Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

As health services and society in general struggle to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, people are desperately seeking new and inventive ways to curb the spread of the disease. A tried and true tool of epidemiologists is contact tracing: interviewing infected subjects in order to create lists of people they’ve had contact with in recent days and weeks. But people’s memories are notor...

During our global COVID-19 self-quarantining, video conferencing usage has exploded. I’ve tried to find hard statistics, but they’re rising so fast that anything I post now will be stale tomorrow. That said, I’ve seen usage growth figures as high as 400%. And since we’re all staying home now ( right? ), video chatting is a great way to get some some social time with friends...

Wouldn’t it be nice if privacy wasn’t an afterthought? What if user privacy was built in from the get go? What if the entire design assumed that you didn’t want anyone selling your data – and respected those wishes? That’s the world of Privacy by Design – a concept pioneered in the mid-1990’s by Dr. Ann Cavoukian. This may seem like an unattainable Utopian...

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Though normally applied to politics, it can be equally applied to opportunistic cyber criminals. With the world transfixed by and anxious about this nasty virus, bad guys are seizing on our fears to make a quick buck. From ransomware-laden virus tracking apps to actually threatening to infect families directly with the actual virus, COVID-19 is becoming a gold...

In part 1 of this interview, Hayley Tsukayama walked us through the details of the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). In part 2, we discuss how this law will affect many of us who are not California residents and how it’s influencing potential legislation in other states and even at the federal level. We also discuss how CCPA can synergize with other state laws and be used as a tool...

On January 1st, 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect. While not perfect, the CCPA is a landmark piece of legislation for the United States, even though legally it only protect California residents. I will dig into the details of this bill – both the good and the bad – in part one of my delightful interview with Hayley Tsukayama from the EFF. Hayley Tsukayam...

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a bombshell article about a small startup called Clearview AI who was using a massive database of three billion faces scraped from several social media sites to offer a creepy facial recognition app. Just one snapshot of some stranger’s face could immediately identify that person – not just name, but potential location, age, other images, s...

it’s not cheap or easy to get your iPhone repaired – largely because there’s not a lot of real competition in the iPhone repair market. That’s no accident. Owners of modern John Deere tractors have really only one option: John Deere. Why? There’s no good technical reason. There’s really no good legal reason either, but laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright...

Here’s a riddle for you: when does something you paid good money not actually belong to you? Answer: when that device is part of the Internet of Things. Why? Because without the express permission and continued support of the company that sold you that device, it becomes a worthless piece of junk. All of our modern “smart” devices are inextricably tied to their cloud-based servic...

It’s that time of year again: tax time! And that means it’s also time for tax scams. I’ll give you some tips on how to avoid them, and also help you find the real “Free File” versions of your favorite online tax filing software. In other news: a German man fooled Google Maps with a wagon full of phones; Hue smart bulbs patched a serious vulnerability; Ring doorbell of...

We install antivirus software to protect us, not exploit us. Like a bodyguard, AV programs needs full, unfettered access to everything in order to properly do the job. That requires complete and absolute trust. And probably a non-disclosure agreement. Unfortunately, antivirus software doesn’t offer you an NDA promise. Avast, the maker of one of the top five AV software applications, has rece...

Happy Data Privacy Day! My guest today is none other than Bruce Schneier: world renowned security guru and author of several great books, including the Data and Goliath and Click Here to Kill Everybody ! Bruce and I discuss the current state of data privacy and what it’s going to take to rein in the corporations that are buying and selling our data with abandon. Bruce Schneier is an internat...

A small company has amassed over 3 billion online photos from social media and other public sources, creating perhaps the largest facial database in existence – far larger than even the FBI’s database. The images are often connected to a person’s full name, address, and people they know. The company, called Clearview, has sold access to this database to over 600 law enforcement a...

The IRS already knows what I made, what taxes I’ve paid, and even what my mortgage interest was last year. Why do I have to fill out tax forms? Turns out there’s a very specific reason, and you’re not going to like it. At the turn of the century, tax preparers like TurboTax and H&R Block negotiated a deal with the US government that prevented this very thing. In exchange, the...

It’s not too late! You can still snag a free upgrade to Windows 10 from Microsoft. If you’re still running Windows 7, it’s time to avail yourself of this offer. Microsoft is ending support for Windows 7 on January 24, 2020. That means that you will no longer get software updates – in particular, security fixes. The official offer to upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost supposed...

2019 has come and gone, and 2020 is upon us! You know what that means: New Years Resolutions ! I’ve put together a Top Ten list of suggestions that will significantly improve your computer security and online privacy! Some of these are easy and some are going to require some effort… but you have a whole year to do them! This will also be a great episode to forward to friends and family...

We know that we’re tracked, but what remains largely invisible is the massive economy working behind the scenes (or “mirror”) to buy, sell, trade and bid on you and your data. I’ve seen estimates that claim there are up to 4000 data brokers in the US alone. And what’s worse is that they are largely unregulated, making the data market a total free-for-all. What can you...

If you’ve listened to even a handful of my shows, you are well aware that you’re being tracked around the web. But even I was surprised by some of the things I learned in the recent white paper from the Electronic Frontier Foundation entitled “Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance”. One of the prime authors of this report, Benn...

We don’t often think about the security and privacy of our regular old “snail mail”, but we need to. According to recent activity observed by researchers of the dark web, the bad guys have been regaining interest in identity theft schemes involving physical letters. And in many cases, they can steal your mail without ever opening your mailbox. I’ll tell you what you can do...

It’s that time of year again – time to see which popular gifts make my privacy/security Naughty and Nice lists! You want to make sure that when you’re giving gifts to your loved ones that you’re not also giving gifts to hackers and data miners! I’ll also start to catch you up on several of the news stories from the past few weeks including Google’s access to pri...

Today in part 2 of my deeply insightful interview with author Kris Shaffer, we discuss how marketers and foreign powers have been capturing our attention and even manipulating our responses. We’ll discuss how these techniques were used in the 2016 US presidential election and in other critical voting situations. In many cases, it’s sufficient to make people stay home or to sow doubt in...

They say we are in the Information Age and that data is the new oil. But many (including my guest, Kris Shaffer) are saying that was is truly valuable today is attention, not information. Information is so plentiful now that it almost has no value. And because just about everything on the internet is free, we’re paying for it with our attention. Marketers have gone to great lengths to study...

Marketing companies have come up with may clever ways to track our travels around the web, hoping to garner as much information about us as they can. At the same time, privacy-conscious organizations have given us tools to maintain our anonymity by countering these tracking technologies. It’s the usual arms race – one that privacy advocates were mostly winning, with VPN’s, blocki...

How are our identities stolen? What happens to our identity information after its been stolen? Once we realize we’ve been hacked, what can we do to mitigate the damage and recover from the consequences? I’ll discuss this and much more with Amyn Gilani from 4iQ – including why you shouldn’t be participating in all those fun social media quizzes. Amyn Gilani leads strategy an...

I’ve been a Dropbox user for many, many years. But recently, they’ve gotten really pushy – trying to get me to save all my photos and docs there, integrating with MS Office when I didn’t ask it to, and pushing me to upgrade. Now it tells me I need to deactivate all but three devices (I have probably 7-8). I’ve been looking for a secure and (more importantly) private a...