Tag Archives: bad password

How it feels to survive Silicon Valley and a pandemic

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It shouldn’t feel like it took a pandemic to get Twitter to boot 7,000 QAnon accounts (and crack down on 150,000 more related to the violent conspiracy group), but it does. At least Twitter is doing harm mitigation around its role in this interconnec...

The Trojan Horse in Trump’s anti-Twitter executive order

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Approximately 100 years ago (May 28, 2020) the White House put social media websites in its (very crowded) crosshairs. This was in the form of an executive order to regulate what Mr. Trump believes to be online censorship, specifically calling Twitte...

Yes, the Patriot Act amendment to track us online is real

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Just being able to calmly purchase toilet paper feels like reason enough to celebrate these days. But one thing a lot of people won’t be cracking champagne over this month is the renewal of the Patriot Act/USA Freedom Act — and its terrible inclusion...

Contact tracing apps are coming whether we like it or not

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The University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute advised the NHS this week that “a contact-tracing app could help stop the coronavirus pandemic, but 80 percent of current smartphone owners would need to use it.”Can you imagine trying to get 80 percent o...

Zoom is now ‘the Facebook of video apps’

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Given our uncertain and nightmarish times, I’m going to cut right to it. A lot of us are wondering just how full of shit Zoom is. Because right now, at the terrifying end of one era and the beginning of another whose shape has yet to be known, this i...

The surveillance profiteers of COVID-19 are here

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Our worlds are so upside-down and backwards right now that Wired claims Surveillance Could Save Lives Amid a Public Health Crisis, and privacy activist Maciej Cegłowski flat-out stated We Need A Massive Surveillance Program.

Coronavirus bursts Big Tech’s bubble

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Virus enthusiasts from all over the world converged in San Francisco this week for America's largest security event: RSA Conference 2020. Before it began, fourteen companies withdrew from RSAC over concerns about the impending Coronavirus (COVID-19)...

It doesn’t matter if China hacked Equifax

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On Monday the FBI and AG Barr announced "an indictment last week charging four members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) with hacking into the computer systems of the credit reporting agency Equifax and stealing Americans' personal data a...

Phishing scams leveled up and we didn’t

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More than a bit of "I'm smarter than you" politics creates the divide between hacking headlines and what we actually need to worry about. On one side, researchers present findings at conferences hoping someone will raise the alarm and practical thing...