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The EFF has confirmed that the Ring Doorbell leaks privacy information of it's customers: Which means that a device that is supposed to keep you secure is in some ways making your life insecure as you do not have control over what happens to the data that is collected on your phone. The list of companies that it gives the data to do not have the best record for privacy: Facebook on that list alone would give me pause to them getting data. The real issue is that you can by having an app on your phone de-anonymize the data that is supposed to be anonymized. The recent NYT article showed how this is done and this is a concern, especially for people with legitimate security concerns (politicians, celebrities, or anyone with kids, etc) so by having a 'security device' (and the app to controls it) leak information to companies that well helped put the orange faced baby in the office with the nuclear football is um quite concerning and doesn't really live up to the industry that Ring is playing in. If you want cameras on your doorbell you should probably look elsewhere for your gadget. The original source is the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-packed-third-party-trackers Hot hardware does an easier to read summary here: https://hothardware.com/news/eff-busts-ring-doorbell-app-for-leaking-private-customer-data-to-third-party-firms

Best Buy's Statement: Part of the Geek Squad Terms of Service: Immediately, after this section, they state by agreeing to the terms of service that you waive any "right you may have to a jury trial, and the right to participate in any class action, private attorney general action, or other representative or consolidated action as either a representative or member of a class, including any class arbitration or consolidated arbitration proceeding. The parties collectively and you, individually, acknowledge and do not agree to arbitration of any claim hereunder on a class-action, collective or representative basis under any circumstances." I am honestly, not that shocked at all in the actions of the FBI nor Geeksquad, I am however more than surprised by the way that Geek Squad seems to proactively search for this, while covering them selves completely for any thing plausible. It will be interesting especially if any Customers were blackmailed by Geek Squad employees over other acts such as nudes that they took themselves since Geek Squad has it set up in such a way to shield all the employees from any acts of Data Intrusion. It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays about. Sources: EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/geek-squads-relationship-fbi-cozier-we-thought ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/article/new-documents-reveal-fbi-paid-geek-squad-repair-staff-as-informants/ PCMag: https://www.pcmag.com/news/359710/the-fbi-paid-geek-squad-employees-as-informants Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/04/03/records-show-deep-ties-between-fbi-and-best-buy-computer-technicians-looking-for-child-porn/?utm_term=.60b6e2e05fbc GeekSquad TOS: http://storage.bestbuy.com/geeksquad/terms/total_tech_support/tts_2017_04_23_to_current_v1_english.pdf

E-Fail is a vulnerability found by German security scientists and may concern a lot of people that use encrypted e-mail services. The EFF has released its knowledge around E-Fail, how to react and how the security flaw works. Nice read in my opinion: https://www.eff.org/my/deeplinks/2018/05/not-so-pretty-what-you-need-know-about-e-fail-and-pgp-flaw-0 For thise who don't like long articles: Be safe and know your encryption!

Hold on to your butts! The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the United States Government over the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act. (Otherwise known as that horrible piece of legislation written by morons who don't know anything about the internet, computers, or how things should work). Further Reading Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/eff-sues-us-government-saying-copyright-rules-on-drm-are-unconstitutional/ It's about frigging time. The DMCA has long been a thorn in the side of the internet. And while yes, people do need to be able to protect their intellectual property, I feel we can all agree that the DMCA does it in a horrible way that basically assumes guilt on the part of the accused, and overall is rather easy for companies to misuse (Without and penalties for misusing it, as far as I am aware. If there are penalties please feel free to post what they are and how they work). As you can no doubt tell, I am biased here. But still I like to think we all agree that the DMCA needs to be trashed, and something fresh put in its place, maybe written by people who actually understand the internet, how powerful a tool it can be to inform and educate people, and who are also aware of the disturbing frequency with which copyright laws are abused Thoughts? Comments? Roaring Applause?

source: http://www.androidauthority.com/eff-vs-google-student-privacy-pledge-659298/ so, get this Google for Education provided students with Chromebooks but also signed Student Privacy Pledge to not sell or use data gathered on other purposes than education Google has already stated to the EFF that it will soon disable a setting for Chrome Sync on Chromebooks that are sold to schools --- oh boy ... if FTC finds google "guilty" no matter the fine they'll pay, it will be too small to atone for it when this data tracking / sharing / and selling will end? will it ever :mellow: can't hope but someone makes a huge blunder out of this, someday, and stir up the pot so hot that the right people will do something to stop it

Back in November T-Mobile were making headlines with their new service called "Binge On". What the service did was allow T-Mobile customers to stream video from selected sites, at reduced quality, and the data would not count towards their monthly data cap. It sounds great in theory, but as it turns out T-Mobile has gotten a lot of flack for not being completely honest with their service. Among the companies complaining is Google. Many users noticed that YouTube was not one of the video platforms included in the Binge On program. That should not matter that much. If it's not in the program it should just work like normal video streaming without Bringe On, right? Wrong! As it turns out, if you have Binge On enabled then T-Mobile will "optimize" all videos you stream or download. So if you got Binge On then T-Mobile will cap you at 480p YouTube videos as well as counting it towards your data cap. What is even scarier are the things the EFF found when they looked into Bringe On. The things they tested were: Streaming in Browser - This was a video using the HTML5 <video> tag on their own servers. Their own servers are not part of Binge On and will therefore count towards the data cap. Direct Download - This was a video file being downloaded to the phone. Direct download, not streamed. Direct Download (Non-Video File Extension) - This test was the same as the direct download, but instead of downloading let's say "video.mp4", it was "notavideo.exe". It was still the same file though. This was to done to test if T-Mobile used some deep packet inspection or similar technology to detect videos inside the TCP packet. The result is that yes, T-Mobile does throttle you. if you have Binge On then you will be capped at about 1.5Mbps download speed for all videos, regardless of them counting towards your data cap or not. T-Mobile are also able to detect which type of file you are downloading without having to rely on file names or content-type in the HTTP header, although they deny deep packet inspection. The EFF also inspected the video files they downloaded and found that there was no changes done to them in terms of quality. The only thing Binge On did to the video files were capping the download rate at 1.5Mbps. How did John Legere react to this? He reacted by saying Google were just out for attention and to the EFF he responded "who the fuck are you EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble and who pays you?". What do you think? I was very skeptical from the start and now that all this has been discovered I think it is a terrible program. If this is not breaking net neutrality then it is dangerously close to doing it. It also throttles users behind their backs which is a really bad thing to do. I am very disappointed by T-Mobil and I am appalled by John's ignorance. Someone had a fantastic twitter conversation with T-Mobile support about it (full conversation here).

We live in an age where most websites are free to use. The price we pay for this "openness" is that we have website adds. I see nothing wrong with Ads, as long as they don't track me and as long as they are not invasive. Yet, I am an AdBlock users, its pretty much the first thing I install after the browser and drivers. I just came back from HopeX where they gave a number of excellent presentations on similar subjects. We can all agree that ads are not going anywhere, they are too deeply embedded in the way in which the internet works nowadays. The one thing that DEEPLY OFFENDS ME LINUS is that you would even consider words like "scummy". And while you did apologize for it, and apology granted BTW, there are things that you are not considering. The main problem with ads, other than being simply annoying sometimes, is the fact that they are profoundly creepy. Most ads out there use cookies and other tracking methods to track you across the web. They gather RIDICULOUS amounts of data about you and your browsing habits. And for everyone out there saying they don't care, you are creeped out by the NSA but not this?! The only solution until recently was to use Adblock, it simply did not run the java-script code of these ads and therefore their trackers. Great, right? Well as it turns out, yes and no. Firstly: You're not supporting the producer of the article. While I'm not necessarily saying that you should "support" every media outlet out there, what I am saying is that you are getting a free service in exchange of having these ads present. Now before you say anything, there is another side to this, the fact that IT SHOULD BE THE JOB OF THE WEBMIN to use non intrusive ad platforms and to actually help the consumer help you. Nevertheless. Secondly: While Adblock will actually take care of blocking a good chunk of these tracking cookies and other semi-malicious bits of code, it will only block VISIBLE CODE, in other words, any kind of tracker that is not visible in the actual website is not going to be blocked. There is a way to change this, but it only helps a little bit and it involves manual configuring and manually adding blacklisted items to Adblock. Ok, so you've read this rant, what's the solution? Well, as it turns out there is this really cool new tool, in Alpha stage right now (More of a 90% working Beta really, I've talked to the creator) and which is semi-sponsored by the EFF which will actually learn about how cookies behave and eventually block them as well as most other web tracking services. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger There was a long discussion about the algorithms used and the features but the gist of it is this: 1. Its Open Source, its all on GitHub. 2. It stops you from being spied on better than AdBlock 3. It does not make you a bad person by not supporting others. I hope Linus reads this and I can't wait to see what you guys think.

What were they thinking with the price?! Do they think they're going to make money off of this?!? :huh: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822689033