Last weekend, during and in the aftermath of a contentious presidential election, the country of Belarus effectively shut off access to most of the internet for its 9.5 million citizens. It's a tactic that has become increasingly popular among authoritarian regimes, whether it's a total blackout like Belarus' or more targeted censorship of specific apps like Telegram and WhatsApp. The outage lasted around three days, although some sites remain blocked.
Elsewhere, we took a look at an Alexa bug that could have let a hacker access your entire voice history. It's patched now, but it's a good reminder to be careful what you say around your voice assistant. Covid-19 scams are so abundant that even ISIS allegedly got in on the grift with a site called FaceMaskCenter.com. And flaws in Qualcomm's ubiquitous Snapdragon chips put over a billion Android devices at risk. A fix has been issued, but those can take some time to trickle down to individual users.
Speaking of flaws, mistakes in open-source libraries could have exposed cryptocurrency exchanges to denial-of-service attacks or worse. A British AI tool intended to predict violent crime turned out not to work as advertised. And we looked at the increasingly sophisticated methods ATM hackers have used for "jackpotting," which is when they make the money machine go brrrrr.
We continued our Dark Patterns
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