You will recall Collection #1, the big aggregation of old breaches. Collections #2 through #5 are now in circulation, and WIRED reports that the five datasets now include some 2.2 billion records. It's big, to be sure, but how consequential this sort of information will prove remains to be seen.

Google has joined Facebook in acknowledging that it paid users to allow access to their phones, TechCrunch says. Mountain View said yesterday that it was stopping the practice. 

Both Google's and Facebook's pay-for-access plans are attracting a great deal of hostile scrutiny, NPR reports. As Fortune notes, Apple may be Facebook's toughest regulator). The Washington Post, the Telegraph, and WIRED all observe that, public expressions of contrition aside, Facebook seems to be shrugging off its string of bad news, at least in terms of the results it reports, but Big Tech as a whole is increasingly looking like the steel industry near the end of the Gilded Age.

With information operations, lies usually receive a bodyguard of truth. Witness the story, as reported by the Washington Post, of Russian claims that Special Counsel Mueller's office has been hacked. That's the lie. The truth that guards it is a set of documents involving the Special Counsel's case against a Russian firm: genuine documents that were obtained through regular legal disclosure, not by hacking.

The US Justice Department is preparing to disrupt North Korea's Joanap botnet.

New York's Attorney General is investigating Apple for its allegedly tardy reaction to the FaceTime bug.