Cybersecurity & Privacy
China opening up some US sites
[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2500”] Image credit: Wikimedia Commons - Creative Commons [/caption] The South China Morning Post is reporting that China will unblock some [primarily] US internet services (that are considered politically sensitive) from within the Shanghai free-trade zone. The government is opening up these sites to allow foreign workers to "live and work happily in the free-trade zone". The hope is that opening up these sites will make the free-trade zone more interesting to foreign companies (in addition to attractive regulations, taxation and limited control).
What is the dark web
Everyone knows what the world wide web (web for short) is and we all know it is incredibly massive containing most of our human knowledge. There is a part of the internet that we call the Dark web which is not indexed by search engines. This is a part of the web you can only get to if you know exactly where it is. Search engines (like Google) collect their information using a tool called spiders and crawlers. These crawlers read web pages and follow links in the pages to index the known web.
Is the Internet built for spying?
The one and only internet <img src="https://ekiledjian2.micro.blog/uploads/2025/b57c63d44e.jpg" alt=""> Edward Snowden is the (now famous) NSA leaker that exposed many of the US intelligence community's most secretive tools to the world. As expected, the public reacted (some would say over-reacted). There is one internet I believe the Internet will be recorded in history as one of the great evolutionary drivers. With the global availability of human knowledge and the ability to create brand new beneficial services (like the Scanadu home health monitor).
Move your email service to Switzerland
Since the PRISM revelations, we have seen a handful of "secure" email services shutter their doors or close their email services (Silent Circle, Lavabit, etc). Then came the shutdown of websites dependent on anonymity of sources (Groklaw). With all the turmoil, you may be looking for an email service less likely to bend to the will of the NSA (or other national security agency). I can't think of a better country than Switzerland. The email service recommended by the founder of Groklaw is now offering a less expensive lite of its email service.
Your counterfeit charger may kill you
I had written an article entitled "Counterfeit USB chargers on eBay may be dangerous" in November 2012 and I strongly recommend you read that article. Now we learn that a 23 year old chinese woman may have been electrocuted as she answered an iPhone that was charging. The South China Morning Post and Sina new now report that the woman may have been using a "3rd party" charger (aka counterfeit). CCTV claims to have a photo showing the damaged iPhone and the charger that cause the users unexpected death.
TrueCaller database stollen (millions of telephone numbers)
Another day brings news of another popular web service getting hacked and having its data stollen. The victim this time is a popular mobile app called TrueCaller. The Syrian Electronic Army claims to have breached TrueCaller's security by exploiting a WordPress flaw and stealing 7 databases. Sorry @Truecaller, we needed your database, thank you for it :) http://t.co/fC6ZyYAGTG #SEA #SyrianElectronicArmy — SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA12) July 17, 2013 The Syrian Electronic Army claims to have gained access to 1 million social networking accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google) through this exploit.
What info does Rogers shares with the Government
With all of the hoopla around Prism in the US, many Canadians may be wondering what Rogers' policy is about sharing customer data with the government. Here is their position: [@ekiledjian](https://micro.blog/ekiledjian) we'd only share information about a customer if a warrant has been issued 2/2 — Nicolas @ Rogers (@RogersNicolas) July 9, 2013 I've reached out to Telus, Bell and Fido & am waiting for their responses
A font that will protect your private information from spies
By now everyone is aware that companies and the government are spying on your every online transaction. They read your emails, instant messages and pretty much anything else you do online. Most of this analysis is done using automatic programs that rely on Optical Character recognition (OCR). OCR will detect what you are transmitting and will attempt to infer meaning. Companies do this to target advertising while governments do this for other reasons (insert you own justification). There is a typeface called ZXX that aims to make this a little more challenging for these organizations.
NSA is using Google, Facebook, Apple, Youtube, Dropbox to spy on users
The Guardian broke one of the biggest most important stories ever. It reported that the NSA has been collecting huge amounts of user data from internet giants such as Google, Apple, Skype, Yahoo, AOL and Youtube. The Guardian alleges that plans are in place to add Dropbox to the list of data providers. To be clear, all this collection seems to be done without a court order and performed with direct access to the servers of these companies. Based on a document authenticated by the Guardian, the NSA was secretly storing and analyzing search history, emails, file transfers, chats, stored documents, voice calls and more.
Washington Post claims Chinese access defense information
The Washington Post claims to ahev gained access to classified documents stating that Chinese hackers compromised systems contrianing information about the USA's highly classified cutting edge defense products (like the F-35 and PAC3 PAtriot missiles). The report goes on to list other critical defense systems like the Aegis ballistic-missile defense system, F/18, V22, etc. Could this report be the reason the US Government has started to take a much stronger and much more public stance against Chinese hackers?