Stay secure out there folks
… or why it’s useless to have the most secure crypto system in the world, when using non-free and untrustworthy tools and libraries to implement it. tl;dr: There is a “backdoor” in Signal nobody cares about, only Google can use it. – ~ larma/blog
Lawyers suck at infosec. Expensive lawyers also suck at infosec. They’re just more expensive. The Surveillance Working Group of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) apparently want lawyers to suck less (at infosec) hence has issued a Guidance (.pdf - EN)1 on improving the IT security of lawyers against unlawful surveillance in May 2016. ...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is driven by a vision of “connecting the world” and, though he has said a compromise is necessary in the case of countries like China where free speech is restricted, it is hard to see how that vision fits with kowtowing to a law that has gotten Thai people jailed for Facebook comments, or even merely receiving a message on the social network. Facebook is blocking content from a number of users following an apparent request from the government. Thailand’s lèse-majesté law prevents criticism of the country’s royal family, and it looks like it is being used to suppress postings from a number of high-profile users who are writing about the transition to a new king, including journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall. His 2014 book on the Thai royal family was banned and branded a “danger to national security and peaceful and orderly society.” ...
“If an intelligence law is not well-conceived and rational, it could easily become a formidable weapon of repression. An intelligence law should not only protect citizens against terrorism, but also against the State. We in France are doing neither. There is a total absence of control in this law.” – Marc Trévidic, former chief terrorism investigator for the French judicial system In recent months, and in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks across Europe, Germany, France and the United Kingdom — Europe’s biggest superpowers — have passed laws granting their surveillance agencies virtually unfettered power to conduct bulk interception of communications across Europe and beyond, with limited to no effective oversight or procedural safeguards from abuse. ...
tl;dr: delete Your Instagram account… A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of use ‘in plain English’ so kids would know their privacy rights – Amy B. Wang // Abstract // Instagram’s terms of use in total run at least seven printed pages, with more than 5,000 words, mostly written in legalese. Jenny Afia, a privacy lawyer and partner at Schillings law firm in London was tasked with rewriting the company’s terms and conditions “in plain English.” The simplified terms of service fit on a single page. ...
Get your loved ones off Facebook – Salim Virani Salim Virani has been checking Facebook upcoming privacy policy due to change on Jan. 30th, 20151. Unless you leave Facebook before this date, you won’t have to accept the new ToS since you agree by staying2. Abstract: Facebook doesn’t keep any of your data safe or anonymous, no matter how much you lock down your privacy settings. There are very serious privacy breaches, like selling your product endorsement to advertisers and politicians, tracking everything you read on the internet, or using data from your friends to learn private things about you: ...
Our data will be shared, bought, sold, analyzed and applied, all of which will have consequences for our lives. – Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum in Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest That’s at least one reason we need to start scrambling our tracks. Source: Motherboard
I don’t like WhatsApp - I don’t mean the app by itself, it’s a great app - but its owner, Facebook. And I don’t like Facebook owner, Mark. Mark Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp for a whooping USD 19 Billion in 2014. Why would you do that? When you invest such a mahoosive amount of money in an instant messenger, you probably expect a mahoosive return on investment, right? Unless it’s about philanthropy. Not sure Mark is that sort of guy. So be prepared to switch to another instant messenger. ...
The Irony of Clinton Embracing ‘Snowden-Approved’ Security App In 2014, Hillary Clinton claimed National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks revealing a mass surveillance program of U.S. citizens helped terrorists and weakened national security. Meanwhile, she denied—and continues to deny—similar allegations directed at her “extremely careless” use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. In 2015, during the first Democratic Party debate, Clinton said Snowden should “not be brought home without facing the music.” ...
“Aggregating” or combining data from multiple sources can actually reveal surprisingly specific information. You might not work for the Pentagon, but your data can be aggregated in the same way to de-anonymize you. Here’s a small collection of these surprising privacy failures: The Classic Paper – Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely shows that knowing just birth date, gender, and zip code is enough to uniquely identify most people. Netflix Debacle – An anonymous Netflix dataset was de-anonymized by correlating it with the IMDB database. Social Exposure – De-anonymizing social networks (by Arvind Narayanan) demonstrates how an anonymous Twitter graph can be re-identified using Flickr for auxiliary information. Your Words Betray You – Your choice of words in writing can be analyzed to uniquely identify you according to On the feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identification. Location, Location, Location – The traces of your GPS location app, even your approximate location, is pretty unique. Outlined in Unique in the crowd, the privacy bounds of human mobility. Bitcoin is often thought of as an anonymous currency, but it’s surprisingly non-anonymous, considering its reputation. This is because a lot of information is contained in the public ledger that records all transactions. See also An analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System. Source: Tozny Blog ...