What We Know About You: Welcome to the Surveillance State – Kevin Novakbegins his article with a reference to a report in The Wall Street Journal that caught his attention. Commercial data brokers are selling their third-party data to the government. If you’re an optimist, you would think this could be a good thing.
Our intelligence agencies and the defense department may be able to identify patterns that could predict and prevent an unfortunate event – terrorism, for example. But honestly, how would you feel if all the conversations in your house that Siri and Alexa are silently listening in on are sold in the aggregate to the government…or something else?
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 23, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few.
On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Eight highlights from this week:
How to Figure Out What Your Car Knows About You; The Feds Can Film Your Front Porch for 68 Days Without a Warrant, Says Court; X Continues to Break as Fraudsters Use Deceptive Links to Scam; FDA and You; Artificial Intelligence and Medical Products: How CBER, CDER, CDRH, and OCP are Working Together;
DOJ sues Apple in antitrust case, says it has illegal monopoly over smartphones; Data brokers admit they’re selling information on precise location, kids, and reproductive healthcare; X Continues to Break as Fraudsters Use Deceptive Links to Scam You; and Why you should stop using SMS.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Case for Marrying an Older Man.Long, and self-obsessed, but revealing — and not wrong — in its neotraditionalism.
New York Times [unpaywalled] – “A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world…Recently, while doing some routine maintenance, Mr. Freund inadvertently found a backdoor hidden in a piece of software that is part of the Linux operating system.
The backdoor was a possible prelude to a major cyberattack that experts say could have caused enormous damage, if it had succeeded…In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck…
But his digging kept turning up new evidence, and last week, Mr. Freund sent his findings to a group of open-source software developers. The news set the tech world on fire. Within hours, a fix was developed and some researchers were crediting him with preventing a potentially historic cyberattack…
