This week in computer security

Originally Posted by Ripper
Facebook patents system to eavesdrop on your phone mic, to work out what your viewing habits are.

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo…ening-tv-shows

This is crazy…

It's not crazy. Delete facebook account already and forget everything about it.
By that I don't mean only the platform called facebook, but also facebook's messenger, instagram and whatsapp.
I mean, you do shove off those different religious groups knocking at your door and pulling your sleeve on street. It's the same shit, different wrapping. And you don't need any of it.

Just get a mic/camera with a manual switch. And turn your dumb phones off.

The problem isn't facebook. You might as well as toss your computer in the trashcan or delete your browser. Mind you if you don't like facebook don't use it but just about every major website is tracking you in some fashion whether it be amazon, google, yahoo, pick your favorite.

Originally Posted by joxer
It's not crazy. Delete facebook account already and forget everything about it.
By that I don't mean only the platform called facebook, but also facebook's messenger, instagram and whatsapp.
I mean, you do shove off those different religious groups knocking at your door and pulling your sleeve on street. It's the same shit, different wrapping. And you don't need any of it.

Originally Posted by you
The problem isn't facebook.

Did I say it is?
The problem is addiction to facebook people refuse to shake off.

It would be nice to see some real data indicating what people do daily in hours that is er whatever. This could include watching tv, playing games, surfing the web, using facebook or twitter or instagram or …. rather than have someone just decide arbitrarily what is an issue.
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I can't comment for others but I personally only use facebook once every 2 or 3 weeks which is a bit high but not (imho) excessive.
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It would also be amusing to figure out if game playing or tv or facebook or twitter or instagram or forum usage is worse or better for people (of course first we would have to formally define worse or better).

Originally Posted by joxer
Did I say it is?
The problem is addiction to facebook people refuse to shake off.

Originally Posted by you
It would be nice to see some real data indicating what people do daily in hours that is er whatever.

Good luck with facebook allowing true numbers publically.

Then why did you bring this up in the first place if it is utterly non-relevant ?

Originally Posted by joxer
Did I say it is?
The problem is addiction to facebook people refuse to shake off.

Originally Posted by joxer
It's not crazy. Delete facebook account already and forget everything about it.

They'll follow you. They already follow you through EVERY web page with that f… icon on it. It tracks you, kind of.

Yea the fix to that is to turn off cookies (sadly some browsers like firefox no longer let you turn off java script).
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vm's are good for this too but then we complain about things like having to reenter credentials…

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
They'll follow you. They already follow you through EVERY web page with that f… icon on it. It tracks you, kind of.

Firefox does let you disable javascript. You do it through about:config, or you can use an addon to give more control.

Also, they offer "multi account containers", which essentially means you can lock certain sites into their own tabs that share no data with any other sites. There's an addon specifically for locking down Facebook, or the full-fat version you can configure for any sites.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/fac…ner-extension/

I still say the safest thing is to cut all connections with Facebook's sites and standalone malware, but for a random user this would do.

I still say facebook is relatively harmless compare to most sites folks visit.

Originally Posted by joxer
I still say the safest thing is to cut all connections with Facebook's sites and standalone malware, but for a random user this would do.

That's wishful thinking.

Don't confuse wishful thinking with fact. The scary thing is that you don't realize how harmful some sites can be ….

Originally Posted by joxer
That's wishful thinking.

We send out cookies. They go quite nicely with a decent cup of tea, with coffee not so good, but they are mostly harmless

Scientists at the TU ("Technical University") in Dresden seemingly found a way to anonymise laser printer printouts again.
https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/new…erueberwachung
You know, printers are printing tiny dots - and that appears to be no conspiracy theory at all - which can track down the printer. Most recent example appears to be the woman Reality Leigh Winner, who was arrested after giving out printed sheets in a "whistleblower" way.

Voting machines in the USA are so insecure that an 11 year old can 'hack' it and change the vote count in under 30 minutes:
https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/13/…licas-def-con/

The insecurity of voting machines is the reason we went back to using a red pencil again several years ago, which is more secure, but less accurate.

The sad thing is, so much of our IT infrastructure is still feeble in terms of security and quality. Things like voting machines, critical to the functioning of democracy itself, are outsourced to some schmuck IT company that put in the best bid, and delivers crap that no-one in the government understands well enough to analyze properly.

For now, stick to paper - it works well enough, and it's not that big a deal to organise properly monitored public counts.