Most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Enter this weekend's reading topic: Privacy.
The Wire by Shawn Powers
In the US, there has been recent concern over ISPs turning over logs to the government. During the past few years, the idea of people snooping on our private data (by governments and others) really has made encryption more popular than ever before. One of the problems with encryption, however, is that it's generally not user-friendly to add its protection to your conversations. Thankfully, messaging services are starting to take notice of the demand. For me, I need a messaging service that works across multiple platforms, encrypts automatically, supports group messaging and ideally can handle audio/video as well. Thankfully, I found an incredible open-source package that ticks all my boxes: Wire.
Facebook Compartmentalization by Kyle Rankin
Whenever people talk about protecting privacy on the internet, social-media sites like Facebook inevitably come up—especially right now. It makes sense—social networks (like Facebook) provide a platform where you can share your personal data with your friends, and it doesn't come as much of a surprise to people to find out they also share that data with advertisers (it's how they pay the bills after all). It makes sense that Facebook uses data you provide when you visit that site. What some people might be surprised to know, however, is just how much. Facebook tracks them when they aren't using Facebook itself but just browsing around the web.
Some readers may solve the problem of Facebook tracking by saying "just don't use Facebook"; however, for many people, that site may be the only way they can keep in touch with some of their friends and family members. Although I don't post on Facebook much myself, I do have an account and use it to keep in touch with certain friends. So in this article, I explain how I employ compartmentalization principles to use Facebook without leaking too much other information about myself.
Protection, Privacy and Playoffs by Shawn Powers
I'm not generally a privacy nut when it comes to my digital life. That's not really a good thing, as I think privacy is important, but it often can be very inconvenient. For example, if you strolled into my home office, you'd find I don't password-protect my screensaver. Again, it's not because I want to invite snoops, but rather it's just a pain to type in my password every time I come back from going to get a cup of tea. (Note: when I worked in a traditional office environment, I did lock my screen. I'm sure working from a home office is why I'm comfortable with lax security.)
A Machine for Keeping Secrets? by Vinay Gupta
The most important thing that the British War Office learned about cryptography was how to keep a secret: Enigma was broken at Bletchley Park early enough in World War II to change the course of the war—and of history. Now here's the thing: only if the breakthrough (called Ultra, which gives you a sense of its importance) was secret could Enigma's compromise be used to defeat the Nazis. Breaking Enigma was literally the "zero-day" that brought down an empire. Zero-day is a bug known only to an attacker. Defenders (those creating/protecting the software) have never seen the exploit and are, therefore, largely powerless to respond until they have done analysis. The longer the zero-day is kept secret, and its use undiscovered, the longer it represents absolute power.
Own Your DNS Data by Kyle Rankin
I honestly think most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Even if they have some inkling along those lines, I still imagine many think of the data they leak only in terms of individual facts, such as their name or where they ate lunch. What many people don't realize is how revealing all of those individual, innocent facts are when they are combined, filtered and analyzed.
Cell-phone metadata (who you called, who called you, the length of the call and what time the call happened) falls under this category, as do all of the search queries you enter on the Internet.
For this article, I discuss a common but often overlooked source of data that is far too revealing: your DNS data.
Tor Security for Android and Desktop Linux by Charles Fisher
The Tor Project presents an effective countermeasure against hostile and disingenuous carriers and ISPs that, on a properly rooted and capable Android device or Linux system, can force all network traffic through Tor encrypted entry points (guard nodes) with custom rules for iptables. This action renders all device network activity opaque to the upstream carrier—barring exceptional intervention, all efforts to track a user are afterward futile.
from Linux Journal - The Original Magazine of the Linux Community https://ift.tt/2r43J48
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