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After Christchurch, we need more than digital-security theater
Just after the Christchurch shooting I came across an article explaining how to make your Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts block violent videos. How-tos like this are depressingly necessary, because while Facebook removes an illustrated nipple for "community safety" at lightning speed with real consequences, the company isn't equally interested in policing content that's indisputably harmful. After the Christchurch attack, Facebook said it took down 1.5 million postings of the terrorist's mass-murder livestream within 24 hours, but only 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at upload.
Russia is going to test an internet ‘kill switch,’ and its citizens will suffer
Russia is planning to disconnect itself from the global internet in a test sometime between now and April. The country says it is implementing an internal internet (intranet) and an internet "kill switch" to protect itself against cyberwar. The question is, would this actually work? "This, as a single tactic, would not be sufficient," explained Bill Woodcock, executive director of Packet Clearing House, via email. "But it hugely reduces their attack surface. So in combination with many other tactics, it's a component of a reasonable strategy."
How sex censorship killed the internet we love
When was the last time you thought of the internet as a weird and wonderful place? I can feel my anxiety climbing as I try to find current news stories about sex. Google News shows one lonely result for "porn," an article that is 26 days old. I log out of everything and try different browsers because this can't be right.
So, you got an IoT device for the holidays
IoT devices are at once a grotesquerie for the security- and privacy-conscious, and a delicious, convenient poison. And chances are pretty good you got one as a holiday gift. You might say we're in the heyday of IoT — though a significant number of infosec professionals might be more inclined to call it the apex of the Internet of Shit. They have a point. Even just a glance at recent headlines is enough to convince anyone that the so-called smartness of these products is a bit lacking.
2018 in cybersecurity: Regrets, we have a few
This was the year security slips, privacy fails and outright stupidity went from bad to surreal. It was a year in which warnings went unheeded and companies lost whatever trust we gave them. It was a nesting doll of security disasters. A clown car of willful negligence. A long 12 months of totally unsexy, nonconsensual edge-play with our data.
Maria Butina: Cybersecurity charlatan, spy
Russian spy Maria Butina's cover story was her academic interest and expertise in cybersecurity. As cover stories go, this unfortunately wasn't a hard one to pull off. Except anyone holding even the barest minimum of cybersecurity knowledge could've figured out in minutes that Butina's interest in cybersecurity was minimal.
The internet war on sex is here
During the Great Internet Sex War, that began in the United States during its Facebook Era, people were forced to stockpile their porn. Lube was bought by the drum and hidden in bunkers, alongside vibrators and air-gapped computers holding valuable troves of accurate, non judgemental sex information. Gimp suits were stored upright, oiled, and ready for doomsday's call. Explicit gifs became a black market commodity, and there were rumors of a Thunderdome ruled by cam girls. Every sexual identity, except the singular one deemed safe by the corporations, went into hiding. Fear prevented even the mere mention of sexual pleasure on the networks and in communications.
Google’s China search engine drama
The first time many of us heard about China's use of facial recognition on jaywalkers was just this week when a prominent Chinese businesswoman was publicly "named and shamed" for improper street crossing. Turns out, she wasn't even there: China's terrifyingly over-the-top use of tech for citizen surveillance made a mistake. The AI system identified Dong Mingzhu's face from a bus advertisement for her company's products.
Holiday gift ideas for paranoids
In so many ways, Black Friday is an inescapable evil of cosmic proportions. It is a creeping cloud of want, pulling us resentfully toward deals that we know tempt us at our peril. The advertising boogeymen who have stalked, harassed and victimized us all year rub their fetid little hands and lure us toward pleasure (cool new gadgets) and pain (security threats, privacy demons, pocketbook hangovers).
More companies are chipping their workers like pets
The trend of blundering into the void of adopting new tech, damn the consequences, full speed ahead, continues this week. The Telegraph tells us about "a number of UK legal and financial firms" are in talks with a chip company to implant their employees with RFID microchips for security purposes.
How Brian Kemp hacked Georgia’s election
"[Brian] Kemp on Thursday said he had resigned as Georgia's secretary of state," reported Reuters yesterday. No one watching Kemp's malfeasant, multi-year election security trash fire could understand why that sentence didn't stop at "resigned."
Dear tech: Stop doing business with Nazis
Kicking Nazis off tech companies' services is so easy, and such a simple thing to do. It is such a basic act of human decency, a trivial task that would stop PayPal, Stripe, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, GoDaddy and many more from being unquestionably complicit in the deadly rise of American Naziism. Stakes climb as we approach next week's elections. And yet.
With Khashoggi, tech confronts its blood money
In 2015 we laughed at Hacking Team for getting hacked. Their profit-driven facilitation of human rights abuses around the world was somehow barely competent, but notorious. They sold illegal hackware and surveillance tech to brutal regimes and trained them in attacking citizens and journalists. We knew they were evil clowns. We just didn't expect what happened next.
Uber, Google, Facebook: Your experiments have gone too far
It was 2014, around the time when Travis Kalanick referred to Uber as his chick-magnet "Boober" in a GQ article, that I'd realized congestion in San Francisco had gone insane. Before there was Uber, getting across town took about ten minutes by car and there was nowhere to park, ever. With Boober in play, there was parking in places there never were spaces, but the streets were so jammed with empty, one-person "gig economy" cars circling, sitting in bus zones, mowing down bicyclists whilst fussing with their phones, still endlessly going nowhere, alone, that walking across the city was faster.
Goodbye Google+, you beautiful, squandered opportunity
When Google+ launched in 2011, people were already fed up with Facebook -- and Google was still cool. After Plus' closed invite garnered significant consumer desire, everyone's hopeful "Facebook killer" nabbed a sweet 300 million active monthly users by 2013 (by comparison, Twitter had 230 million). No one could have predicted that on a random Monday seven years later, the tech giant would hang its head, admit a middling API-access privacy hole and the existence of tumbleweeds on the service, and then announce it was shuttering Plus to the public.
Facebook’s two-factor ad practices give middle finger to infosec
We've all encountered security questions asking where we went to school, our favorite color or food, our first concert, and the ubiquitous "mother's maiden name." Imagine a world where on one screen you carefully chose Stanford, red, spaghetti and so on, and on the next you were shown ads for Italian restaurants, red shoes, and jobs for Stanford grads. Seems like an insane violation, right? I mean, it stands to reason that we expect that the information we type to secure our online accounts and apps is private and safely guarded.
Silicon Valley’s Brett Kavanaugh problem
As we steel ourselves to careen numbly toward whatever new horrors lay in store with Trump, his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, and the conservative politicians willing to help them, it's impossible not to contemplate how deep and depraved the culture of silence actually goes here. USA Today wrote: "When Kavanaugh gave a speech in 2015 at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law and stated, 'What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. That's been a good thing for all of us, I think,' he summed up the culture perfectly (...) It was their job to protect each other from their misdeeds no matter how big or alcohol-fueled. The boys kept each other's secrets."
FCC’s Ajit Pai labels California net neutrality law 'illegal'
FCC head honcho, Ajit Pai, didn't mince words in comments regarding California's recent passing of a tough net neutrality bill. In his keynote speech for neoconservative policy organization Maine Heritage Policy Center, Pai called California's SB 822 "illegal" and said it "poses a risk to the rest of the country." Pai also hinted that he'd be coming for California should SB 822, seen as the toughest net neutrality law in the nation, receive the governor's signature, as it's expected to in the next two weeks.
Why PayPal’s crackdown on ASMR creators should worry you
In June, China banned and excised videos of sound effects while claiming to cleanse its internet of pornography. YouTube had already demonetized the genre in a sex panic; now PayPal is banning people for life and holding individuals' funds, ignorant of the facts and marching lockstep to the tune of 8chan trolls enacting a campaign to punish "whores." The most bitter punchline in all this? A tiny percentage of the entire video genre is even remotely sexual, and those suffering — female creators — aren't even making sex content.
The US government comes for Google, Facebook, and Twitter
Facebook, Twitter, and Google were threatened by lawmakers from three distinct quarters on Wednesday. A leaked email from the largest US telecom lobbying group tells us where this is headed. One threat came during testimony from Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey to Congress when Senator Mark Warner told the pair of executives that "Congress is going to have to take action here. The era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end."
