167. Mic Drop: TikTok’s day in Appeals Court

TikTok’s lawyers were in a U.S. Court of Appeals this week trying to push back against a law that requires the popular video app to sell its American subsidiary to a non-Chinese owner or be banished from app stores. Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and expert in lawfare, explains what’s at stake.

TikTok took down Esma Memtimin’s posts for allegedly violating the platform’s community rules even though her videos were about stickers and current events. A recent study from Rutgers University suggests Memtimin isn’t alone — when researchers compared TikTok’s content with other similar platforms there is a mysterious dearth of posts about subjects Beijing considers hot button issues.

The Russian-speaking cyber gang, FIN7, has fooled red team hackers into doing their dirty work by masquerading as legitimate cybersecurity companies just looking for talent. Silent Push’s Zach Edwards talks about the scam.

Investigators have been chasing the Russian-speaking cyber gang for years — and they’ve stayed just one step ahead. Threat researcher Zach Edwards lays out why bringing gangs like this to justice has always been so hard.

Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership may have smashed TVs in the 1990s, but these days their embracing slickly-produced videos and social media influencers to try to rehab their image abroad. Afghan anthropologist Omar Sharifi unpacks whether its working.

Technology has changed the way countries wage war, and today, we look at an app in Afghanistan that wanted to change the way people on the ground experienced it.

New legislation is seeking to designate some ransomware attacks as acts of terror. Former FBI agent John Riggi talks about the proposal and how it might change the battle against ransomware gangs.

Sky Lakes Medical Center in south central Oregon never imagined it could be on the receiving end of a ransomware attack. Then Ryuk put them in the crosshairs.

Just a stone’s throw from the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, the National Cryptologic Museum displays dozens of rarely seen code breaking machines that, quite literally, changed the course of history. We take a tour and chat with the museum’s affable director, Vince Houghton.

For years now, the Internet has trafficked in things that are more mean than fun. Disinformation, online bullying, and a general malaise are all over social media. We talk to former Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director Renee Diresta about her new book “Invisible Rulers” and ask why, ahead of the DNC Convention, the Dems’ new unbearable lightness has gone so viral.