Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Digital security and its discontents—from Hillary Clinton’s emails to ransomware to Tor hacks—is in many ways one of the chief concerns of the contemporary FBI. So it makes sense that the bureau’s director, James Comey, would dip his toe into the digital torrent with a Twitter account. It also makes sense, given Comey’s high profile,…
The logo for the “Missing Richard Simmons” podcast by Dan Taberski. For decades, the fitness guru Richard Simmons was Hollywood’s most accessible celebrity. He was a talk show fixture, a leader of weight loss cruises and an instructor of $12 classes at his Beverly Hills workout studio, Slimmons. He greeted tour buses in front of…
It’s true. After days of speculation over whether the NSA knew about the Heartbleed vulnerability that affected as many as two thirds of the websites on the internet, two anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the NSA didn’t just know about it, they used it to gather intelligence. Well, you may be wondering, why wouldn’t they?…
Sean Spicer’s WHOIS data is public for everyone to see Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images By Brian Koerber2017-02-07 18:54:20 UTC After an election where data security became a regularly debated hot topic, you’d think everyone in politics would, for lack of better poetry, have their shit together. But of course, you’d be wrong. Until very recently,…
Amazon’s Echo devices and its virtual assistant are meant to help find answers by listening for your voice commands. However, police in Arkansas want to know if one of the gadgets overheard something that can help with a murder case. According to The Information, authorities in Bentonville issued a warrant for Amazon to hand over any audio or records…
Evernote just posted an update to its Privacy Policy that details how the company will make use of some new machine learning tools. In order for those tools to work, Evernote will need to allow a human review of your notes, and that’s not the only reason an employee would look at your notes. In…
When Hulk Hogan faced off in court against the Web site Gawker, earlier this year, it was easy to become distracted by the rococo tawdriness of the spectacle. After all, the case centered on the leak of a surreptitiously videotaped sexual encounter between Hogan, the professional wrestler, and the wife of his erstwhile best…
Web of Trust’s browser was pulled for being, well, untrustworthy. Browser add-on caught selling identifiable web histories. Source: Browser add-on caught selling identifiable web histories
Today ad-blocking is mostly restricted to desktop web browsers. But iOS 9, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, will include support for ad blockers when it becomes available in the fall. Several ad-blocking firms are already creating apps for the new OS; when it’s out, you’ll simply download an ad blocker and no longer have to…
Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye1,*, Laura Radaelli2, Vivek Kumar Singh1,3, Alex “Sandy” Pentland1 1Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 20 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 2Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aabogade 34, Aarhus, 8200, Denmark. 3School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University,…