ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, it went into effect immediately. The order had immediate consequences for thousands of people. But beyond harming long-term US residents, their families, their education, and their work, the executive order could cause long-lasting shockwaves in the business world—and especially in the technology sector.

Computer-related jobs are the top source of new wages in the US, according to analyses from Code.org, a nonprofit organization that advocates for more access to computer-science education. But there aren’t enough skilled American workers to fill open tech jobs in the US: There are more than 500,000 open computing jobs, but only about 43,000 Americans graduate from college with computer-science degrees every year. That’s a problem that H-1B visas—non-immigrant visas that allow high-skilled foreign workers to be employed, temporarily, by American companies—are designed to solve. A forthcoming executive order will likely change the rules to make it harder for companies to grant foreign workers H-1B visas.

There’s a category of often-misleading news sources that seems to have escaped the notice of tech companies: state-sponsored outlets like RT, a TV network and online news website that’s funded by the Russian government. As my colleagues Julia Ioffe and Rosie Gray wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review and BuzzFeed, respectively, RT—formerly known as Russia Today—routinely shapes its coverage portray Russia in the best possible light, and to make the West, and especially the United States, look bad. RT stories regularly appear toward the top of Google search results.