Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else On Thursday, Bezos published emails in which the Enquirer’s parent company explicitly threatened to publish intimate photographs of Bezos and his mistress, which wereapparently exchanged between the two through their iPhones, unless Bezos agreed to a series of demands involving silence about the company’s conduct. In a perfect world, none of the sexually salacious material… Read More
QuadrigaX lost $150 million in cryptocurrencies because its founder died and only he knew the wallet password. Troubled Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX owes its customers $190 million and cannot access most of the funds, according to a court filing obtained by CoinDesk. In a sworn affidavit filed Jan. 31 with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, Jennifer Robertson, identified as the widow of QuadrigaCX founder Gerald Cotten, said the exchangeowes its customers roughly… Read More
Hundreds of Bounty Hunters Had Access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint Customer Location Data for Years In January, Motherboard revealed that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint were selling their customers’ real-time location data, which trickled down through a complex network of companies until eventually ending up in the hands of at least one bounty hunter. Motherboard was also able to purchase the real-time location of a T-Mobile phone on the black market… Read More
Open sourcing ClusterFuzz ClusterFuzz has found more than 16,000 bugs in Chrome and more than 11,000 bugs in over 160 open source projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz. It is an integral part of the development process of Chrome and many other open source projects. ClusterFuzz is often able to detect bugs hours after they are introduced and verify the… Read More
The Big DNS Privacy Debate at FOSDEM This weekend at the excellent FOSDEM gathering there were no less than three presentations on DNS over HTTPs. Daniel Stenberg presented a keynote session “DNS over HTTPS – the good, the bad and the ugly” (video), Vittorio Bertola discussed “The DoH Dilemma” while Daniel, Stéphane Bortzmeyer and I formed a DNS Privacy Panel expertly moderated… Read More
A Scammer Used YouTube’s Copyright System to Ransom Creators A scammer was found to be manually abusing YouTube’s automated copyright system in an effort to hold YouTube channels ransom. By submitting multiple fake copyright “flags” on videos, the scammer was able to bring at least two YouTube accounts to the brink of automatic deactivation under YouTube’s “three strikes” policy, even getting past YouTube employees… Read More
Mayhem, the Machine That Finds Software Vulnerabilities, Then Patches Them Back in 2011, when the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that “software is eating the world,” it was still a fresh idea. Now it’s obvious that software permeates our lives. From complex electronics like medical devices and autonomous vehicles to simple objects like Internet-connected lightbulbs and thermometers, we’re surrounded by software. And that means we’re… Read More