Episode #293: Edwin Kwan: Messenger and Facebook: Default End to End Encryption; Hillary Coover: Campaign Targets Taiwan Elections with Stolen Identities and Disinformation; Katy Craig: North Korea’s Lazarus Still Exploiting Log4j; Marcel Brown: This Day in Tech History

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The stories we’re covering today.

Marcel Brown: December 16, 2016. After a long delay, Apple finally releases their new wireless earbuds, the Apple AirPods. Within two years, they became Apple's most popular accessory, and today are some of the most popular and well recognized earbuds in the market.

Hillary Coover: A covert campaign dating back to May 2022 is distorting conversations about Taiwan's upcoming elections. The Graphika report exposes hundreds of fake social media accounts on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. While the perpetrators remain unidentified, the operation favored a pro-China political party in Taiwan, while criticizing its main rival.

Katy Craig: Two years after the infamous Log4j vulnerability came to light, North Korean hackers are still exploiting this flaw in widespread cyberattacks. These attacks fall under the wide-reaching activities of the Lazarus umbrella, a term for the various North Korean government hacking operations.

Edwin Kwan: Meta has announced the rollout of default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls on Messenger and Facebook. The rollout will take several months to complete globally, prompting users to set up recovery methods when their chats are upgraded.