Pretty horrible story of a US journalist who had his computer and phone searched at the border when returning to the US from Mexico. After I gave him the password to my iPhone, Moncivias spent three hours reviewing hundreds of photos and videos and emails and calls and texts, including encrypted messages on WhatsApp, Signal, … Read More “US Journalist Detained When Returning to US” »
They’re a thing: Developers say digital plates utilize “advanced telematics” — to collect tolls, pay for parking and send out Amber Alerts when a child is abducted. They also help recover stolen vehicles by changing the display to read “Stolen,” thereby alerting everyone within eyeshot. This makes no sense to me. The numbers are static. … Read More “Digital License Plates” »
Google has released an open-source cryptographic tool: Private Join and Compute. From a Wired article: Private Join and Compute uses a 1970s methodology known as “commutative encryption” to allow data in the data sets to be encrypted with multiple keys, without it mattering which order the keys are used in. This is helpful for multiparty … Read More “Google Releases Basic Homomorphic Encryption Tool” »
Wow, is this an embarrassing bug: Yubico is recalling a line of security keys used by the U.S. government due to a firmware flaw. The company issued a security advisory today that warned of an issue in YubiKey FIPS Series devices with firmware versions 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 that reduced the randomness of the cryptographic keys … Read More “Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw” »
It’s amazing: Then, about 20 hours into the recording from the Medusa’s fifth deployment, Dr. Robinson saw the sharp points of tentacles sneaking into the camera’s view. “My heart felt like exploding,” he said on Thursday, over a shaky phone connection from the ship’s bridge. At first, the animal stayed on the edge of the … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Fantastic Video of a Juvenile Giant Squid” »
Today is my last day at IBM. If you’ve been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of “Special Advisor.” As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write … Read More “I’m Leaving IBM” »
The digital forensics company Cellebrite now claims it can unlock any iPhone. I dithered before blogging this, not wanting to give the company more publicity. But I decided that everyone who wants to know already knows, and that Apple already knows. It’s all of us that need to know. Powered by WPeMatico
The Spanish Soccer League’s smartphone app spies on fans in order to find bars that are illegally streaming its games. The app listens with the microphone for the broadcasts, and then uses geolocation to figure out where the phone is. The Spanish data protection agency has ordered the league to stop doing this. Not because … Read More “Spanish Soccer League App Spies on Fans” »
MongoDB now has the ability to encrypt data by field: MongoDB calls the new feature Field Level Encryption. It works kind of like end-to-end encrypted messaging, which scrambles data as it moves across the internet, revealing it only to the sender and the recipient. In such a “client-side” encryption scheme, databases utilizing Field Level Encryption … Read More “MongoDB Offers Field Level Encryption” »
Forget deep fakes. Someone wearing a latex mask fooled people on video calls for a period of two years, successfully scamming 80 million euros from rich French citizens. Powered by WPeMatico