Bruce Schneier's Foreign Policy essay in 5G security argues that we're unduly focused on the possibility of Chinese manufacturers inserting backdoors or killswitches in 5G equipment, and not focused enough on intrinsic weakness in a badly defined, badly developed standard wherein "near-term corporate profits prevailed against broader social good." Read the rest

DEPLOYMENTS COME AS IRAN TENSIONS FLARE AFTER U.S. AIRSTRIKE IN BAGHDAD Read the rest

“Among the eight or so examples initially provided to Reddit are a handful of disturbingly clear images showing a sleeping baby, a security camera's view of an enclosed porch, and a man seemingly asleep in a chair.” Read the rest

The US Navy has issued a policy banning the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the China-owned video messaging service is a “cybersecurity threat.” Read the rest

They had 'American' faces, but these pro-Trump social media accounts all had algorithmically generated faces that only appeared 'American.'

Facebook and Twitter have banned a pro-Trump network that reached 55 million accounts and is said to be linked to a US-based media company called The BL which has ties to Epoch Media Group and the Chinese Falun Gong cult. Read the rest

Facebook offered a revealing explanation to lawmakers for why it continues to track users’ locations even after those users turn Facebook's location tracking services off. Read the rest

After LifeLabs was hit by a a cyber attack in November, the Canada-based medical lab paid a ransom to recover stolen data belonging to more than 15 million of its customers. That stolen data included usernames, password, and some 80,000 or more test results. Read the rest

Cliff Stoll (previously) is a computing legend: his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of how he was drafted to help run Lawrence Berkeley Lab's computers (he was a physicist who knew a lot about Unix systems), and then discovered a $0.75 billing discrepancy that set him on the trail of East German hackers working for the Soviet Union, using his servers as a staging point to infiltrate US military networks. Read the rest

Dten is a "certified hardware provider" for Zoom, making smart screens and whiteboards for videoconferencing; a Forescout Research report reveals that Dten committed a string of idiotic security blunders in designing its products, exposing its customers to video and audio surveillance, as well as theft of presentations and whiteboard data. Read the rest

What data does your car gather about you? Where does it go? Who has access to it? Read the rest

In my 2008 novel Little Brother, the underground resistance uses a secure operating system called "Paranoid Linux" that is designed to prevent surveillance and leave no evidence of its use; that was fiction, but there's a real Paranoid Linux out there: Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, and it turns 10 today. Read the rest

The increasingly popular social media application TikTok has a concerning relationship with the Chinese state. That link became ever the more concerning today, when reports began circulating of a brand new partnership between the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, and the government of China. Read the rest

Nulledcast is a realtime podcast streamed on a Discord channel for the hacking forum Nulled: the hosts break into Ring and Nest cameras in realtime, blare sirens at the owners, then torment them with insults and racist slurs, livestreaming their responses to hundreds of listeners. Read the rest

A family in DeSoto County, Mississippi, bought a Ring security camera so they could keep an eye on their three young girls in their bedroom. Four days later, they learned that a hacker had broken into the camera and subjected their children to continuous bedroom surveillance, taunting the children through the camera's built-in speaker. Read the rest

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "A new investigation from Gizmodo just revealed that anyone, anywhere can get geographic coordinates of Ring devices from Amazon’s Neighbors App. Not only can someone find out where users live, they can use footage to track bystanders, locate children, and monitor people going into buildings, like clinics, for private appointments. Amazon sells these devices under the guise of keeping us safe. They’re lying. Their surveillance devices and network puts us all in danger. We need lawmakers to fully investigate the threats associated with Amazon’s dragnet and its impact on our privacy, security, and civil liberties. Fight for the Future has launched a campaign calling for Congress to investigate Amazon's surveillance practices. You can add your name here." (Image: Dan Calacci/MIT) Read the rest

Princen Alice created a "password generator" that glues random Welsh-sounding words into a craggy landscape of letters. It's probably not very good, since it's three or four dictionary words and a number plus the fallacious ethnocentric belief that unpronouceability to English speakers reflects randomness, but what a delightful mess! Read the rest