Land Life is a company that offers "Technology-driven reforestation at scale," the kind of business that boasts buzzwords like this:

Land Life Company is committed to its high-tech approach to smart reforestation, and applies it every step of the way: from beginning the process with detailed climate analysis to using specialized machines to mechanically speed up the planting of biodiverse species to then monitoring growth with our proprietary terrestrial monitoring app and drones. 

The mobile phones of a number of politicians in Spain, including the president of Catalonia's parliament, were recently hacked. The government of Spain has been an NSO customer since 2015, reports Motherboard on Tuesday.

NSO Group is an Israeli company that sells surveillance and hacking tools to governments around the world.

A leaked document co-written by 45 googlers and reported on by Motherboard details how each was subjected to illegal workplace retaliation after reporting abuse by co-workers or superiors.

In 2016, Google announced that it was renaming its small Google Ideas unit to "Jigsaw," giving the new unit a much broader, "wildly ambitious" mandate: to tackle "surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship."

OG Users is a forum for people who steal login credentials for online services, mostly to sell desirable login-names for popular services like Instagram; it attained notoriety when Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai linked the forum to an epidemic of SIM-swapping attacks; a few months later, the Reply All podcast devoted an episode to the forum.

This week, we learned that the notorious Israeli cyber-arms-dealer NSO Group had figured out how hijack your Iphone or Android phone by placing a simple Whatsapp call, an attack that would work even if you don't answer the call.

The DOJ has indicted three former Verizon and AT&T employees for alleged membership in a crime-ring known as the "The Community"; the indictment says the telco employees helped their confederates undertake "port-out" scams (AKA "SIM-swapping" AKA "SIM hijacking"), which allowed criminals to gain control over targets' phone numbers, thereby receiving SMS-based two-factor authentication codes.

If Facebook is broken for you in some way large or small, you can't call them to complain — the company doesn't have a customer service number, it has a "support portal" for people suffering with the service, which combines the worst of autoresponders with the worst of underpaid, three-ring-binder constrained support staff to make a system that runs like a cost-conscious version of Kafka's "The Trial."

Itrack and Protrack are commercial devices for tracking fleets of commercial vehicles; they can be configured to allow for remote killswitching of the cars' engines, presumably as a theft-prevention measure.

Said Dorsey to staff: "Some of you will be very supportive of our meeting [with] the president, and some of you might feel we shouldn't take this meeting at all."

Security researcher Cian Heasley discovered an unprotected online storage folder accessible via the web that contains all the data that stalkers and snoops took from their victims' devices via a commercial program that steals photos and recordings from their devices.

Last September, Facebook drew fire for abusing the phone numbers users provided for two-factor authentication messages, sending spam advertising messages over the same channel — now, rather than reforming its ways, Facebook has doubled down on poisoning the security well, by adding a no-opt-out policy of allowing anyone in the world to search for you by phone number if you provide that number for two-factor auth.

Haisam Elsharkawi is a US citizen of Egyptian descent who was travelling to Mecca in 2017 when he was pulled out the boarding line for his flight from LAX by CBP agents who demanded that he unlock his phones; when he refused and asked for a lawyer, he was handcuffed and taken to an interrogation room where he was questioned and bullied until he unlocked his phones; the CBP officers spent 15 minutes paging through his emails, making snarky remarks about his Amazon purchase history and how many unread emails he had, and then let him go.

Hacking Team (previously) was an Italian company that developed cyberweapons that it sold to oppressive government around the world, to be used against their own citizens to monitor and suppress political oppositions; in 2015, a hacker calling themselves "Phineas Fisher" hacked and dumped hundreds of gigabytes' worth of internal Hacking Team data, effectively killing the company.

Wolf Intelligence is a German state surveillanceware company founded by Manish Kumar, selling tools that independent researchers described as "very shitty and it's just copy paste from open source projects," used by governments to spy on their citizens.

Yesterday, at least 90,000,000 Facebook users were forced to log back into the service without any explanation; later, the company revealed that at least 50,000,000 of them had been hacked, but wouldn't say how.

Researchers from the University of Toronto's outstanding Citizen Lab (previously) have published their latest research on the notorious and prolific Israeli cyber-arms-dealer The NSO Group (previously), one of the world's go-to suppliers for tools used by despots to spy on dissidents and opposition figures, often as a prelude to their imprisonment, torture and murder.

Apple pioneered the idea of "app stores," where operating system vendors got to decide who could distribute software that ran on their platforms, arguing that these "curated" stores would ensure high quality and protect users from malicious and inferior code.

As you might imagine, Spyfone is a company that offers to spy on other peoples' phones for you: its major market is parents and bosses who infect and surveil the phones their kids/minions use, peeking on their texts, emails, Facebook messages, passwords, photos, browsing history, etc.

Qanon (previously) is an eye-wateringly stupid far-right conspiracy theory whose proponents spend hours trying to decode alleged ciphertexts created by the cult's leader or leaders.