The recent news that a conservative data analytics firm left 198 million voter records unsecured online for nearly two weeks should give every American pause, particularly at a time when intelligence officials say the Russian government actively seeks to undermine American elections.
Mexican journalist and human rights lawyers have been getting some troubling texts.
Some come in the guise of bills to pay, according to a new report from Citizen Lab. Some are dressed as AMBER alerts. Then there are texts that threaten kidnapping, and those that flaunt details of the recipients' lives.
In the wake of the new Investigatory Powers Act and the effect it might have on end-to-end crypto, and the further privacy- and security-eroding effects of the Digital Economy Act, we thought it was high time to write a guide on building your own VPN. If you want to keep your data safe and your browsing habits private, funnelling everything through your own VPN is one of the best things you can do.
The awesome operating system Linux is free and open source. As such, there are thousands of different ‘flavours’ available – and some types of Linux such as Ubuntu are generic and meant for many different uses.
But security-conscious users will be pleased to know that there are also a number of Linux distributions (distros) specifically designed for privacy. They can help to keep your data safe through encryption and operating in a ‘Live’ mode where no data is written to your hard drive in use.
An enterprising Gizmodo reporter seems to have found the private Twitter account of the head of the FBI, James Comey.
In a Thursday afternoon e-mail to Ars, the FBI National Press Office wrote: "We don’t have any comment."
The reporter, Ashley Feinberg, wrote up a detailed narrative as to how she was able to locate him by first finding his son, Brien Comey, on Instagram. When she followed this lead, even though that account is locked, Instagram suggested other accounts that Feinberg may wish to follow. Those included one named @reinholdniebuhr.
The US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to eliminate ISP privacy rules, following the Senate vote to take the same action last week. The legislation to kill the rules now heads to President Donald Trump for his signature or veto.
The White House issued a statement today supporting the House's action, and saying that Trump's advisors will recommend that he sign the legislation. That would make the death of the Federal Communications Commission's privacy rules official.
The US Senate yesterday voted to eliminate privacy rules that would have forced ISPs to get your consent before selling Web browsing history and app usage history to advertisers. Within a week, the House of Representatives could follow suit, and the rules approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year would be eliminated by Congress.
A coalition of tech companies and civil liberties organizations issued a letter slamming a proposal that Customs and Border Protection officials could begin collecting social media and mobile device passwords as a condition for travelers to enter the United States.
The letter's signatories also include individual tech and legal experts from universities around the world, as well as 50 groups representing journalistic, digital privacy, constitutional and religious interests.
When Ryan Lackey travels to a country like Russia or China, he takes certain precautions: Instead of his usual gear, the Seattle-based security researcher and founder of a stealth security startup brings a locked-down Chromebook and an iPhone SE that’s set up to sync with a separate, non-sensitive Apple account. He wipes both before every trip, and loads only the minimum data he’ll need. Lackey goes so far as to keep separate travel sets for each country, so that he can forensically analyze the devices when he gets home to check for signs of each country’s tampering.
US Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has informed Congress that the DHS is considering requiring refugees and visa applicants from seven Muslim-majority nations to hand over their social media credentials from Facebook and other sites as part of a security check. "We want to get on their social media, with passwords: What do you do, what do you say?" he told the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday. "If they don't want to cooperate, then you don't come in."
