Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Taxes Are Down, Down, Down

As long as I’m making budget charts, here’s another one for you: Over the past 40 years, the total tax burden in the US has declined from about 18 percent of GDP to about 16 percent of GDP. Keep this in mind the next time you hear some Republican on TV moaning about the immense […]

Citing Intense Public Interest, Judge Unseals Files in Case of Trump Associate Felix Sater

The decision came after The Intercept sought access to the filings, some of which have remained under seal for two decades.

The post Citing Intense Public Interest, Judge Unseals Files in Case of Trump Associate Felix Sater appeared first on The Intercept.

How fat prawns can save lives

New research provides a roadmap for how entrepreneurs can harness freshwater prawns' voracious appetite for snails to reduce the transmission of schistosomiasis-causing parasites while still making a profit selling the tasty animals as food. The study shows how small-scale farming of freshwater prawns could be a win-win for communities in emerging and developing economies where schistosomiasis is common.

He Was Told to Go Back to Africa. Instead, He May Go to the U.S. Senate.

Helena, Montana, mayor Wilmot Collins was reminded by Donald Trump’s recent comments of the racism he faced when he first came to the U.S. from Liberia.

The post He Was Told to Go Back to Africa. Instead, He May Go to the U.S. Senate. appeared first on The Intercept.

As a psychiatrist, if I had severe depression I’d choose ECT | Mariam Alexander | Opinion | The Guardian https://prismo.xyz/posts/3490ef9c-918d-4deb-a553-c0573511c926

https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-development-fund/

Pretty neat! If they keep this up Blender might start displacing Autodesk (apparently people aren't happy with that anymore)

Amazon customer service representatives report 24 hour shifts - Vox https://prismo.xyz/posts/fc43509d-d33d-4493-b5ba-d7fbdfe11ccc

Heart disease biomarker linked to paleo diet

People who follow the paleo diet have twice the amount of a key blood biomarker linked closely to heart disease, the world's first major study examining the impact of the diet on gut bacteria has found.

San Juan Takes to the Streets

Puerto Rico changed after Maria – and protestors aren’t backing down.

Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

What does the future hold? Ask our seer, Ben Passmore.

Why Am I Scared to Ride a Bike?

To save lives, cities need to design roads for people—not cars.

10 Years of Working In These Times: The 25 Best Stories

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Working In These Times. When I became its editor, in 2012, the site had just turned three.

Founded in July 2009 as a daily labor “blog,” WITT had already become much more, providing full-length, original reporting on each and every major labor story of the day.

We had a void to fill. With the exception of Steven Greenhouse at the New York Times, major newspapers lacked a single reporter dedicated to labor (and most still do). When they deigned to cover labor at all, mainstream outlets published management-slanted pieces in their business sections.

Working In These Times boasted a fleet of top-notch reporters: some casualties of downsized U.S. newsrooms whom we’d lucked out to inherit, some young journalists just cutting their teeth, and David Moberg, a veteran In These Times reporter who had been pounding the picket lines since the magazine’s founding in 1976.

Those reporters—David, Stephen Franklin, Kari Lydersen, Michelle Chen, Sarah Jaffe, Josh Eidelson and many more—taught me the principles of labor reporting: Cheerlead the labor movement and the power of unions, while keeping a critical distance so as to inform labor strategy. Talk to the rank and file. Make sure workers understand the risks they’re taking when speaking out about workplace conditions. Don’t twist their arms to “get the story.”

And the golden rule: Report from the workers’ perspective, not the bosses’.

Reading through the more than 4,500 articles we’ve posted in 10 years of Working In These Times, what I noticed most is the variety of workers you meet. Coal miners, transit workers, teachers and domestic workers: the working people who rarely get a forum to tell their stories.

What struck me, too, was how dogged labor’s fights are—and how long they’ve lasted. Hotel workers spoke out about sexual harassment years before the #MeToo movement erupted. The Chicago teachers walkout in 2012 helped lay the groundwork for the teachers strike wave that took the country by storm in 2018. Fight for $15 protesters demonstrated for years before $15 minimum wage ordinances were won in cities across the country (and the position became de rigueur for Democrats seeking office). Domestic workers came together in New York nine years before the first national Domestic Workers Bill of Rights was introduced, just last week.

In the stories below, which chronicle the iconic labor battles of the last 10 years, you’ll meet the workers who formed the backbone of those fights and many more.

Bad Religion expand fall tour

While the band is already touring in support of their new album, Age of Unreason, Bad Religion have added some additional tour dates to the US leg of the tour. The newly added dates will begin September 17 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL and wrap October 6 in San Diego, CA. Tickets are on sale as […]

The post Bad Religion expand fall tour appeared first on Dying Scene.

Librem 5 Devkit on a train, it just works.

Border Patrol’s Toxic Culture Goes Way Beyond Facebook Groups. It’s Actually for Sale on a T-Shirt.

A Border Patrol agent who allegedly hit a migrant with his agency truck is going on trial next month, and a federal judge ruled Thursday that some of the racist text messages he sent before and after hitting the man can be used in court. On December 3, 2017, Matthew Bowen, an agent patrolling in […]

Kazakhstan government is now intercepting all HTTPS traffic - which is why a trusted root certificate is important https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-intercepting-all-https-traffic/

Don’t Let Encrypted Messaging Become a Hollow Promise

Why do we care about encryption? Why was it a big deal, at least in theory, when Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook would move to end-to-end encryption on all three of its messaging platforms? We don’t just support encryption for its own sake. We fight for it because encryption is one of the most powerful tools individuals have for maintaining their digital privacy and security in an increasingly insecure world.

And although encryption may be the backbone, it’s important to recognize that protecting digital security and privacy encompasses much more; it’s also about additional technicalfeatures and policy choices that support the privacy and security goals that encryption enables.

But as we careen from one attack on encryption after another by governments from Australia to India to Singapore to Kazakhstan, we risk losing sight of this bigger picture. Even if encryption advocates could “win” this seemingly forever crypto war, it would be a hollow victory if it came at the expense of broader security. Some efforts—a recent proposal from Germany comes to mind—are as hamfisted as ever, attempting to give government the power to demand the plaintext of any encrypted message. But others, like the GCHQ’s “Ghost” proposal, purport to give governments the ability to listen in on end-to-end encrypted communications without “weakening encryption or defeating the end-to-end nature of the service.” And, relevant to Facebook’s announcement, we’ve seen suggestions that providers could still find ways of filtering or blocking certain content, even when it is encrypted with a key the provider doesn’t hold.

So, as governments and others try to find ways to surveil and moderate private messages, it leads us to ask: What policy choices are incompatible with secure messaging? We know that the answer has to be more than “don’t break encryption,” because, well, GCHQ already has a comeback to that one. Even when a policy choice technically maintains the mathematical components of end-to-end encryption, it can still violate the expectations users associate with secure communication.

So our answer, in short, is: a secure messenger should guarantee that no one but you and your intended recipients can read your messages or otherwise analyze their contents to infer what you are talking about. Any time a messaging app has to add “unless...” to that guarantee, whether in response to legislation or internal policy decisions, it’s a sign that messenger is delivering compromised security to its users.

EFF considers the following signs that a messenger is not delivering end-to-end encryption: client-side scanning, law enforcement “ghosts,” and unencrypted backups. In each of these cases, your messages remain between you and your intended recipient, unless...

Client-side scanning

Your messages stay between you and your recipient....unless you send something that matches up to a database of problematic content.

End-to-end encryption is meant to protect your messages from any outside party, including network eavesdroppers, law enforcement, and the messaging company itself. But the company could determine the contents of certain end-to-end encrypted messages if it implemented a technique called client-side scanning.

Sometimes called “endpoint filtering” or “local processing,” this privacy-invasive proposal works like this: every time you send a message, software that comes with your messaging app first checks it against a database of “hashes,” or unique digital fingerprints, usually of images or videos. If it finds a match, it may refuse to send your message, notify the recipient, or even forward it to a third party, possibly without your knowledge.

Hash-matching is already a common practice among email services, hosting providers, social networks, and other large services that allow users to upload and share their own content. One widely used tool is PhotoDNA, created by Microsoft to detect child exploitation images. It allows providers to automatically detect and prevent this content from being uploaded to their networks and to report it to law enforcement. But because services like PhotoDNA run on company servers, they cannot be used with an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, leading to the proposal that providers of these services should do this scanning “client-side,” on the device itself.

The prevention of child exploitation imagery might seem to be a uniquely strong case for client-side scanning on end-to-end encrypted services. But it’s safe to predict that once messaging platforms introduce this capability, it will likely be used to filter a wide range of other content. Indeed, we’ve already seen a proposal that Whatsapp create “an updatable list of rumors and fact-checks” that would be downloaded to each phone and compared to messages to “warn users before they share known misinformation.” We can expect to see similar attempts to screen end-to-end messaging for “extremist” content and copyright infringement. There are good reasons to be wary of this sort of filtering of speech when it is done on public social media sites, but using it in the context of encrypted messaging is a much more extreme step, fully undermining users’ ability to carry out a private conversation.

Because all of the scanning and comparison takes place on your device, rather than in the cloud, advocates of this technique argue that it does not break end-to-end encryption: your message still travels between its two “ends”—you and your recipient—fully encrypted. But it’s simply not end-to-end encryption if a company’s software is sitting on one of the “ends” silently looking over your shoulder and pre-filtering all the messages you send.

Messengers can make the choice to implement client-side scanning. However, if they do, they violate the user expectations associated with end-to-end encryption, and cannot claim to be offering it.

Law enforcement “ghosts”

Your messages stay between you and your recipient...unless law enforcement compels a company to add a silent onlooker to your conversation.

Another proposed tweak to encrypted messaging is the GCHQ’s “Ghost” proposal, which its authors describe like this:

It’s relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call. The service provider usually controls the identity system and so really decides who’s who and which devices are involved—they’re usually involved in introducing the parties to a chat or call. You end up with everything still being end-to-end encrypted, but there’s an extra ‘end’ on this particular communication. This sort of solution seems to be no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips that our democratically elected representatives and judiciary authorize today in traditional voice intercept solutions and certainly doesn’t give any government power they shouldn’t have.

But as EFF has writtenbefore, this requires the provider to lie to its customers, actively suppressing any notification or UX feature that allow users to verify who is participating in a conversation. Encryption without this kind of notification simply does not meet the bar for security.

Unencrypted backups by default

Your messages stay between you and your recipient......unless you back up your messages.

Messaging apps will often give users the option to back up their messages, so that conversations can be recovered if a phone is lost or destroyed. Mobile operating systems iOS and Android offer similar options to back up one’s entire phone. If conversation history from a “secure” messenger is backed up to the cloud unencrypted (or encrypted in a way that allows the company running the backup to access message contents), then the messenger might as well not have been end-to-end encrypted to begin with.

Instead, a messenger can choose to encrypt the backups under a key kept on the user’s device or a password that only the users know, or it can choose to not encrypt the backups. If a messenger chooses not to encrypt backups, then they should be off by default and users should have an opportunity to understand the implications of turning them on.

For example, WhatsApp provides a mechanism to back messages up to the cloud. In order to back messages up in a way that makes them restorable without a passphrase in the future, these backups need to be stored unencrypted at rest. Upon first install, WhatsApp prompts you to choose how often you wish to backup your messages: daily, weekly, monthly, or never.  In EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense, we adviseusers to never back up their WhatsApp messages to the cloud, since that would deliver unencrypted copies of your message log to the cloud provider. In order for your communications to be truly secure, any contact you chat with must do the same.

Continuing the fight

In the 1990s, we had to fight hard in the courts, and in software, to defend the right to use encryption strong enough to protect online communications; in the 2000s, we watched mass government and corporate surveillance undermine everything online that was not defended by that encryption, deployed end-to-end. But there will always be attempts to find a weakness in those protections. And right now, that weakness lies in our acceptance of surveillance in our devices. We see that in attempts to implement client-side scanning, mandate deceptive user interfaces, or leak plaintext from our devices and apps. Keeping everyone’s communications safe means making sure we don’t hand over control of our devices to companies, governments, or other third parties.

The Northernmost Settlement on Earth Cracked 70 Degrees For the First Time This Week #climatechange #climatecrisis
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-northernmost-settlement-on-earth-cracked-70-degrees-1836527516

Germany has banned its #schools from using cloud-based productivity suites from Microsoft, Google, and Apple, because the companies weren't meeting the country's #privacy requirements. 
https://t.co/smlJIQ0sNA

Victory! Oakland City Council Votes to Ban Government Use of Face Surveillance

Earlier this week, Oakland’s City Council voted unanimously to ban local government use of face surveillance. The amendment to Oakland’s Community Surveillance and Community Safety Ordinance will make Oakland the third U.S. city to take this critical step toward protecting the safety, privacy, and civil liberties of its residents. 

Local governments like those in San Francisco, CA; Somerville, MA; and now Oakland, CA are leading the way in proactively heading off the threat of this particularly pernicious form of surveillance. However, after a series of hearings by the House Oversight Committee, national and international policymakers have also begun to look closely at the technology’s threat to human rights and civil liberties. 

On the same day that Oakland’s City Council voted to ban government use of the technology, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act (H.R. 3494) that would require the Director of National Intelligence to report on the use of face surveillance by intelligence agencies. David Kaye, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, has also called for a moratorium on face surveillance saying, "Surveillance tools can interfere with human rights, from the right to privacy and freedom of expression to rights of association and assembly."

Over the last several years, EFF has continuously voiced concerns over the First and Fourth Amendment implications of government use of face surveillance. These concerns are exacerbated by research conducted by MIT’s Media Lab regarding the technology’s high error rates for women and people of color. However, even if manufacturers are successful in addressing the technology’s substantially higher error rates for already marginalized communities, government use of face recognition technology will still threaten safety and privacy, chill free speech, and amplify historical and ongoing discrimination in our criminal system.

Even as Oakland’s face surveillance ban awaits a procedural second reading, lawmakers and community members across the country are considering their own prohibitions and moratoriums on their local government’s use. This week, the Public Safety Committee in the neighboring city of Berkeley, CA held a hearing on their own proposed ban, and lawmakers across the country took to Twitter to share news of their like intentions.

Massachusetts residents, beyond Somerville, hoping to protect their communities from face surveillance should contact their state lawmakers in support of S.1385 and H.1538, the proposed bills calling for a moratorium throughout the Commonwealth. Outside of Massachusetts, as governing bodies across the country adjourn for their summer recess, now is an opportune time to call on your own representatives to take a stand for the rights of their constituents, by banning government use of face surveillance in your community.