Never OK

| 0 Comments

This week news broker that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was subject to a warrant back in January. By itself this is only noteworthy because it is Trump. The real problem is the secretive nature of these warrants — no one is allowed to tell and the subject is not allowed to know.

This is not new. For year, the FISA court has been so secretive that the ACLU was denied access to any related decisions, the Wall Street Journal has written about the abuses, But the pales compared to the number of non-FISA requests against social media.

Google alone lists roughly 70,000 requests for user information per year*:

It’s unknown exactly how many of these have some sort of secretive order — where Google is barred from disclosing to the target that there even is a warrant out for their information. Until a few years ago, most companies were not even allowed to report that they had any secret warrants served against them.

Forbes reported in 2019:

The statistics for other social media companies are just as bleak.

There is no difference between a warrantless search and seizure or a warranted search that you never know about. You have no rights to exercise when the government refuses to acknowledge that they are being violated.

 It doesn’t matter who the target is, outside of the most sensitive, classified and national security implicating cases, all Americans have a fourth amendment right to know when there is a warrant out for any of their information.  

*Includes non-warrant sources, that amount to roughly the same thing.

Want To Know If A Website Supports Two Factor Authentication?

, | 0 Comments

Two-factor authentication is awesome, and I highly recommend it for everything. The most common way to implement it is through codes you get over SMS or text messages. This is not the best way to do it.

It could have been prevented. Here’s what happened. A bad guy with a cell phone and a new SIM card pretended to be my pastor and called up my pastor’s cell phone provider’s customer service. The bad guy convinced them to change my pastor’s phone number over to the bad guy’s SIM card. Then the hackers began to get all of my pastor’s phone calls and text messages.

Want To Know If A Website Supports Two Factor Authentication _ JM Addington

My pastor is relatively tech-savvy, so he had a two-factor authentication setup on many accounts, mostly through SMS. So after the attackers took over his text messages, they got the two-factor authentication codes. Of course, this doesn’t explain how they got his passwords. This part is simpler. They probably just bought them on the Darkweb, where most of our passwords are available.

The attack is not particularly sophisticated. With minimal training, I could teach you how to replicate it. If you don’t want to learn, you can pay about $10 on the Internet for somebody else to do it for you. Fun times.

How could he have avoided this attack?

If he used app-based two-factor authentication, like Google Authenticator or Authy (my favorite, shown at left), it would have been much more difficult – maybe impossible- for the attackers to get into his accounts. Even if they had gotten control of his cell phone number, they would not have been able to get any codes because the multifactor would have been set up through his application on his physical phone and not through text messages.

Want To Know If A Website Supports Two Factor Authentication (2fa)? Check out https://2fa.directory/, where you can search across hundreds of websites. 

AI Influencers: Discern Who Gets the Money

| 0 Comments

Cross posted from my LinkedIn:

As excited as I am about #AI, I am deeply distrustful of those behind it. We have over two decades of Silicon Valley Visionaries creating products that they promise will “democratize,” the world and “bring us together” and other such nonsense.

The mantra has been “move fast and break things,” and they did.

It wasn’t until they made their millions (or billions) that any of them reflected on the things that were broken along the way, and the lack of goals reached.

Twitter was used to help move along the Arab Spring, and Facebook was used to attempt genocide in Myanmar.

The visionaries cannot dominate the conversation, nor can the voices of Silicon Valley execs that are still in the game.

The current execs that are sounding the alarm the loudest are the ones who stand to lose out if someone else beats them in the AI race. Many of them have worked on their own AI for years and are panicking now that they realize just how far behind they are.

This is the biggest moment, a Rubicon, any of us alive have seen, and may see. You don’t have to be an AI expert to do your part. Know who to listen to. Listen to them. Don’t listen to the rest.

— –

You can find an open letter that calls for, “[an immediate] pause for at least 6 months [of] the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4”

A number of those signatures are from competitors who are at least 6 months behind, hence, they are allowed to catch up to ChatGPT, but ChatGPT isn’t allowed to advance itself.

https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

You’re Not A Navy Seal to Work Harder and Sleep Less

| 0 Comments

The most toxic element of small business culture is the belief that if you work long enough, hard enough— wake  up early and go to sleep late—you will find success and you’re a loser if you don’t. 

This is bullshit. Here’s why the culture persists: 

  1. Only people who embrace that culture and find success brag about it. You never see all the people that tried and failed. 
  2. “Self-improvement” books –  especially by former Navy Seals – glorify it. Guess what? You aren’t a Navy Seal.  
  • 0.0000060698% of the US population is a Navy Seal.  
  • Don’t discard all the advice – but  don’t believe that you have to act  like a Navy Seal to find success.
  1. It sounds like an easy button. It’s not. 
  • If only getting up earlier resulted in profits and success everyone would do it. SMB self-flagellation is  not a recipe for success. 

The bottom line: The culture is toxic and only a minority of people find success in it. Don’t embrace the toxicity.

PERSONAL BACKUP

| 0 Comments

I mostly write about business and technology, but personal tech matters just as much and the same lessons apply.

Last month my physical backup went bad and I nearly lost months of photos and
other documents.

Personal things! Family stuff! Photos of my kids!

But I got it all back. For over a decade I’ve used an online backup service called
BackBlaze to back up my personal files.

  • BackBlaze backs up your entire computer to the cloud—even
  • external hard drives (!)—for a fixed monthly price.

They mailed me a hard drive with all of my photos and documents, safe and sound.
I don’t get a spiff to write this: I write about it because I think it is one of the most
important things you can do to protect your personal digital life and memories.
BackBlaze.com

Most Read