Web browsers have become the equivalent of safe deposit boxes, digital spaces where we stuff our personal information and expect it to be kept safe. While the websites that harbor sensitive data generally swear that this information is private and protected, a detailed report by cybersecurity researcher Sam Jadali, explained in depth by Dan Goodin at Ars Technica, found that eight browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox were harvesting personal data from millions of people, unbeknownst to both them and to the makers of those browsers.

The House of Representatives has instructed the Pentagon to disclose whether it used ticks to infect the American public with Lyme disease between 1950 and 1975. The allegation comes from Chris Smith, the Republican representative for New Jersey. A long-standing campaigner on Lyme disease, Smith says the claims are from a new book about the illness and the man who discovered it – a bioweapons scientist called Willy Burgdofer.

The defenders of Sen. Al Franken are perhaps the single most embarrassing group of allegedly progressive people in the Democratic coalition. Franken, who resigned from the Senate in January 2018, was accused by eight different women of sexual impropriety. Most of these accusations were both serious and credible, in that the women making them were mostly liberals who had no apparent reason to lie about Franken's behavior toward them. Despite this, Franken's defenders are married to the delusional belief that it's all just a frame-up and that if he'd had "due process" in the form of a Senate ethics investigation (run by Republicans, who control that chamber) he would have somehow managed to prove this.