This week we looked inward for change; if you ever wondered what it’s like to be a national technology and culture magazine that loses $100,000 in Bitcoin, have we got a story for you[1]. If you'd rather an even wilder tale from around the globe, please read about how Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko faked his own death[2], and why some of his colleagues have cried foul.
In other international news, Papua New Guinea threatened to ban Facebook[3] for a month for seemingly spurious reasons, concerning locals who rely on the service. Closer to home, inmates in San Quentin built their own search engine[4], for use exclusively in a prison-approved coding program.
Government agencies are even less prepared for cyberattacks[5] than you thought. Garrett Graff reviewed former director of national intelligence James Clapper's new book[6], and charted his path to becoming one of President Donald Trump's most vocal critics. And please enjoy these very good pups getting brain scans[7] to see if they'd be good bomb-sniffers. No, really!
But wait, there's more. As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
A Very Bad Steam Vulnerability Gets Patched After 10 Years[8]
Vulnerabilities happen. But not many of them persist unnoticed as long as a remote code execution flaw that was recently discovered in online gaming platform Steam. For 10 years, all it would take to run malicious code on one a Steam-connected device was sending some bad packets. Security researcher Tom Court, who identified the issue, notes that a security upgrade Valve implemented in July of