If you needed more reasons to move away from using SMS-based authentication, and treating phone companies as trusted, “AT&T employees took over $1 million in bribes to plant malware and unlock millions of smartphones: DOJ“. Abuse reporting systems are being abused. You need to threat model and play the chess game. “How Flat Earthers Nearly…
Read More Interesting Reads, August 19
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[Update: clarified a sentence about whose privacy is touched, and where.] I had missed the story “Big Brother on wheels: Why your car company may know more about you than your spouse.” There are surprising details, including that you might be able to shut it off, and the phrase “If a customer declines, we do…
Read More Automotive PrivacyI came across a fascinating post at Jon Udell’s blog, “Homicide rates in context ,” which starts out with this graph of 2007 data: Jon’s post says more than I care to on this subject right now, and points out questions worth asking. As I said in my post on “Thoughts on the Tragedies of…
Read More Guns, Homicides and DataFor more than a decade, California and other states have kept their newest teen drivers on a tight leash, restricting the hours when they can get behind the wheel and whom they can bring along as passengers. Public officials were confident that their get-tough policies were saving lives. Now, though, a nationwide analysis of crash…
Read More Emergent Effects of Restrictions on Teenage DriversThere’s something important happening around Google+. It’s the start of a rebellion against the idea of “government authorized names.” (A lot of folks foolishly allow the other side to name this as “real names,” but a real name is a name someone calls you.) Let’s start with “Why Facebook and Google’s Concept of ‘Real Names’…
Read More Nymwars: Thoughts on Google+Yesterday, AT&T announced an Encrypted Mobile Voice. As CNet summarizes: AT&T is using One Vault Voice to provide users with an application to control their security. The app integrates into a device’s address book and “standard operation” to give users the option to encrypt any call. AT&T said that when encryption is used, the call…
Read More AT&T, Voice Encryption and TrustIndia’s EVMs are Vulnerable to Fraud. And for pointing that out, Hari Prasad has been arrested by the police in India, who wanted to threaten and intimidate him question him about where he got the machine that he studied. That’s a shame. The correct response is to fund Hari Prasad’s work, not use the police…
Read More Transparency, India, Voting Machines[The ACLU has a new] report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity (.pdf), surveys news accounts and studies of questionable snooping and arrests in 33 states and the District of Columbia over the past decade. The survey provides an outline of, and links to, dozens of examples of Cold War-era…
Read More Why we need strong oversight & transparencyLet me tell you how it will be There’s one for you, nineteen for me Chorus: If privacy appear too small Be grateful I don’t take it all Thanks to Jim Harper for the link.
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