Either this man is really good at doing crimes or Iceland is really bad at security. Authorities say a man who is suspected of being the mastermind behind the theft of £1.4 million worth of bitcoin mining equipment has escaped the Icelandic prison where he was being held. What’s more, he allegedly hopped a flight on the same plane as the Icelandic Prime Minister. Read More >>

The Russian government ordered the Telegram messaging app be banned last week due to its failure to turn over encryption keys to authorities. But as the app’s founder promised, Telegram is still working. Now, Russia is breaking the internet in the country by blocking millions of IP addresses in a scattershot attempt to quash the service. Read More >>

Cambridge Analytica, the disgraced data firm that guided the Trump campaign’s digital strategy and sparked Facebook’s latest troubles, reportedly wanted to branch out into shadier business: digital currencies. According to a former Cambridge employee, the planned token was aimed at giving people more control over their personal data. Read More >>

Among the unanswered questions at Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional hearings last week, the CEO was a bit stumped when asked if he would be willing to change Facebook’s business model in order to protect users’ privacy. Facebook’s data collection has received a lot of attention from a security perspective, but a new report illustrates why we should be just as concerned about how it uses that data to influence our behaviour. Read More >>

Ian Balina, a popular cryptocurrency evangelist, was in the midst of a standard livestream on his YouTube channel on Sunday night when a viewer asked, “Ian, did you know that somebody transferred all your tokens from your account?” With $2 million (£1.4 million) worth of cryptocurrency gone from his wallet, Balina claims he was hacked. But the strangeness of the situation has the community questioning his story. Read More >>

On Friday a court ruled that Telegram should be blocked inside Russia due to its failure to turn over its encryption keys. In 2016, Russia passed “anti-terror laws” that require messaging services give authorities the ability to decrypt communications. Telegram founder Pavel Durov has defied the order and now says he has a workaround. Read More >>

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat for 10 hours of questioning before US House and Senate committees this week. Most of his answers were versions of those already found in official Facebook statements. But when he received a tough question, rather than answer on the spot, he vowed to get to the bottom of it. We’ve made a simple worksheet to help him remember all the points his team needs to follow up on. Read More >>

Tyler Barris is being held by police on charges of involuntary manslaughter after he allegedly placed a phony emergency call that resulted in the death of another man. But Barris reportedly managed to get access to the internet and proceeded to hop on Twitter threatening to “swat” again and proclaiming himself an “eGod.” Read More >>

Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify before the US Congress this week as his apology tour rolls on, but the Facebook CEO’s newfound humility has done little stem the flood of criticism hitting his company. The latest high-profile critic to jump into the fray is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Read More >>

In a change-up that acknowledges the reality of the business it’s in, the MPAA has included a breakdown of the home entertainment market in its latest annual box office report. Topping both the DVD/Blu-ray and digital rentals charts for 2017 in the US is Ben Affleck’s weird-ass action hero/math savant flick The Accountant. Read More >>

Netflix raised eyebrows with the £100 million budget it handed over to Martin Scorsese recently, but according to a Reuters report, it’s looking to pay out a lot more for some billboard real estate. The move could be seen as an escalation of its cold war with Hollywood. Read More >>

Facebook’s hypocritical protection of its executives’ privacy while hanging everyone else out to dry was highlighted on Thursday night when it confirmed Mark Zuckerberg has the ability to delete Messenger communications from other peoples’ inboxes. Now, Facebook is apparently going to give everyone that option. Read More >>

Since the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal first broke last month, Facebook has tried out a number of PR strategies to address the growing outcry. At this point, the social media company is just going for broke, telling the public it should just assume that “most” of the 2.2 billion Facebook users have probably had their public data scraped by “malicious actors.” That’s huge news. But it doesn’t feel huge—if you managed to pick up that detail at all. Read More >>

“Look, this is bad,” Mark Zuckerberg told reporters during an impromptu conference call on Wednesday. The Facebook CEO spent much of the time taking responsibility for the privacy scandals that have consumed his company recently, but he also pointed out that he’s been the victim of fake news. Contrary to a recent Reuters report, he said, new controls for privacy settings required by European law will roll out globally. Read More >>

BlackBerry is gradually feeling out its new niche as a veritable patent troll. Following a complaint it filed against Facebook last month, the company has filed fresh litigation against Snap, creator of Snapchat, for allegedly infringing its messaging patents. Read More >>