Was he compelled to actually put his finger on the phone, or was he just compelled to surrender his fingerprints? TFA is not precisely clear about that. If it's the former then that's incontrovertibly a violation of the Fifth Amendment. If it's the latter then it's just routine--he's going to leave a trace somewhere eventually.
In either case, the moral of the story is, don't use your biometrics to lock your phone.
Microsoft--and let's be fair here, also Sony to a lesser degree--both really have long histories of abusing their customers. I'm really not a Nintendo fanboy, and I have lots of bad things to say about them, but at the very least they actually recognize that their customers are human beings who play games for fun, they aren't fleshbags with coin purses.
and fleeing prosecution to "frenemy" nations made you a genius security researcher as well. Maybe there's some kind of cause-effect relationship there that I don't understand. I look forward to Edward Snowden's future cure for cancer because apparently he is some kind of super genius who can achieve anything he wants.
Do you suppose he snatched all that intel and escaped unnoticed to Hong Kong using magic pixie dust?
The problem is your phone's GSM/CDMA radio is a proprietary black box and there's certain way to really shut it up besides breaking it or putting it behind a place where no transmissions can escape, like a freezer. All of the towers are poisoned because all of the American telecoms have no qualms with surrendering your privacy when presented with warrants, even if they're certainly unconstitutional.
So, if you're some kind of political dissident, or you're trying to escape an abusive person who has access to the telecoms' data*, it's probably best to not even use cellular communication at all. Use Tails. If you have no other choice but to use cellular transmissions, then it's probably better to have some kind of hotspot where you can communicate everything with end-to-end encryption from a trusted computer, rather than using the radio that comes in your phone and could potentially blabber about everything connected to it.
*You might think this unlikely, but once I was listening to an FM radio show (the Kane Show, for those in the Washington DC area). This show has a segment where people who know their significant other is cheating on them get revenge in various ways. Now, this might've been entirely staged or a hoax, but one woman told the hosts that she knew her boyfriend was cheating on her because she worked for Verizon (which was his provider) and monitored everything he did on his phone through 4G. Maybe the boyfriend had it coming in this particular case, but imagine some violent, stalkerish man doing this to women...
The trend for modern browsers to drop support for any standard more than five minutes old, and in doing so cut off huge amounts of valuable content developed over multiple decades, is exactly the opposite of what the Web is supposed to be about.
Right on. When the WWW was conceived in Tim Berners-Lee's head, I'm sure the very first thing he salivated over was all of people whose bank accounts were jacked via Flash-transmitted malware.
Most likely this will result in nothing, but I'm really, really hopeful that more countries will band together with France on this and hit Microsoft with some considerable sanctions, and switch off of Windows.
At the very least, this is something I can show to aggravating Microsoft fans/shills who are still in complete denial about the Orwellian nature of Windows 10.
It's perfectly fine that Microsoft spies on you because Windows 10 is free! Unlike evil GOOGLE, who reads your email to find people who do things they don't like!
God, I'm tired of refuting this stupid shill argument. Google's services are free. They tell you explicitly what they do with your data. Google does not have a monopoly on email, you're free to use many other providers. Since I'm concerned about my privacy, I only use gmail as a spam box.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been evasive and deceptive about collecting peoples' data, completely silent about what they *do* with that information, and they collect all this info by leveraging their de facto monopoly on the desktop OS market (yes, you can use macOS or GNU, but billions of dollars of legacy Win32 programs and contracts are wrapped up on Microsoft's end, and so switching is not so simple for the privacy-concerned).
The fact that you drank the kool-aid and think Flash is the problem is why you aren't seeing what's wrong with a browser discontinuing support for something that is still a presence on the Web.
Are you denying that Flash has been the vector for numerous security exploits?
TFS is rather concerning but it seems to be conjecture and interpretation of a dev's blog. Presumably (well, I hope at least) there will be some documentation about what the procedure is for turning off the boot-lock or what ever.
Pale Moon with Noscript. When they decide to start thinking for me, i'll look for another browser...
Explain how the browser is "thinking for you" by discontinuing support for something. Firefox is free software. Fork it and support Flash yourself if you care so much. Mozilla doesn't want to waste the resources on a plugin that causes problems for millions of people.
Imagine a car that doesn't drive to Walmart... because it disagrees with Walmart policies. Browser is a vehicle, it has no value on its own. And if that vehicle will start telling me where I should and shouldn't go, I will just ditch it.
"Click to activate" is fine. Making user aware that flash may not be safe is fine. But "discontinue support for Flash in Firefox" is not OK, regardless of what I think about Flash as a technology. While it remains on many sites, it must be supported for browser to be of any use.
Bad analogy. A car is like your keyboard and mouse. Discontinuing Flash in the browser is like the city preventing pipe builders from connecting people's drinking water pipes to the radioactive waste dump.
No it isn't. Windows failure to segment "Administrator" from "General Purpose User" for most of the last 25 years is. Flash is way down on the list. And besides which, this is a shitty way to enforce security. Click through access does nothing for security whatsoever except make people feel good. The user gets used to clicking through without thinking and you have the same vulnerability anyway.
I won't disagree with you on the Windows part, but click-to-access does have some purpose. At least then the browser will only use Flash for something the user explicitly requests like a game, rather than it automatically running in the background for God-knows-what.
The EOL date for technology is controlled by the users, not the manufacturer.
That's true for free software that can be forked when it's no longer maintained. But for proprietary software like Flash, the EOL is when the owner stops supporting it.
Flash is a particularly egregious example since its design is inherently insecure, but at at the very least Adobe still issues patches for the publicly known vulnerabilities. That won't be true forever.
Believe it or not, there's a lot of people who just run Firefox or Chrome fresh from the install without any tinkering or extensions. There's a reason why ads are still the biggest vector for malware.
I'm not exactly sure why Facebook owns both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In any case, if I understand correctly, WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption by default, whereas for Facebook Messenger you have to manually opt for a "private" conversation to get EtEE. It would be best if they deprecated the latter in favor of the former.
This is just a PR move. Everyone interested knows that Skype is insecure and can be tapped on demand by Microsoft and certainly many other groups. It's just that if they admit it the mainstream media will run stories about it, and damage the Skype brand. As long as they refuse to confirm or deny there is no story.
This is exactly right. There is no question that all Skype transmissions are practically open postcards. Microsoft avoids any bad publicity by just not bringing attention to the fact.
XP support's only dead if you don't have an extended-life contract with Microsoft, like the U.S. Navy does. And I would not think it unlikely that they use Skype.
Slashdot Mirror
Was he compelled to actually put his finger on the phone, or was he just compelled to surrender his fingerprints? TFA is not precisely clear about that. If it's the former then that's incontrovertibly a violation of the Fifth Amendment. If it's the latter then it's just routine--he's going to leave a trace somewhere eventually.
In either case, the moral of the story is, don't use your biometrics to lock your phone.
This is days before a huge LAN party I'm going to, I finally got everything set up the way I want it in Windows 10
IT BURNS
Isn't life grand, when you rent your computer from Microsoft rather than owning and controlling it?
"Going by the reviews, it appears Windows 10 Anniversary Update is substantially more stable"
How the hell can you judge an OS's stability before it's even out?
Microsoft--and let's be fair here, also Sony to a lesser degree--both really have long histories of abusing their customers. I'm really not a Nintendo fanboy, and I have lots of bad things to say about them, but at the very least they actually recognize that their customers are human beings who play games for fun, they aren't fleshbags with coin purses.
I use KeePassX, but there's also KeePass 2 and some other forks. Which one exactly will be audited?
It's not a secret that Clinton is a rather vile person, so whatever rude and dirty things she says to other Democrats is of no consequence.
The question is, is there anything in there that's incriminating? If not, it doesn't really matter.
Even Microsoft themselves aren't denying Windows 10 is a spy machine.
All of you who said that the privacy concerns were just FUD or that it's simple to turn off the surveillance, time to eat your crow.
and fleeing prosecution to "frenemy" nations made you a genius security researcher as well. Maybe there's some kind of cause-effect relationship there that I don't understand. I look forward to Edward Snowden's future cure for cancer because apparently he is some kind of super genius who can achieve anything he wants.
Do you suppose he snatched all that intel and escaped unnoticed to Hong Kong using magic pixie dust?
The problem is your phone's GSM/CDMA radio is a proprietary black box and there's certain way to really shut it up besides breaking it or putting it behind a place where no transmissions can escape, like a freezer. All of the towers are poisoned because all of the American telecoms have no qualms with surrendering your privacy when presented with warrants, even if they're certainly unconstitutional.
So, if you're some kind of political dissident, or you're trying to escape an abusive person who has access to the telecoms' data*, it's probably best to not even use cellular communication at all. Use Tails. If you have no other choice but to use cellular transmissions, then it's probably better to have some kind of hotspot where you can communicate everything with end-to-end encryption from a trusted computer, rather than using the radio that comes in your phone and could potentially blabber about everything connected to it.
*You might think this unlikely, but once I was listening to an FM radio show (the Kane Show, for those in the Washington DC area). This show has a segment where people who know their significant other is cheating on them get revenge in various ways. Now, this might've been entirely staged or a hoax, but one woman told the hosts that she knew her boyfriend was cheating on her because she worked for Verizon (which was his provider) and monitored everything he did on his phone through 4G. Maybe the boyfriend had it coming in this particular case, but imagine some violent, stalkerish man doing this to women...
Ha, you're right. Mea culpa, now allow me to clean the egg off my face....
The trend for modern browsers to drop support for any standard more than five minutes old, and in doing so cut off huge amounts of valuable content developed over multiple decades, is exactly the opposite of what the Web is supposed to be about.
Right on. When the WWW was conceived in Tim Berners-Lee's head, I'm sure the very first thing he salivated over was all of people whose bank accounts were jacked via Flash-transmitted malware.
Most likely this will result in nothing, but I'm really, really hopeful that more countries will band together with France on this and hit Microsoft with some considerable sanctions, and switch off of Windows.
At the very least, this is something I can show to aggravating Microsoft fans/shills who are still in complete denial about the Orwellian nature of Windows 10.
It's perfectly fine that Microsoft spies on you because Windows 10 is free! Unlike evil GOOGLE, who reads your email to find people who do things they don't like!
God, I'm tired of refuting this stupid shill argument. Google's services are free. They tell you explicitly what they do with your data. Google does not have a monopoly on email, you're free to use many other providers. Since I'm concerned about my privacy, I only use gmail as a spam box.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been evasive and deceptive about collecting peoples' data, completely silent about what they *do* with that information, and they collect all this info by leveraging their de facto monopoly on the desktop OS market (yes, you can use macOS or GNU, but billions of dollars of legacy Win32 programs and contracts are wrapped up on Microsoft's end, and so switching is not so simple for the privacy-concerned).
The fact that you drank the kool-aid and think Flash is the problem is why you aren't seeing what's wrong with a browser discontinuing support for something that is still a presence on the Web.
Are you denying that Flash has been the vector for numerous security exploits?
TFS is rather concerning but it seems to be conjecture and interpretation of a dev's blog. Presumably (well, I hope at least) there will be some documentation about what the procedure is for turning off the boot-lock or what ever.
Pale Moon with Noscript. When they decide to start thinking for me, i'll look for another browser...
Explain how the browser is "thinking for you" by discontinuing support for something. Firefox is free software. Fork it and support Flash yourself if you care so much. Mozilla doesn't want to waste the resources on a plugin that causes problems for millions of people.
Imagine a car that doesn't drive to Walmart... because it disagrees with Walmart policies. Browser is a vehicle, it has no value on its own. And if that vehicle will start telling me where I should and shouldn't go, I will just ditch it. "Click to activate" is fine. Making user aware that flash may not be safe is fine. But "discontinue support for Flash in Firefox" is not OK, regardless of what I think about Flash as a technology. While it remains on many sites, it must be supported for browser to be of any use.
Bad analogy. A car is like your keyboard and mouse. Discontinuing Flash in the browser is like the city preventing pipe builders from connecting people's drinking water pipes to the radioactive waste dump.
No it isn't. Windows failure to segment "Administrator" from "General Purpose User" for most of the last 25 years is. Flash is way down on the list. And besides which, this is a shitty way to enforce security. Click through access does nothing for security whatsoever except make people feel good. The user gets used to clicking through without thinking and you have the same vulnerability anyway.
I won't disagree with you on the Windows part, but click-to-access does have some purpose. At least then the browser will only use Flash for something the user explicitly requests like a game, rather than it automatically running in the background for God-knows-what.
The EOL date for technology is controlled by the users, not the manufacturer.
That's true for free software that can be forked when it's no longer maintained. But for proprietary software like Flash, the EOL is when the owner stops supporting it.
Flash is a particularly egregious example since its design is inherently insecure, but at at the very least Adobe still issues patches for the publicly known vulnerabilities. That won't be true forever.
Believe it or not, there's a lot of people who just run Firefox or Chrome fresh from the install without any tinkering or extensions. There's a reason why ads are still the biggest vector for malware.
Firefox is dead. Political correctness in Mozilla killed it. Too many wanking hipsters write software these days instead of riding their bicycles.
Blocking an enormous security hole is "political correctness"?
Did you flip this much of a shit when HTTPS was pioneered?
Now they are going to make people's lives more difficult vis a vis Flash because of some religious reason.
...
Right, "religious reason." Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that Flash has probably been the biggest security blackhole of all time.
I'm not exactly sure why Facebook owns both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In any case, if I understand correctly, WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption by default, whereas for Facebook Messenger you have to manually opt for a "private" conversation to get EtEE. It would be best if they deprecated the latter in favor of the former.
This is just a PR move. Everyone interested knows that Skype is insecure and can be tapped on demand by Microsoft and certainly many other groups. It's just that if they admit it the mainstream media will run stories about it, and damage the Skype brand. As long as they refuse to confirm or deny there is no story.
This is exactly right. There is no question that all Skype transmissions are practically open postcards. Microsoft avoids any bad publicity by just not bringing attention to the fact.
XP support's only dead if you don't have an extended-life contract with Microsoft, like the U.S. Navy does. And I would not think it unlikely that they use Skype.