Police monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals, murders, and extortion plots.

French authorities had penetrated the Encrochat network, leveraged that access to install a technical tool in what appears to be a mass hacking operation, and had been quietly reading the users' communications for months.

This was malware on the Encrochat device itself, meaning that it could potentially read the messages written and stored on the device before they were encrypted and sent over the internet, a devastating finding for a company whose main mandate is to protect the content of communications for highly sensitive clients.

Brand-new customers can expect to pay $65/mo for the service from here on out, while existing customers will see the price jump from $50 to $65 on their July bill.

The other family of streaming and TV services to see a price hike today comes from AT&T, whose AT&T TV (a streaming-only product with rates and plans that resemble standard cable contracts) and DirecTV (a standard satellite-TV product) are each seeing their new-customer rates jump.

These price spikes come less than three months after AT&T disclosed a massive 890,000 drop in premium TV service subscribers.

India's Ministry of Information Technology said it was banning the 59 Chinese apps after receiving "many complaints from various sources" about apps that were "stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorised manner".

"The compilation of these data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India, which ultimately impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India, is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures," the ministry said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will change the way it handles rule-breaking speech from high-profile politicians in the future amid an advertising boycott that has drawn participation from large firms across several sectors.

"A handful of times a year, we leave up content that would otherwise violate our policies if the public interest value outweighs the risk of harm," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook Live video and accompanying post, repeating his usual argument that everyone should be able to read whatever a politician chooses to say on the platform.

There will be no automatic change for existing accounts and people who already have location history turned on in their Google settings, but the company plans to inform existing users of the option to set up auto-delete after three to 18 months, he said. People also have the option to turn the setting off.

The change comes after growing scrutiny of the amount of data that tech companies such as Google collect and retain. Personal data helps to fuel Google’s lucrative advertising business by allowing marketers to better target their ads.

The researchers’ gold-scrubber is based on an organic compound called a porphyrin. Linked together in a polymer, it possesses lots and lots of little pores that, energetically, want to host a metal atom.

The researchers say the polymer costs about $5 per gram to produce, and that gram can capture $64 in gold. And since the polymer can be reused, it would be considerably cheaper than that over time, adding little to the overall cost of a recycling operation.

We found that many apps quietly read any text found in the pasteboard every time the app is opened. Text left in the pasteboard could be as simple as a shopping list, or could be something more sensitive: passwords, account numbers, etc.

We have investigated many popular apps in the App Store and found that they frequently access the pasteboard without the user being aware. Our investigation confirms that many popular apps read the text content of the pasteboard. However, it is not clear what the apps do with the data. To prevent apps from exploiting the pasteboard, Apple must act.

We identified an executable file displaying highly unusual behavior and sending system information to a suspicious Chinese domain. Discussions with our client revealed that this was part of their bank’s required tax software.

Basically, it was a wide-open door into the network with SYSTEM level privileges and connected to a command and control server completely separate from the tax software’s network infrastructure.

We believe that every corporation operating in China or using the Aisino Intelligent Tax Software should consider this incident a potential threat and should engage in threat hunting, containment, and remediation countermeasures, as outlined in our technical report.

Comcast is partnering with Mozilla to deploy encrypted DNS lookups on the Firefox browser, the companies announced today. Comcast's version of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) will be turned on by default for Firefox users on Comcast's broadband network, but people will be able to switch to other options like Cloudflare and NextDNS.

Firefox CTO Eric Rescorla said that "bringing ISPs into the TRR program helps us protect user privacy online without disrupting existing user experiences," and that Mozilla hopes today's news "sets a precedent for further cooperation between browsers and ISPs."

Earlier this month, the CEO of domain registrar Namecheap Richard Kirkendall warned “Facebook is fighting for the blanket right to access your information,” and detailed efforts behind the scenes at DNS overseer ICANN to force through Facebook’s interpretation of privacy laws to slurp data on domain holders.

Facebook has been particularly aggressive, filing tens of thousands of requests for data on domains that are often only tangentially related to its trademarks and insisting its rights are being infringed. When those requests have been rebuffed, Facebook has then sued the companies that people used to register the names, claiming trademark infringement and demanding $100,000 in compensation.

But so far at least, the antisocial network – whose entire business is built on grabbing, storing and monetizing this kind of data – is determined to keep pushing its claims, even if it delays the creation of a new system for everyone else.