Weaponized Ticks | Evolution of a Russian Troll | Facebook & 3D-printed Guns, and more

Privacy Concerns Over Viral Photo Apps Are Totally Valid. But They’re Also Often Overblown. (Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox)
The panic about FaceApp’s old-person filter isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just tinged with xenophobia and devoid of context.
Oakland to become the third U.S. city to ban facial recognition

Active Chinese Hacking Campaign Targeted Diplomats from Slovakia, South America (Jeff Stone, Cyberscoop)
Suspected Chinese hackers who have haunted military and government targets for a generation have updated their malicious software tools to target diplomatic missions.

Facebook Quietly Relaxed Its Ban on Sharing Blueprints for 3D-printed Guns (The Trace)
Earlier this month, the social media giant revised an 11-month-old policy and will now allow “legitimate” gun dealers — both brick-and-mortar and online — to offer instructions for printing untraceable guns in states where they’re legal. The platform still bans private individuals from sharing such files.

The Conspiracy Theory That’s Got a Congressman Demanding a Probe into Weaponized Ticks (Kelly Vinett, Vice)
A New Jersey congressman is asking the Pentagon to finally investigate a decades-old conspiracy that the government weaponized ticks — and ended up creating Lyme disease.
Republican Rep. Chris Smith presented an amendment calling for the Department of Defense’s Inspector General to probe whether the military “experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.”
Smith’s amendment came after he read Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, by Stanford University-based science writer Kris Newby. In the book’s introduction, she describes the effect of Lyme as “an American Chernobyl.”
“I think [the congressman’s] state is at ground zero of this outbreak and his constituency has been impacted severely. I hope people can understand weaponized ticks are bad and we need to know what happened at the height of the Cold War bioweapons program,” Newby told VICE News.
New Jersey reported 5,092 cases in 2017, the most it’s seen in two decades.
But experts say the probe won’t amount to anything because the conspiracy doesn’t hold up to science.
“There’s evidence in the U.S. that Lyme disease was here before Columbus came around,” Phil Baker, executive director for the American Lyme Disease Foundation, told VICE News. Plus, Lyme disease isn’t life-threatening, so it’s not a good candidate for a biological weapon, he said. Fatigue and flu-like symptoms are the most common warning signs of Lyme, though it can cause facial paralysis, arthritis, fever and rash without antibiotics.
“Both the tick and the bacterium that causes Lyme disease are ancient creatures,” said Richard Ostfeld, a Ph.D. in disease ecology at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, to VICE News.
“There is strong scientific evidence that the present-day forms of the [Lyme disease] bacterium diverged from a common ancestor at least 60,000 years ago,” said Ostfeld. Even a 5,300-year-old mummy discovered in the Eastern Alps had traces of Lyme disease in his DNA.