Who wants a ride in the peeper-mobile?

from here and here

The privacy issues with Teslas are beyond what I would have expected. Intimate moments captured by your car and shared around the Tesla offices like a joke? Or that simply walking past one in a parking lot can get you captured on camera and uploaded and examined by data labelers? Yikes.

Can't unsee what you saw on Seesaw

from here and here

Apparently Seesaw suffered a credential stuffing attack and the attacker(s) sent Goatse pics all over the place. Now you might be thinking "Wait a minute, credential stuffing is hardly their fault", but there are defenses against such things, so the fact that the attack worked suggests that Seesaw did not have adequate defenses against what is a fairly ordinary kind of attack, all things considered.

How'd you like a reminder of your younger, cringier self

from here and here

And the cringey reminders are the best case scenario. There are probably worse memories stored in your Facebook account, and almost no one ever bothers to get rid of that stuff.

Younger people seem to have the good sense not to use Facebook in the first place, though. They've probably seen what it's like when people with numerous years of history on Facebook get haunted by the most painful or embarrassing moments of their past. 

How can we trust you with backdoors if you don't trust yourselves?

from here

It's really revealing that the police want backdoors to use against other police, apparently oblivious to the fact that that would allow those other police to use the same backdoors against them (and a whole bunch of others). Clearly they aren't putting a lot of thought into this. All they know how to do is ask for more power.

No network for you

from here

It seems like with everything that's going on right now, it's an excellent time to introduce this concept, because people will have a more visceral connection with what it means to isolate things.

Gotta do what the health authorities say

from here and here (source article)

I mean, of course cybercrime is going to increase when criminals are stuck at home. There aren't many other ways they can rip people off from the comfort of their own homes.

What would be really smart is if the diapers could change themselves

from here

I'm sure the security on these smart diapers is just as crappy as any other IoT device - and why not? Who would want to hack a diaper? But someone probably would want to hack the servers and get your personal information.

Open wide...

from here

The traditional wisdom might be that you should be grateful of a gift rather than inspect it too closely, but in this day and age, when the Internet puts countless victims at a crooks fingertips, it might be wiser to exercise and abundance of caution.

We lose one way or another

from here

Either the cars fail or the test (CAPTCHA) fails. Both kinds of failure are bad for us.

(Thanks to Valdis Klētnieks for bringing this great observation to my attention)

So that's why people like it so much

from here

I've worked in open, highly collaborative environments for my entire professional career and I'm very team-oriented - so it took me an entire month of working from home to realize the privacy benefits.

If someone had just told me to look at it from a privacy perspective I never would have hesitated.

Yes I scan

from here

If you want to make sure your telephone connection is working right you might say "can you hear me now?" to the party on the other end of the line. If you want to make sure your antivirus installation is working right, you'll want to send it the special 68 characters described on the EICAR site (unless you're using one of the few products that don't support that file).

Without the service what you have is a paper weight

from here

I've been thinking about this for a while, especially with regards to what the vendor is actually selling you. You think they're selling you a device? No, they're selling you a service that provides you with some convenience. You have to use their proprietary thing in order to make use of that service. You interact with the service through that thing - maybe also through your browser, but also through that proprietary thing if you want to get the benefits of the service.

You interact with a hydration tracking service by using a supposed smart water bottle supplied by the hydration tracking service provider. You get the benefits of the sleep tracking service by laying your head on a pillow-shaped sensor linked to that service. You get the convenience of app-enabled entry into your home by replacing the lock on your door with a device controlled by servers in some far away place.

So since smart devices aren't really smart and aren't really the device you think they are but rather special purpose dumb-terminals connected to a remote service, I figured a catch phrase might be a good way to clear things up. And since the "There is no spoon" model worked so well in the past, I give you

There are no smart devices, just digital services that have physical avatars

The Internet of Leaks

from here

There's a school of thought that it's not if you get breached but when. The logical conclusion to that line of reasoning is that everything gets breached if given enough time, and a breach of a DNA testing service/genealogy site is certainly not hurting that argument.

No wonder security feels like a chore

from here

As a bachelor, I frequently eat food out of the pot or casserole dish it was cooked in to reduce the amount of work involved in cleaning up afterwards. It may sound lazy but honestly, most innovations are designed to make our lives easier, so why get hung up on doing things that are unnecessary?

Now that I've realized how much time and effort is going into applying updates relative to how much benefit I'm getting out of those apps, I think maybe I should be applying the same philosophy to keeping apps that I do to using dishes. Reduce as much as possible.

Best Buy Peek Squad

from here

I always wondered about the privacy issues involved in repair shops, and now we know for sure that they violate customer privacy. Something to keep in mind next time you're considering taking your machine in for repair.

Crooks don't want to work harder than they have to

from here

If you're looking for money then you rob banks because that's where the money is. If you're looking for personal info then you rob Equifax because increasingly that's where the personal info is.

There's actually a couple of reasons why breaching Equifax may have been easier than compiling the data

1. Equifax may not have done a good job of protecting the data (we don't know yet)
2. The more breaches there are the more work is required to collect the data from all the various sources

There's more than one way to defeat a cryptosystem

found on ImgFlip

You can't go out on the Internet with all your bits showing

from here

I'm proposing the phrase

Data is naked without encryption

as a catch phrase to help get non-technical people to appreciate the need for encryption. They may have heard and repeated the "I've got nothing to hide" meme without realizing the irony of saying that while wearing clothes. This phrase references the clothing rebuttal to the 'nothing to hide' idea (which I sometimes express as "Then why are you wearing pants?") but brings it back around to data instead of leaving it in awkward personal territory, and also offers constructive advice (adopt encryption) instead of just being judgmental.

I haven't done many catch phrases over the years, but who knows, maybe this one will catch on.

Thank Judas for chocolate eggs

from here

The resurrection wouldn't have happened without the crucifixion, which in turn wouldn't have happened without Judas.

Now the argument could be made that the eggs have more to do with a pagan goddess named Ēostre, but most people don't remember or were never taught anything about pagan gods and goddesses, so without the Jesus connection it's probable Easter would have been lost to history like so many other things.

As if anyone maintains anything anymore

from here

Even if the devices update themselves automatically, the trend so far has been that they don't continue to operate normally while the update is taking place. This is probably because it's difficult to replace files while they're in use by a running process.

So imagine all the things in your life stop working temporarily. It doesn't have to be all a the same time to be a problem, in fact if it's not all at the same time it could be a bigger problem. With enough smart devices updating themselves, the chances of one updating after another becomes greater, and the longer the chain of successive devices updating themselves is the more of an intrusion into your life it becomes.