Newsletter Archives

• The best tech secrets of 2022: AirTags, TikTok, Twitter, oh my

  Posted on December 26, 2022 at 02:45 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.52 • 2022-12-26

  Look for our BONUS issue on January 2, 2023!

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Amid my efforts to help you protect yourself against some rather aggressive technologies, I’m glad to report that there’s been at least some progress this year on the worst aspects of our “labor-saving” devices.

  Please note: I’m not claiming that my columns by themselves caused any of the changes I describe below. I just report the problems. We can all celebrate when bad tech is improved, whoever may have developed a particular solution.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.52.0, 2022-12-26).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Public Defender AirTags, Cryptocurrency, Newsletters, NFT, privacy, security, Surveillance, TikTok, Twitter

• Be watchful for scams in the forums

  Posted on November 21, 2022 at 02:44 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  FROM THE FORUMS

  

  By Susan Bradley

  Last week, there was an incident in the forums that was unexpected and of some concern.

  Someone (let’s codename the person “Rogue”) signed up for a Plus membership, then used it to send direct messages (DMs) to several other members. The DM contained a solicitation.

  I took immediate action.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.47.0, 2022-11-21).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  From the Forums Forums, privacy, scams, security

• Can DuckDuckGo raise enough money to give Google a scare?

  Posted on October 31, 2022 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.44 • 2022-10-31

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  People in a small but dedicated movement known as “degoogling” strive to avoid being tracked by the Google search giant. That’s a challenge, because Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., also compiles data on you through YouTube, the Play Store, and many other subsidiaries.

  A major alternative is a privacy-focused search engine with the weird name of DuckDuckGo. (Founder Gabriel Weinberg, soon to become a father, chose the moniker in 2008 after the children’s game Duck, Duck, Goose.) DDG, as the search engine is sometimes known, promises not to save searches you enter nor retain any information about you.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.44.0, 2022-10-31).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, privacy, Public Defender, search engines

• Should you get a free credit report for any data breach?

  Posted on September 26, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Samsung Electronics — the giant multinational that sells 28% of all the smartphones in the world, as well as many other consumer devices — has sent notices to some of its users that their personal information in Samsung’s database has been hacked.

  In a statement, the company says the hackers didn’t obtain users’ credit-card or debit-card numbers. But the intrusion did reveal some customers’ names, addresses, birthdates, and the Samsung products they’d registered. As a result, the corporation’s notices recommend that affected users obtain a copy of their credit report from major reporting agencies.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.39.0, 2022-09-26).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Credit Reports, data breach, privacy, Public Defender, Samsung, security

• Amazon releases Ring videos without consent. Should you care?

  Posted on August 1, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Giant retailer Amazon.com, the parent company of Ring video and audio doorbells and other devices, admits in a letter to a United States senator that it sometimes releases recorded files to law-enforcement agencies without a court-ordered warrant or the consent of the recording’s owner.

  In response to a request for information from Sen. Edward Markey (Democrat of Massachusetts), Amazon vice president for public policy Brian Huseman revealed: “Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times” in the first half of 2022.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.31.0, 2022-08-01).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Amazon Ring, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, privacy, Public Defender, security, Surveillance

• Portable Text Encryption — Your super-secret decoder ring

  Posted on August 1, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  Ever send an important and sensitive email to the wrong person? Wouldn’t it be great if the reply you got back was “Why did you send me gibberish?” instead of “Bob makes HOW MUCH!?”

  U.S. developer Dana Booth has created an easy-to-use tool to encrypt text before pasting it into an email, chat message, or anywhere else. Portable Text Encryption uses AES, DES, Blowfish, and RC4 symmetric encryption ciphers to make sure that if the recipient of your message doesn’t have the password you provide (tell them verbally — not in an email), they aren’t gonna be reading anything but gibberish.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.31.0, 2022-08-01).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Freeware Spotlight AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, encryption, privacy

• TikTok steals your files, passwords, and more: FCC official

  Posted on July 11, 2022 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.28 • 2022-07-11

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  TikTok, the wildly popular short-video app owned by China’s ByteDance corporation, may be kicked out of Apple’s and Google’s download stores.

  A US official boldly asserts that TikTok is “accessing users’ most sensitive data, including passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, and personal messages.”

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.28.0, 2022-07-11).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Federal Communications Commission, privacy, Public Defender, security, TikTok

• What should you consider sensitive?

  Posted on June 13, 2022 at 02:40 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  ON SECURITY

  

  By Susan Bradley

  What information is sensitive? What information should you never give to anyone?

  The answer is, it depends. Sometimes it depends on what you are doing, sometimes it depends on the jurisdiction (i.e., country or state) you live in. But often it comes down to what you feel comfortable giving to someone else. And the answer is usually different for different people.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.24.0, 2022-06-13).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, On Security AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Patch Lady Posts, privacy, security

• Look who’s stalking 2: Apple responds to AirTag security threats

  Posted on March 7, 2022 at 02:45 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.10 • 2022-03-07

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The Apple AirTag, a $29 tracker the company started selling last year, has been criticized by experts for its weak protections against criminals who use the device to stalk people and pinpoint vehicles to steal. In response, Apple posted last month a response that promises only minor upgrades to the gadgets’ software.

  Meanwhile, a developer announced recently that he had built — using a few dollars’ worth of electronic parts — an AirTag-like clone that takes full advantage of Apple’s free and worldwide Find My communication network. As an illustration of the weakness of AirTags, the clone easily defeats all of Apple’s existing security and detection systems, including the new features the corporation said last month it was planning to implement in the future.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 19.10.0 (2022-03-07).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Newsletter 19.10.F (2022-03-07).

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AirTags, Apple, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, privacy, Public Defender, security

• Look who’s stalking: Protect yourself from Apple AirTags

  Posted on January 10, 2022 at 02:44 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Ever since Apple started selling $29 tracking devices called AirTags last April, criminal types have used them to tail people, pinpoint and heist their cars, and worse — but warnings of planted devices were made available only to iPhone owners. Now, people who have more common phones can find out whether they’re being tracked, too.

  The AirTag is a small, plastic-encased device that’s approximately the size of three or four dollar coins stacked on top of each other. It competes with such trackers as the Bluetooth-based Tile Pro and the GPS-based Verizon Hum^x. But most Bluetooth devices connect only to phones within 50 meters or so, and GPS trackers require you to pay monthly fees.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 19.02.0 (2022-01-10).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AirTags, Apple, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Crime, privacy, Public Defender

• Kape Technologies, formerly Crossrider, now owns 4 top VPNs

  Posted on September 27, 2021 at 02:43 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  A holding company with a controversial history — Kape Technologies — announced this month that it had purchased a leading virtual private network, ExpressVPN, adding it to a collection of three other major VPN companies that Kape acquired in 2017 through 2019.

  This concentration of VPN services has raised concerns.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.37.0 (2021-09-27).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender, Security AskWoody Plus Newsletter, privacy, Public Defender, security, VPN

• Apple gives privacy one minute

  Posted on September 20, 2021 at 02:43 CDT by Silvia Eckert • Comment in the Forums

  APPLE NEWS

  

  By Silvia Eckert

  “California streaming” ducks the controversial CSAM issue at last week’s annual iPhone event.

  As reported by Brian Livingston in his column Apple plans to break its end-to-end encryption (AskWoody 2021-08-30), Apple announced about a month ago an initiative to limit the distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) by looking for inappropriate imagery on its customers’ devices and reporting occurrences to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But because the technology represented what amounted to surveillance that could be applied to virtually anything, an enormous amount of backlash against the initiative occurred.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.36.0 (2021-09-20).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.36.F (2021-09-20).

  Apple, AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter Apple, Apple News, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, privacy, security
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