Citizenlab details an "elaborate phishing campaign" against Iranian expats and activists, combining phone-calls from fake Reuters reporters, mostly convincing Google Docs login-screens, and a sophisticated attempt to do a "real-time man-in-the-middle attack" against Google's two-factor authentication. Read the rest
My latest Guardian column looks at the fiction and reality of "Internet Utopianism," and the effect that a belief in the transformative power of the Internet has had on movements, companies, and norms. Read the rest
My latest Guardian column, Can anything curb the dominance of the internet's big guns? points out that everything governments do to tame the online giants has no effect on them -- but makes it nearly impossible for new companies to compete with them. Read the rest
A letterpress Valentine from Paperwheel ($6.75). (via Dan Hon) Read the rest
A year ago, the news that the world's biggest video site was abandoning proprietary software would have been incredible, but thanks to the World Wide Web Consortium's Netflix-driven DRM work, this changes very little. Read the rest
Google's dropped its dumbass Real Names policy for social media, but don't worry, the adorable little fella found a welcome home in China, where bloggers and other social media users are now prohibited from using aliases or parody names. Read the rest
Google's made some major announcements about End-to-End, their implementation of the best-of-breed email encryption tool PGP, which they're refactoring as a way of encrypting webmail so that neither they nor the spy-services can read it in transit or at rest. Read the rest
The 2007 project to bring emoji to Android -- and thence to the Web -- involved an epic battle over the inclusion of the much-loved "pile of poop" emoji, whose significance to the Japanese market was poorly understood by various reactionary elements at Google. Read the rest
Once you've successfully infected your victim's computer with malware, you want to be able to send it orders -- so you spawn an invisible Internet Explorer window, login to an anonymous Gmail account, and check in the Drafts folder for secret orders. Read the rest
They're licensed CC-BY-SA and designed for use in mobile apps and other interactive stuff -- there's 750 in all! It's part of Google's Material Design project. Read the rest
Right now, Google blocks "forgotten" articles on EU versions of its site. Read the rest
The sudden reversal of Google's years-long insistence on "real names" for G+ users came after a long fight about the biases inherent in such a policy. Read the rest
The offices of Bornstein and Bornstein are notorious for running "boot camps" advising San Francisco landlords on legal loopholes for evicting long-term tenants so they can rent to the high-flying tech sector. Read the rest
After years of criticism, Google Plus has finally dropped its controversial, Facebook-alike "Real Names" policy. Read the rest
The controversial "right to be forgotten" European court ruling has Google removing embarrassing (and worse) search results from search-results served in the EU. Read the rest
Parisa Tabriz 's title at Google is "Security Princess" -- meaning that she runs the adversarial internal team tasked with continuously testing and probing Google's security to find flaws before the enemy does. Read the rest
