Happy 2020 folks – A few links that found their ways into my bookmarks lately:
Which emoji scissors close (wh0.github.io)
Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant criterion.
Yeah why would scissors work anyway ;)?
Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet (bbc.com)
Russia has successfully tested a country-wide alternative to the global internet, its government has announced.
Well this was announced for quite a while but it’s concerning if other nations start to follow suit.
How to Track POTUS (nytimes.com)
The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of the President.
Well nobody saw this coming, right? Right!
We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety and without including a means for lawful access to the content of communications to protect our citizens.
great… weakening E2E encrpyption for the greater good… Is this an rerun of the crypto exports all over again?
Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward (news.stanford.edu)
“We’re trying to develop automated vehicles that can handle emergency maneuvers or slippery surfaces like ice or snow,” Gerdes said. “We’d like to develop automated vehicles that can use all of the friction between the tire and the road to get the car out of harm’s way. We want the car to be able to avoid any accident that’s avoidable within the laws of physics.”
It’s insane to see an EV DeLorean driving that track without going off rails!
Fefes Blog (blog.fefe.de)
Und – dieses Detail hat mir echt die Schuhe ausgezogen – 60% der Energie dieses Kraftwerks geht wieder in den Betrieb des Tagebaus.
Kohle? Das kann weg oder?
Privacy Analysis of Tiktok’s App and Website (rufposten.de)
Another nail into TikToks Privacy coffin…
Nail 1: Tiktok – Überwachung und Kritik Nail 2: Cheerfulness and Censorship
The “Great Cannon” has been deployed again (cybersecurity.att.com)
These may seem like an odd selection of websites and memes to target, however these meme images appear on the LIHKG forums so the traffic is likely intended to blend in with normal traffic. The URLs are appended to the LIHKG image proxy url (eg; https://na.cx/i/6hxp6x9.gif becomes https://i.lih.kg/540/https://na.cx/i/6hxp6x9.gif?t=6009966493) which causes LIHKG to perform the bandwidth and computationally expensive task of taking a remote image, changing its size, then serving it to the user.
The Great Cannon has been deployed earlier already (also in the writeup) but It’s interesting how the DOS will be hit the target – by basically invalidating caches and re-rendering images.