Google is working on a brand new design for the web version of Gmail. Yesterday, I published screenshots of the new design. TechCrunch’s tipster Chaim also discovered an interesting new feature in the new Gmail. You’ll soon be able to send expiring emails.

Working on an email service is hard as you have to be compatible with all sorts of email providers and email clients. But it doesn’t seem to be stopping Google as the company is now evolving beyond the simple POP3/IMAP/SMTP protocols. Based on those screenshots, expiring emails work pretty much like expiring emails in ProtonMail. After some time, the email becomes unreadable.

Apple Inc. warned employees to stop leaking internal information on future plans and raised the specter of potential legal action and criminal charges, one of the most-aggressive moves by the world’s largest technology company to control information about its activities.

The Cupertino, California-based company said in a lengthy memo posted to its internal blog that it "caught 29 leakers," last year and noted that 12 of those were arrested. "These people not only lose their jobs, they can face extreme difficulty finding employment elsewhere," Apple added. The company declined to comment on Friday. 

Kryptos Logic, the cyber-security firm running the main WannaCry sinkhole, announced today plans to allow organizations access to some of the WannaCry sinkhole data.

The security firm cites recurring WannaCry ransomware infections that are still taking place at various companies, even eleven months after the first WannaCry outbreak in May 2017. For example, Boeing,  Connecticut state agencies, Honda, and Victoria state police suffered WannaCry infections long after Kryptos Logic researcher Marcus "MalwareTech" Hutchins registered the WannaCry killswitch domain, effectively stopping the global outbreak on May 12, last year.

VirnetX Holding Corp. won $502.6 million against Apple Inc. after a federal jury in Texas said the maker of iPhones was infringing patents for secure communications, the latest twist in a dispute now in its eighth year.

VirnetX’s stock rose as much as 44 percent on the news in after hours trading. The company closed at $4.10 per share on Tuesday. Apple’s stock has seen little change on the news given that the $502.6 million award is minuscule compared to the company’s profits. The company generated $20 billion profit in the first quarter, the company said in February. 

Vevo’s YouTube account appears to have fallen victim to hackers today, as a number of high-profile music videos have been defaced. The most-viewed YouTube video of all time, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” disappeared from YouTube briefly after being defaced by hackers.

The video’s image was altered and replaced with a masked gang holding guns (from Netflix show Casa de Papel), and the description was changed by hackers calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi’sh. Lots of other popular music videos have also defaced. 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”

It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3. The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed.

The Trump administration has said it wants to start collecting the social media history of nearly everyone seeking a visa to enter the US.

The proposal, which comes from the state department, would require most visa applicants to give details of their Facebook and Twitter accounts. They would have to disclose all social media identities used in the past five years. About 14.7 million people a year would be affected by the proposals. The information would be used to identify and vet those seeking both immigrant and non-immigrant visas. Applicants would also be asked for five years of their telephone numbers, email addresses and travel history. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected Apple CEO Tim Cook’s critique of his company’s business model, which Cook characterized as a scheme to monetize customers, calling it “glib” and “not at all aligned with the truth.”

“I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you,” Zuckerberg told Vox co-founder Ezra Klein on his podcast. “Because that sounds ridiculous to me.” In an interview with Klein, Zuckerberg described Cook’s assessment that Apple has a sounder business model.

Like most electronic stuff, robots are not immune to cybercriminals. Last year, researchers at IOActive detected as many as 50 vulnerabilities in robots developed by the Japanese firm SoftBank. They informed the manufacturer but never heard back. So this year at the Security Analyst Summit 2018, they decided to demonstrate what can happen.

Robots are all around us, toiling away in factories and warehouses, busting a gut in landfills, and even working in hospitals. For its part, SoftBank Robotics supplies electronic helpers to work with people. The NAO model introduces school kids and students to programming and robotics, and it also teaches children with autism. 

Facebook was recently hit by a huge scandal. According to media reports, data on the “likes” of 50 million Facebook users was harvested by the firm Cambridge Analytica and used for targeted political advertising. Facebook’s own behavior of added fuel to the fire of public outrage.

As a result, the company’s capitalization shed tens of billions of dollars, and a number of Twitter activists launched the #DeleteFacebook campaign. In our opinion, first, the action comes a bit late —the horse has well and truly bolted — and second, the incident underscores yet again people’s dependence on modern technology and vulnerability to it.