Skip to main content

Home/ Future of the Web/ Group items tagged vulnerabilities

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Dark Reading - 10 Strategies To Fight Anonymous DDoS Attacks - 0 views

www.darkreading.com/...1102699

howto prevent DDoS attacks internet security both ways

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 May 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 May 14
     
    "10 Strategies To Fight Anonymous DDoS Attacks Preventing distributed denial of service attacks may be impossible. But with advance planning, they can be mitigated and stopped. Learn where to begin."
Paul Merrell

Inside the NSA's War on Internet Security - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...ternet-security-a-1010361.html

surveillance state NSA encryption-vulnerabilities must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • US and British intelligence agencies undertake every effort imaginable to crack all types of encrypted Internet communication. The cloud, it seems, is full of holes. The good news: New Snowden documents show that some forms of encryption still cause problems for the NSA.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Dec 14
     
    A must-read. Identifies which encryption methods the NSA has cracked, which they can't, and which they  have difficulties with.
Paul Merrell

What the Hack! 56 Suspected Hackers arrested in the UK | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ted-hackers-arrested-in-the-uk

UK hackers arrests

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The UK National Crime Agency arrested 56 suspected hackers, including one 23-year-old male who allegedly attempted to hack his way into the U.S.’ Department of Defense in 2014. Not attempting to minimize the potential risks of hacking but how much does cyber-crime actually cost, what are the risks and what about those who hack the data of billions of internet users per day to, allegedly, “keep all of us safe?”
  • Besides the 23-year-old who allegedly attempted to hack his way into the a U.S. Department of Defense site, the other detainees allegedly were members of the hacking collectives Lizard Squad and D33DS which are being accused of fraud, money laundering and Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service (DOS & DDOS) attacks.  D33DS stands accused of having stolen data of some 450,000 Yahoo users. The arrests followed the recent announcement about the so-called FREAK security vulnerability that was leaving thousands of SSL sites unprotected. The arrest of the 56 hackers in the UK was reported as the National Crime Agency’s way of “sending a clear message” to the hacker community.
  • The U.S. DoD’s cyber-security functioned, obviously. A recent article by Benjamin Dean entitled “Hard Evidence: How much is cybercrime really costing us” suggests that the money spent on cyber-security per year is disproportional to the harm that is being caused by cyber-crime. Dean, who is a Fellow for Internet Governance and Cyber-security at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University would conclude that: There are numerous competing budgetary priorities at any one time and limited funds to spend on meeting all these needs. How much money does it make sense to invest in bolstering cybersecurity, relative to the losses? …In the hysteria created in the wake of the hacks of 2014, we risk making the wrong choice simply because we don’t know what the current sums of money are being spent on.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Meanwhile, NSA whitleblower Edward Snowden (think about him what you want), would reveal that the NSA and the GCHQ hacked themselves into the possession of the encryption codes of the world’s largest SIM card manufacturer Gemalto. Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program wouldn’t come as a surprise to those who have known about the United States’ and allies mutual spying network Echelon for decades.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Researchers find same RSA encryption key used 28,000 times | ITworld - 0 views

www.itworld.com/...tion-key-used-28000-times.html

researchers find rsa encryption key used shared thousands times security vulnerability

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 Mar 15
     
    "By Jeremy Kirk Follow IDG News Service | March 16, 2015 What if the key to your house was shared with 28,000 other homes?"
Paul Merrell

How to Encrypt the Entire Web for Free - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-plans-encrypt-entire-web-free

surveillance state encryption https let's-encrypt nsa-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • If we’ve learned one thing from the Snowden revelations, it’s that what can be spied on will be spied on. Since the advent of what used to be known as the World Wide Web, it has been a relatively simple matter for network attackers—whether it’s the NSA, Chinese intelligence, your employer, your university, abusive partners, or teenage hackers on the same public WiFi as you—to spy on almost everything you do online. HTTPS, the technology that encrypts traffic between browsers and websites, fixes this problem—anyone listening in on that stream of data between you and, say, your Gmail window or bank’s web site would get nothing but useless random characters—but is woefully under-used. The ambitious new non-profit Let’s Encrypt aims to make the process of deploying HTTPS not only fast, simple, and free, but completely automatic. If it succeeds, the project will render vast regions of the internet invisible to prying eyes.
  • Encryption also prevents attackers from tampering with or impersonating legitimate websites. For example, the Chinese government censors specific pages on Wikipedia, the FBI impersonated The Seattle Times to get a suspect to click on a malicious link, and Verizon and AT&T injected tracking tokens into mobile traffic without user consent. HTTPS goes a long way in preventing these sorts of attacks. And of course there’s the NSA, which relies on the limited adoption of HTTPS to continue to spy on the entire internet with impunity. If companies want to do one thing to meaningfully protect their customers from surveillance, it should be enabling encryption on their websites by default.
  • Let’s Encrypt, which was announced this week but won’t be ready to use until the second quarter of 2015, describes itself as “a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit.” It’s the product of years of work from engineers at Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan. (Disclosure: I used to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I was aware of Let’s Encrypt while it was being developed.) If Let’s Encrypt works as advertised, deploying HTTPS correctly and using all of the best practices will be one of the simplest parts of running a website. All it will take is running a command. Currently, HTTPS requires jumping through a variety of complicated hoops that certificate authorities insist on in order prove ownership of domain names. Let’s Encrypt automates this task in seconds, without requiring any human intervention, and at no cost.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The benefits of using HTTPS are obvious when you think about protecting secret information you send over the internet, like passwords and credit card numbers. It also helps protect information like what you search for in Google, what articles you read, what prescription medicine you take, and messages you send to colleagues, friends, and family from being monitored by hackers or authorities. But there are less obvious benefits as well. Websites that don’t use HTTPS are vulnerable to “session hijacking,” where attackers can take over your account even if they don’t know your password. When you download software without encryption, sophisticated attackers can secretly replace the download with malware that hacks your computer as soon as you try installing it.
  • The transition to a fully encrypted web won’t be immediate. After Let’s Encrypt is available to the public in 2015, each website will have to actually use it to switch over. And major web hosting companies also need to hop on board for their customers to be able to take advantage of it. If hosting companies start work now to integrate Let’s Encrypt into their services, they could offer HTTPS hosting by default at no extra cost to all their customers by the time it launches.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14
     
    Don't miss the video. And if you have a web site, urge your host service to begin preparing for Let's Encrypt. (See video on why it's good for them.)
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Nikto - OWASP - 0 views

www.owasp.org/Nikto

Nikto OWASP GPL open source vulnerability ceck GNU_Linux Linux network

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Mar 15
     
    "Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 3500 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, versions on over 900 servers, and version specific problems on over 250 servers. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated (if desired). "
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Mar 15
     
    "Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 3500 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, versions on over 900 servers, and version specific problems on over 250 servers. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated (if desired). "
Paul Merrell

Free At Last: New DMCA Rules Might Make the Web a Better Place | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ht-make-the-web-a-better-place

DMCA-exemptions auto-software VW-scandal video-games remixers

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • David Mao, the Librarian of Congress, has issued new rules pertaining to exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) after a 3 year battle that was expedited in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal.
  • Opposition to this new decision is coming from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the auto industry because the DMCA prohibits “circumventing encryption or access controls to copy or modify copyrighted works.” For example, GM “claimed the exemption ‘could introduce safety and security issues as well as facilitate violation of various laws designed specifically to regulate the modern car, including emissions, fuel economy, and vehicle safety regulations’.” The exemption in question is in Section 1201 which forbids the unlocking of software access controls which has given the auto industry the unique ability to “threaten legal action against anyone who needs to get around those restrictions, no matter how legitimate the reason.” Journalist Nick Statt points out that this provision “made it illegal in the past to unlock your smartphone from its carrier or even to share your HBO Go password with a friend. It’s designed to let corporations protect copyrighted material, but it allows them to crackdown on circumventions even when they’re not infringing on those copyrights or trying to access or steal proprietary information.”
  • Kit Walsh, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), explained that the “‘access control’ rule is supposed to protect against unlawful copying. But as we’ve seen in the recent Volkswagen scandal—where VW was caught manipulating smog tests—it can be used instead to hide wrongdoing hidden in computer code.” Walsh continued: “We are pleased that analysts will now be able to examine the software in the cars we drive without facing legal threats from car manufacturers, and that the Librarian has acted to promote competition in the vehicle aftermarket and protect the long tradition of vehicle owners tinkering with their cars and tractors. The year-long delay in implementing the exemptions, though, is disappointing and unjustified. The VW smog tests and a long run of security vulnerabilities have shown researchers and drivers need the exemptions now.” As part of the new changes, gamers can “modify an old video game so it doesn’t perform a check with an authentication server that has since been shut down” and after the publisher cuts of support for the video game.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Another positive from the change is that smartphone users will be able to jailbreak their phone and finally enjoy running operating systems and applications from any source, not just those approved by the manufacturer. And finally, those who remix excerpts from DVDs, Blu – Ray discs or downloading services will be allowed to mix the material into theirs without violating the DMCA.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

The kernel of the argument over Linux's vulnerabilities | The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ity-the-kernel-of-the-argument

washingtonpost.com Linux kernel argument security use spreading worldwide Internet www web running open source free software

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 07 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 07 Nov 15
     
    "Fast, flexible and free, Linux is taking over the online world. But there is growing unease about security weaknesses."
Paul Merrell

Microsoft pledges to tell email customers of state-sponsored hacking in future - Techno... - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...osoft-hotmail-attack-1.3386823

internet-security email Microsoft penetration-attempts

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Microsoft Corp. has agreed to change its policies and always tell email customers when it suspects there has been a government hacking attempt after widespread hacking by Chinese authorities was exposed. Microsoft experts concluded several years ago that Chinese authorities had hacked into more than a thousand Hotmail email accounts, targeting international leaders of China's Tibetan and Uighur minorities in particular — but it decided not to tell the victims, allowing the hackers to continue their campaign, according to former employees of the company. On Wednesday, after a series of requests for comment from Reuters, Microsoft said it would change its policy on notifying customers. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said the company was never certain of the origin of the Hotmail attacks.
  • The company also confirmed for the first time that it had not called, emailed or otherwise told the Hotmail users that their electronic correspondence had been collected. The company declined to say what role the exposure of the Hotmail campaign played in its decision to make the policy shift. The first public signal of the attacks came in May 2011, though no direct link was immediately made with the Chinese authorities.
  • That's when security firm Trend Micro Inc announced it had found an email sent to someone in Taiwan that contained a miniature computer program. The program took advantage of a previously undetected flaw in Microsoft's own web pages to direct Hotmail and other free Microsoft email services to secretly forward copies of all of a recipient's incoming mail to an account controlled by the attacker. Trend Micro found more than a thousand victims, and Microsoft patched the vulnerability before the security company announced its findings publicly
Paul Merrell

Apple's New Challenge: Learning How the U.S. Cracked Its iPhone - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-us-cracked-its-iphone.html

surveillance state Apple FBI San-Bernadino iPhone security

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Now that the United States government has cracked open an iPhone that belonged to a gunman in the San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting without Apple’s help, the tech company is under pressure to find and fix the flaw.But unlike other cases where security vulnerabilities have cropped up, Apple may face a higher set of hurdles in ferreting out and repairing the particular iPhone hole that the government hacked.The challenges start with the lack of information about the method that the law enforcement authorities, with the aid of a third party, used to break into the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, an attacker in the San Bernardino rampage last year. Federal officials have refused to identify the person, or organization, who helped crack the device, and have declined to specify the procedure used to open the iPhone. Apple also cannot obtain the device to reverse-engineer the problem, the way it would in other hacking situations.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 16
     
    It would make a very interesting Freedom of Information Act case if Apple sued under that Act to force disclosure of the security hole iPhone product defect the FBI exploited. I know of no interpretation of the law enforcement FOIA exemption that would justify FBI disclosure of the information. It might be alleged that the information is the trade secret of the company that disclosed the defect and exploit to the the FBI, but there's a very strong argument that the fact that the information was shared with the FBI waived the trade secrecy claim. And the notion that government is entitled to collect product security defects and exploit them without informing the exploited product's company of the specific defect is extremely weak.  Were I Tim Cook, I would have already told my lawyers to get cracking on filing the FOIA request with the FBI to get the legal ball rolling. 
Paul Merrell

The Wifi Alliance, Coming Soon to Your Neighborhood: 5G Wireless | Global Research - Ce... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5646667

5G wireless health-effects

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Just as any new technology claims to offer the most advanced development; that their definition of progress will cure society’s ills or make life easier by eliminating the drudgery of antiquated appliances, the Wifi Alliance  was organized as a worldwide wireless network to connect ‘everyone and everything, everywhere” as it promised “improvements to nearly every aspect of daily life.”    The Alliance, which makes no pretense of potential health or environmental concerns, further proclaimed (and they may be correct) that there are “more wifi devices than people on earth”.   It is that inescapable exposure to ubiquitous wireless technologies wherein lies the problem.   
  • Even prior to the 1997 introduction of commercially available wifi devices which has saturated every industrialized country, EMF wifi hot spots were everywhere.  Today with the addition of cell and cordless phones and towers, broadcast antennas, smart meters and the pervasive computer wifi, both adults and especially vulnerable children are surrounded 24-7 by an inescapable presence with little recognition that all radiation exposure is cumulative.    
  • The National Toxicology Program (NTP), a branch of the US National Institute for Health (NIH), conducted the world’s largest study on radiofrequency radiation used by the US telecommunications industry and found a ‘significantly statistical increase in brain and heart cancers” in animals exposed to EMF (electromagnetic fields).  The NTP study confirmed the connection between mobile and wireless phone use and human brain cancer risks and its conclusions were supported by other epidemiological peer-reviewed studies.  Of special note is that studies citing the biological risk to human health were below accepted international exposure standards.    
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jul 18
     
    ""…what this means is that the current safety standards as off by a factor of about 7 million.' Pointing out that a recent FCC Chair was a former lobbyist for the telecom industry, "I know how they've attacked various people.  In the U.S. … the funding for the EMF research [by the Environmental Protection Agency] was cut off starting in 1986 … The U.S. Office of Naval Research had been funding a fair amount of research in this area [in the '70s]. They [also] … stopped funding new grants in 1986 …  And then the NIH a few years later followed the same path …" As if all was not reason enough for concern or even downright panic,  the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G (fifth generation), representing the innocuous sounding Internet of Things, promises a quantum leap in power and exceedingly more damaging health impacts with mandatory exposures.      The immense expansion of radiation emissions from the current wireless EMF frequency band and 5G about to be perpetrated on an unsuspecting American public should be criminal.  Developed by the US military as non lethal perimeter and crowd control, the Active Denial System emits a high density, high frequency wireless radiation comparable to 5G and emits radiation in the neighborhood of 90 GHz.    The current Pre 5G, frequency band emissions used in today's commercial wireless range is from 300 Mhz to 3 GHZ as 5G will become the first wireless system to utilize millimeter waves with frequencies ranging from 30 to 300 GHz. One example of the differential is that a current LANS (local area network system) uses 2.4 GHz.  Hidden behind these numbers is an utterly devastating increase in health effects of immeasurable impacts so stunning as to numb the senses. In 2017, the international Environmental Health Trust recommended an EU moratorium "on the roll-out of the fifth generation, 5G, for telecommunication until potential hazards for human health and the environment hav
Paul Merrell

Theresa May to create new internet that would be controlled and regulated by government... - 1 views

www.independent.co.uk/...tives-government-a7744176.html

Internet censorship UK May Conservatives

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online. Particular focus has been drawn to the end of the manifesto, which makes clear that the Tories want to introduce huge changes to the way the internet works. "Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet," it states. "We disagree." Senior Tories confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the phrasing indicates that the government intends to introduce huge restrictions on what people can post, share and publish online. The plans will allow Britain to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", the manifesto claims. It comes just soon after the Investigatory Powers Act came into law. That legislation allowed the government to force internet companies to keep records on their customers' browsing histories, as well as giving ministers the power to break apps like WhatsApp so that messages can be read. The manifesto makes reference to those increased powers, saying that the government will work even harder to ensure there is no "safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online". That is apparently a reference in part to its work to encourage technology companies to build backdoors into their encrypted messaging services – which gives the government the ability to read terrorists' messages, but also weakens the security of everyone else's messages, technology companies have warned.
  • The government now appears to be launching a similarly radical change in the way that social networks and internet companies work. While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn't published, the manifesto suggests. The new rules would include laws that make it harder than ever to access pornographic and other websites. The government will be able to place restrictions on seeing adult content and any exceptions would have to be justified to ministers, the manifesto suggests. The manifesto even suggests that the government might stop search engines like Google from directing people to pornographic websites. "We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm," the Conservatives write.
  • The laws would also force technology companies to delete anything that a person posted when they were under 18. But perhaps most unusually they would be forced to help controversial government schemes like its Prevent strategy, by promoting counter-extremist narratives. "In harnessing the digital revolution, we must take steps to protect the vulnerable and give people confidence to use the internet without fear of abuse, criminality or exposure to horrific content", the manifesto claims in a section called 'the safest place to be online'. The plans are in keeping with the Tories' commitment that the online world must be regulated as strongly as the offline one, and that the same rules should apply in both. "Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline," the Conservatives' manifesto says, explaining this justification for a new level of regulation. "It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The manifesto also proposes that internet companies will have to pay a levy, like the one currently paid by gambling firms. Just like with gambling, that money will be used to pay for advertising schemes to tell people about the dangers of the internet, in particular being used to "support awareness and preventative activity to counter internet harms", according to the manifesto. The Conservatives will also seek to regulate the kind of news that is posted online and how companies are paid for it. If elected, Theresa May will "take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy" – and crack down on Facebook and Google to ensure that news companies get enough advertising money. If internet companies refuse to comply with the rulings – a suggestion that some have already made about the powers in the Investigatory Powers Act – then there will be a strict and strong set of ways to punish them. "We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law," the manifesto reads. In laying out its plan for increased regulation, the Tories anticipate and reject potential criticism that such rules could put people at risk.
  • "While we cannot create this framework alone, it is for government, not private companies, to protect the security of people and ensure the fairness of the rules by which people and businesses abide," the document reads. "Nor do we agree that the risks of such an approach outweigh the potential benefits."
Paul Merrell

South Korea considers shutting down domestic cryptocurrency exchanges - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...rrency-exchanges-idUSKBN1F706T

computer-security vulneratiblities Spectre Meltdown investigations

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The request is one of the first responses from the U.S. Congress to the disclosure earlier this month by security researchers of the two major flaws, which may allow hackers to steal passwords or encryption keys on most types of computers, phones and cloud-based servers. McNerney, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked the companies to explain the scope of Spectre and Meltdown, their timeframe for understanding the vulnerabilities, how consumers are affected and whether the flaws have been exploited, among other questions.
Paul Merrell

Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - 0 views

theintercept.com/...he-u-s-and-israeli-governments

OpenWeb censorship Facebook Instagram Israel U.S.

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In September of last year, we noted that Facebook representatives were meeting with the Israeli government to determine which Facebook accounts of Palestinians should be deleted on the ground that they constituted “incitement.” The meetings — called for and presided over by one of the most extremist and authoritarian Israeli officials, pro-settlement Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country. The predictable results of those meetings are now clear and well-documented. Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders
  • Facebook now seems to be explicitly admitting that it also intends to follow the censorship orders of the U.S. government.
  • What this means is obvious: that the U.S. government — meaning, at the moment, the Trump administration — has the unilateral and unchecked power to force the removal of anyone it wants from Facebook and Instagram by simply including them on a sanctions list. Does anyone think this is a good outcome? Does anyone trust the Trump administration — or any other government — to compel social media platforms to delete and block anyone it wants to be silenced? As the ACLU’s Jennifer Granick told the Times: It’s not a law that appears to be written or designed to deal with the special situations where it’s lawful or appropriate to repress speech. … This sanctions law is being used to suppress speech with little consideration of the free expression values and the special risks of blocking speech, as opposed to blocking commerce or funds as the sanctions was designed to do. That’s really problematic.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • As is always true of censorship, there is one, and only one, principle driving all of this: power. Facebook will submit to and obey the censorship demands of governments and officials who actually wield power over it, while ignoring those who do not. That’s why declared enemies of the U.S. and Israeli governments are vulnerable to censorship measures by Facebook, whereas U.S and Israeli officials (and their most tyrannical and repressive allies) are not
  • All of this illustrates that the same severe dangers from state censorship are raised at least as much by the pleas for Silicon Valley giants to more actively censor “bad speech.” Calls for state censorship may often be well-intentioned — a desire to protect marginalized groups from damaging “hate speech” — yet, predictably, they are far more often used against marginalized groups: to censor them rather than protect them. One need merely look at how hate speech laws are used in Europe, or on U.S. college campuses, to see that the censorship victims are often critics of European wars, or activists against Israeli occupation, or advocates for minority rights.
  • It’s hard to believe that anyone’s ideal view of the internet entails vesting power in the U.S. government, the Israeli government, and other world powers to decide who may be heard on it and who must be suppressed. But increasingly, in the name of pleading with internet companies to protect us, that’s exactly what is happening.
Paul Merrell

Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can't. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...den-command-audio-attacks.html

smartphone-security audio vulnerabilities

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 May 18 - No Cached
  • Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.
  • Researchers can now send secret audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.
Paul Merrell

The Supreme Court's Groundbreaking Privacy Victory for the Digital Age | American Civil... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...ng-privacy-victory-digital-age

privacy rights 4th-Amendment litigation Supreme-Court

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court on Friday handed down what is arguably the most consequential privacy decision of the digital age, ruling that police need a warrant before they can seize people’s sensitive location information stored by cellphone companies. The case specifically concerns the privacy of cellphone location data, but the ruling has broad implications for government access to all manner of information collected about people and stored by the purveyors of popular technologies. In its decision, the court rejects the government’s expansive argument that people lose their privacy rights merely by using those technologies. Carpenter v. U.S., which was argued by the ACLU, involves Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted in 2013 of a string of burglaries in Detroit. To tie Carpenter to the burglaries, FBI agents obtained — without seeking a warrant — months’ worth of his location information from Carpenter’s cellphone company. They got almost 13,000 data points tracking Carpenter’s whereabouts during that period, revealing where he slept, when he attended church, and much more. Indeed, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Friday’s decision, “when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”.
  • The ACLU argued the agents had violated Carpenter’s Fourth Amendment rights when they obtained such detailed records without a warrant based on probable cause. In a decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court agreed, recognizing that the Fourth Amendment must apply to records of such unprecedented breadth and sensitivity: Mapping a cell phone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts. As with GPS information, the timestamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’
  • The government’s argument that it needed no warrant for these records extends far beyond cellphone location information, to any data generated by modern technologies and held by private companies rather than in our own homes or pockets. To make their case, government lawyers relied on an outdated, 1970s-era legal doctrine that says that once someone shares information with a “third party” — in Carpenter’s case, a cellphone company — that data is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court made abundantly clear that this doctrine has its limits and cannot serve as a carte blanche for the government seizure of any data of its choosing without judicial oversight.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While the decision extends in the immediate term only to historical cellphone location data, the Supreme Court’s reasoning opens the door to the protection of the many other kinds of data generated by popular technologies. Today’s decision provides a groundbreaking update to privacy rights that the digital age has rendered vulnerable to abuse by the government’s appetite for surveillance. It recognizes that “cell phones and the services they provide are ‘such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life’ that carrying one is indispensable to participation in modern society.” And it helps ensure that we don’t have to give up those rights if we want to participate in modern life. 
Paul Merrell

UK Government Approves Net Censorship - British Free Speech Dies | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...rship-british-free-speech-dies

Internet-censorship UK legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The United Kingdom has become the first Western nation to move ahead with large-scale censorship of the internet, effectively creating regulation that will limit freedom on the last frontier of digital liberty. In a move that has the nation reeling, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has unveiled rules that will punish internet companies with fines, and even imprisonment, if they fail to protect users from “harmful and illegal content.”
  • Couched in language that suggests this is being done to protect children from pedophiles and vulnerable people from cyberbullying, the proposals will place a massive burden on small companies. Further, they will ultimately make it impossible for those not of the pervasive politically correct ideology to produce and share content.
Paul Merrell

Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...twitter-whistleblower-sec-spam

Twitter whistleblower FTC security

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 78 of 78
Showing 20▼ items per page