Privacy

“A group of European security researchers have released a warning about a set of vulnerabilities affecting users of PGP and S/MIME. EFF has been in communication with the research team, and can confirm that these vulnerabilities pose an immediate risk to those using these tools for email communication, including the potential exposure of the contents of past messages.“

Attention PGP Users: New Vulnerabilities Require You To Take Action Now

Officially called “EFAIL”: https://efail.de/

A number of platforms are said to be vulnerable.
Quotes include, “Email is no longer a secure communication medium” and “can confirm that these vulnerabilities pose an immediate risk to those using these tools for email communication, including the potential exposure of the contents of past messages.”.
IMHO there seems to be a bit of hysteria going on about this this morning. On the other hand, I’m no security expert so what do I know.

Protonmail has stated,
“ProtonMail is safe against the efail PGP vulnerability. The real vulnerability is implementation errors in various PGP clients. PGP (and OpenPGP) is fine. Any service that uses our @openpgpjs library is also safe as long the default settings aren’t changed.”

I dunno, I never really believed anything on a computer was 100% secure or private and tend to conduct myself accordingly. Of course I’m just an average, boring dude so I’ve no idea why someone would waste the effort to read my email.

There is gonna be a lot more to read on this in the coming days.

Another HP Keylogger
Security researcher Michael Myng found a keylogger on some HP laptops. There was one found earlier this year. This is on top of spyware found on HP devices.
Yikes!

GET OFF OF FACEBOOK
Another former Facebook exec rips social media:
“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works…No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
source: iVerge

Y’all know I am not a fan of social media, especially Facebook. IMHO social media isn’t good for your emotional well-being, is a privacy and security nightmare, and is bad for society in general. I’ve posted numerous examples here in the past. Below is another one. It is written by Sandy Parakilas, former operations manager, platform team at Facebook.
We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself

“I led Facebook’s efforts to fix privacy problems on its developer platform in advance of its 2012 initial public offering. What I saw from the inside was a company that prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse. As the world contemplates what to do about Facebook in the wake of its role in Russia’s election meddling, it must consider this history. Lawmakers shouldn’t allow Facebook to regulate itself. Because it won’t…Facebook knows what you look like, your location, who your friends are, your interests, if you’re in a relationship or not, and what other pages you look at on the web…Facebook knows what you look like, your location, who your friends are, your interests, if you’re in a relationship or not, and what other pages you look at on the web…But when I was at Facebook, the typical reaction I recall looked like this: try to put any negative press coverage to bed as quickly as possible, with no sincere efforts to put safeguards in place or to identify and stop abusive developers…The company won’t protect us by itself, and nothing less than our democracy is at stake.“

This is the second anti-facebook statement by a former high-ranking Facebook employee this month.
Is anyone listening?