Also, wipe your hard drives before you throw out computers. Folks throw PCs out all the time in my office building, and I pick them up to refurb and ‘freecycle’ them. More than half the time, I’ll plug it in to see if it will boot it up, and the drives are still intact, and loaded up with personal data… Then I plug in my DBAN USB stick and wipe the drive(s) 3x.
I work in IT. Most systems have laughable security. Passwords are often saved in plain text in scripts or config files. I went to a site to help out a very large provincial governmental organization move some data out of one system and into another. They sat me down with a loaner laptop and the guy logged me into his user account on the server. When I asked for escalated privileges, he told me he’d go get someone who knew the service account passwords.
After a few minutes, I started poking around on my own… And had administrative access within an hour. I could read the database (raw data), access documents, start and stop the software, plus, figured out how to get into the upstream system that fed data to this server… I was working on figuring out the software’s admin password when the guy came back. I’m sure that given some more time, I could have rooted the box because the OS hadn’t been updated in years.
Yes, in very poor countries, they subsidize the data usage for WhatsApp, so that it’s free to end users. It’s extraordinarily popular in Asia and Africa as a result.
And now Meta knows when she’s having her period, the phone number of her gynecologist, and what period products she buys… thanks to the app spying on her health and fitness, contact, and shopping data.
#WTF
I’m going to test blocking YouTube for having unskippable ads. :)
I’m truly surprised there hasn’t been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
I suspect the problem is that people wouldn’t even pay a penny per video to content creators. From what I’ve seen of other competing video sites, there’s a really serious moderation issue stopping them from wide adoption… So many of the competing sites are full of flat earth / anti-vax / pro-fascism content…
And FYI, the info about Signal was confirmed as they received a subpoena a couple years back, and their response was part of the public court records.
Oh, and I had a thought about their methodology - the screen recording software only works when it’s booted from the internal hard drive. Boot with a USB stick with a Linux live image, mount the internal drive as read-only, and you can copy the entire thing, and nobody will ever know.