CyberTechTips

When I first became a regular user of Linux, several years ago, I tried out different text editors and quickly discovered that emacs was my best choice. By coincidence, about that time I ran into an old emacs manual written by Richard Stallman in the dollar section of a used booksore. In that edition, near the end of the book, was a section on “Mail Amusements.” This documented the command “M-x spook” which adds “a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message.

A review of a book well worth reading.

A report by The Washington Post, which included information from Edward J. Snowden, suggested that roughly nine out of 10 communications involved people who were not the direct targets of surveillance.

If you have multiple hard drives in your Linux system, you don't have to treat them as different storage devices. With Btrfs, you can easily create a storage pool out of those hard drives.

In honor of the Fourth of July, let's talk a little about how horrifically paranoid and counterproductive the US government has become. And I'm not even talking about Congress! Instead I mean our old friend the No Such Agency, who, it turns out, have been singling out for special treatment anyone who displays any interest in tools which might make the NSA's life more difficult.

Find out everything there is to know about the secure email provider ProtonMail.

It's been revealed that major Hollywood movie studios including Disney, Paramount, Fox, Sony and Universal attempted to have torrent sites added to New Zealand's already controversial Internet child protection filter. Alongside ISPs' objections to the proposal, the Kiwi government rejected the request.

Jake Appelbaum et al., are reporting on XKEYSCORE selection rules that target users—and people who just visit the websites of—Tor, Tails, and other sites. This isn’t just metadata; this is “full take” content that’s stored forever. This code demonstrates the ease with which an XKeyscore rule can analyze the full content of intercepted connections. The fingerprint first checks every message using the “email_address” function to see if the message is to or from “bridges@torproject.org”. Next, if the address matched, it uses the “email_body” function to search the full content of the email for a particular piece of text – in this case, “https://bridges.torproject.org/”. If the “email_body” function finds what it is looking for, it passes the full email text to a C++ program which extracts the bridge addresses and stores them in a database. ...

Encryption is hard. When NSA leaker Edward Snowden wanted to communicate with journalist Glenn Greenwald via encrypted email, Greenwald couldn’t figure out the venerable crypto program PGP even after Snowden made a 12-minute tutorial video. Nadim Kobeissi wants to bulldoze that steep learning curve.

The A.V. Club digs deep into film, TV, music, games, books and more.

Anti-surveillance activists flew a blimp above the National Security Agency’s massive, $1.5 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah on Friday as an act of protest against the NSA’s contentious collection of vast amounts of the world’s digital data.

A small software app called Onionshare offers the most secure file sharing available. So why hasn't anyone heard of it? Well, mostly because it was

The U.S. was far and away the most popular hacking target in the world.

Hacking Team is an Italian malware company that sells exploit tools to governments. Both Kaspersky Lab and Citizen Lab have published detailed reports on its capabilities against Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry smart phones. They allow, for example, for covert collection of emails, text messages, call history and address books, and they can be used to log keystrokes and obtain search history data. They can take screenshots, record audio from the phones to monitor calls or ambient conversations, hijack the phone’s camera to snap pictures or piggyback on the phone’s GPS system to monitor the user’s location. The Android version can also enable the phone’s Wi-Fi function to siphon data from the phone wirelessly instead of using the cell network to transmit it. The latter would incur data charges and raise the phone owner’s suspicion...

We find Everything.

Coming soon to a protest near you: drones that fire pepper spray bullets. Desert Wolf’s website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second. In addition to pepper-spray ammunition, the firm says it can also be armed with dye-marker balls and solid plastic balls. The machine can carry up to 4,000 bullets at a time as well as “blinding lasers” and on-board speakers that can communicate warnings to a crowd.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the vast amount of data contained on modern cellphones must be protected from routine inspection.

The FBI plans to roll out the face recognition component of its massive Next Generation Identification (NGI) biometrics database this summer—but the Bureau has six years of catching up to do in explaining to Americans exactly how it plans to collect, use and protect this data.  Today we called on...

Businesses that do not encrypt their information risk losing it. Legal professionals risk private and confidential client information when they do not take steps to secure it properly. Your operating system has encryption built in, through Windows Bitlocker or Mac File Vault II. If you are one of those lawyers on an older version of […]

It's important to secure your wireless network with WPA2 encryption and a strong passphrase.

Newly uncovered components of a digital surveillance tool used by more than 60 governments worldwide provide a rare glimpse at the extensive ways law enforcement and intelligence agencies use the tool to surreptitiously record and steal data from mobile phones. The modules, made by the Italian company Hacking Team, were uncovered by researchers working independently \[…\]