Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Please STOP, stop, stop using #Google #reCaptcha on your websites!
You are giving away your visitors' #privacy and they cannot even opt-out and avoid it if they want to reach your contents.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-has-a-dark-side
#privacyMatters #webdevelopment

Nextcloud announces a new collaborative rich text editor called Nextcloud Text, not "a replacement to a full office suite, but rather a distraction-free, focused way of writing rich-text documents alone or together with others."
https://cloud.nextcloud.com/s/4Bi8CMtKLDe2otY

Always fun to read through this site. https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/police-raid-omnirat-developer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheHackersNews+%28The+Hackers+News+-+Cyber+Security+Blog%29&_m=3n.009a.2017.sb0ao0e4pk.192e

The “backfire effect” is mostly a myth, a broad look at the research suggests » Nieman Journalism Lab https://prismo.xyz/posts/ea38bd6d-c7a0-4145-b8bf-5c6f4e5222aa

California: Stop Face Surveillance on Police Body-Worn Cameras

Communities called for police officers to wear cameras with the hope that doing so would improve police accountability, not further mass surveillance. But today, we stand at a crossroads. Face recognition technology is now capable of being interfaced with body-worn cameras in real-time—a development that has grave implications for privacy, free speech, and racial justice.

Take Action

California: No Face Recognition on Body-Worn Cameras

That is why we have joined a coalition of civil rights and civil liberties organizations to support A.B. 1215, authored by California Assemblymember Phil Ting. This bill would prohibit the use of face recognition, or other forms of biometric technology, on a camera worn or carried by a police officer.

Ting’s bill, by targeting a particularly harmful application of face surveillance, is crucial not only to curbing mass surveillance, but also to facilitating better relationships between police officers and the communities they serve. As EFF activist Nathan Sheard told the California Assembly last month, using face recognition technology “in connection with police body cameras would force Californians to decide between actively avoiding interaction and cooperation with law enforcement, or having their images collected, analyzed, and stored as perpetual candidates for suspicion.”

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The Assembly passed the bill with a 45-17 vote on May 9, and it is now before the Senate.

Bans on government use of face surveillance have gathered support and momentum across the country. San Francisco in May banned city use of face surveillance. This month, Oakland, Calif. and Somerville, Mass. have both taken crucial steps toward adopting similar bans, with both measures now headed for full city council votes. Massachusetts is also considering a statewide moratorium on government use of face surveillance.

Meanwhile, law enforcement face recognition has come under heavy criticism at the federal level by the House Oversight Committee and the Government Accountability Office.

A.B. 1215 reflects widespread concern over face surveillance. Please urge your lawmakers to support this bill. We should not transform a tool intended to improve police accountability into a mass biometric surveillance network.

Sort of inspired by the results of a poll @fribbledom did regarding Free Software donations and a comment I made about an easy way to keep yourself on track with that, I started this simple project.

https://fosscan.org

I have to #dogfood the project so including a pic of my own (rapidly filling) #FOSScan

Victory: California Orders State Audit of Automated License Plate Readers

A California legislative committee today voted to direct the State Auditor to launch a probe into the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by law enforcement agencies. The audit will include the first comprehensive statewide survey of which agencies use this surveillance technology and what vendors they use. It will also include a deeper audit into four specific jurisdictions across the state. 

ALPRs are camera systems that scan the license plates of vehicles in order to track people in real-time and create search databases of drivers’ historical travel patterns. As a mass surveillance technology, ALPR captures information on every driver, regardless of whether their vehicle is under suspicion. 

In 2015, EFF supported legislation—S.B. 34—to require agencies to implement policies that protect civil liberties and privacy, and to maintain a detailed log of every time someone accesses ALPR data. In the years since, EFF has filed hundreds of public records requests and analyzed scores of policies only to discover that many agencies are either ignoring the law altogether or failing to follow some of its provisions. Often EFF’s research faces hurdles because agencies signed non-disclosure agreements with the primary vendor of the technology, Vigilant Solutions. 

EFF assisted Sen. Wiener in drafting the audit request in order to obtain an impartial review of the spread of ALPRs and to assess whether agencies are complying with S.B. 34. In addition to circulating a statewide questionnaire, the auditor will conduct investigations into the Fresno Police Department, Sacramento County Sheriff and Department of Human Assistance, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Marin County Sheriff/San Rafael Police Department (these north Bay Area jurisdictions share an ALPR system). 

California State Auditor Elaine Howle testified that the audit would take 2,800 hours of staff time and estimated that it will be completed in 7 months.

Last year, EFF collected records from 60 agencies in California: together they accounted for more than 1.1 billion license plate scans in 2017-2018 alone. Only about 0.1% were flagged as relevant to an investigation at the time they were collected. The ACLU of Northern California filed a lawsuit against ICE to obtain records about ALPR and found that immigration authorities routinely gained access to data collected by agencies in California. 

The audit is especially timely in light of news that U.S. Customs and Border Protections’ license plate vendor was breached, resulting in massive amounts of confidential records being leaked onto the Internet. While CBP’s system is outside the scope of the audit, it serves as a warning of how ALPR systems not only threaten privacy, but also create cybersecurity risks. 

A previous audit of the state’s gang databases found the systems were rife with errors, which led to the passage of two reform bills. The ALPR audit may take several months to complete, but we anticipate that the State Auditor will also make concrete recommendations for legislative reforms to reel in this controversial form of mass surveillance.

Related Cases:  Automated License Plate Readers- ACLU of Southern California & EFF v. LAPD & LASD Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)

The History of Cellular Network Security Doesn’t Bode Well for 5G

There’s been quite a bit of media hype about the improvements 5G is set to supposedly bring to users, many of which are no more than telecom talking points. One aspect of the conversation that’s especially important to get right is whether or not 5G will bring much-needed security fixes to cell networks. Unfortunately, we will still need to be concerned about these issues—and more—in 5G.

Past security flaws in the design of cell network infrastructure are being used for everything from large scale SMS spamming to enabling dragnet surveillance by law enforcement and spying in DC via cell site simulators (a.k.a. Stingrays, IMSI-catchers). Longtime cell network security researcher Roger Piqueras Jover has recently published a short but comprehensive reflection on the history of the cell security research that uncovered much of those flaws, and with it, his view of the security outlook for 5G.

Jover draws attention to how rapidly the field of cell network security research has been accelerating. It took researchers over 10 years after GSM was first standardized and deployed to find the first security flaws in the GSM (2G) protocol. For LTE (4G), it took approximately 7 years. Fast forward to the 5G standard, which was finalized  in March 2018. While there are currently no commercial implementations of 5G widely in use yet, researchers have already discovered over 6 critical security flaws in this new protocol.

Standardization efforts simply aren’t keeping up with the rapid rise of critical security flaws. The group responsible for maintaining the standards and incorporating security fixes (the 3GPP) primarily consists of big players in the telco industry, who don’t have much incentive to come up with and incorporate the critical user privacy fixes that are needed.

On the positive side, Jover points out that there are increasing efforts from researchers to explore potential fixes for many of the security problems in cell networks. In the recent past Ericsson has stepped up their efforts to fix some of the vulnerabilities in 5G’s identification and authentication procedures (i.e. the process that takes place between a mobile phone and a cell tower when each is verifying the other is who they claim to be). Similarly, researchers recently published a proof-of-concept paper proposing a PKI (public key infrastructure) & digital certificate system for the connection between mobile phones and cell towers (similar to SSL certificates and HTTPS).

Despite these efforts, for real change to take place, it must come from within: the 3GPP’s biggest players need to embrace the work required to fix the fundamental flaws that have plagued cell networks for years. Until then, our mobile devices are still vulnerable to being caught up in dragnet and targeted surveillance attacks. As it stands, 5G won’t be any sort of panacea—for increasing security, for improving wireless accessibility, or for solving the issues of broadband monopolies that contribute to each of these.

@switchingsocial
Here is another great note taking app: @joplinapp
There are clients for all platforms. Syncing could be done via @nextcloud or other syncing platforms.

Investors in Companies Profiting Off Student Loans Are Worried About Democrats’ Proposals to Cancel Debt

With ambitious proposals from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, momentum for canceling student debt is growing.

The post Investors in Companies Profiting Off Student Loans Are Worried About Democrats’ Proposals to Cancel Debt appeared first on The Intercept.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/hey-advertisers-track-this/

In the same spirit as Ad Nauseam. I like the intent, although it's questionable if it does much for me since I use Firefox through Tor and uBlock and uMatrix and cookies are on a whitelist-only... Nice to see Mozilla extend the middle finger to the surveillance capitalism forces though 🤷

Want to find your way from A to B?

You should try:
https://maps.openrouteservice.org

I've used it a couple of times today, and it was great.

* Uses OpenStreetMap data
* Service provided by HeiGIT
* Doesn't spy on you
* Maps look great
* Effective routes
* Share with friends
* Add your own tracks
* Export to GPX plus others
* Elevation profile

You can also go to C, D, E and many more. 😉

#OSM #maps #routes #routing #FOSS #FLOSS #CrowdSourced

...And 18 Point Back

Trump says E. Jean Carroll “isn’t his type.”

Rules For Thee, But Not For Me

Now for this episode of “It’s Okay if You’re a Republican!”

Amazon Troopers: Special Delivery

Service guarantees free shipping on items over $20!

History is Repeating Itself

Four European cartoonists on the rise of the far-right in their neck of the woods