Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

In the second half of my interview with Winston Privacy CEO Richard Stokes, we talk about why your data is so valuable to advertisers and what you can do to limit all this tracking. In particular, we’ll discuss the Winston box which acts as a sort of force field around your home network, preventing all your “smart” and “internet of things” devices from reporting on yo...

Protecting your privacy today is hard. It’s really hard. It’s too hard. Every ‘smart’ device you own is tattling on you, constantly, to dozens of companies. Your phone, your tablet, your PC, your TV, your streaming box, your DVR, your smart thermostat, your internet-connected medical devices… The list goes on and it gets longer every day. What if you could not only se...

The US government is once again looking to break or hobble encrypted communications in the name of national security and law enforcement. They claim that we’re “going dark” – that modern end-to-end encryption used in apps like Signal and Wickr that protect user privacy are preventing them from keeping us safe and bringing the bad guys to justice. Cryptographers and technolo...

Why do most VPN apps suck so badly? How do you know which VPN service providers you can trust with your privacy? How is it that our internet service providers know so much about our web surfing habits? Today I explore these questions and more with John Graham-Cumming, the CTO of the internet performance and security company. He will also tell us about a new VPN service coming soon from Cloudflare...

How many of your “smart” devices are smart enough to update their own software? For that matter, how many of them can upgrade at all? It’s a good bet that most of them run some flavor of the free and open-source Linux operating system. A nasty bug was just found that affects almost all Linux systems, allowing a simple remote command to bring the system to its knees. There have be...

In today’s show I have a sobering discussion with the EFF’s Eva Galperin about the rise of stalkerware (sometimes called “spouseware”). It’s become all too easy for abusive, unscrupulous people to spy on their significant others, tracking their every move, monitoring all their communications. We’ll talk about how our phones can be subverted and what measures you...

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser on the planet by far, used by about two thirds of all web surfers. But Google is an advertising company and ad blockers are a direct threat to their business model. Google is planning to make a highly controversial change to Chrome’s plugin framework that would break some popular ad blocking extensions like uBlock Origin, forcing them to use much...

Is it possible to hide your tracks online? Is it even worth the effort to try? How do you know which companies, products and services you can trust? Is government regulation the answer? We’ll address all of these questions today in part 2 of my interview with David Ruiz. David will give you several great resources for getting more informed and also for getting more involved in the fight for...

In January of this year, Malwarebytes (a world-class antivirus software maker) conducted a massive poll on privacy that included 4000 people from 66 different countries. On today’s show, I will delve into the key takeaways from this poll and some rather (pleasantly) surprising results. (Tune in next week for part 2.) David Ruiz is a pro-privacy, pro-security writer for Malwarebytes Labs, whe...

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Google can read your Gmail. You may even realize that Google is scanning your emails for things like trip itineraries, which allows them to automatically add flights and hotel reservations to your Google Calendar, for example. But you may not realize how much other juicy info is there to be mined, like online purchases. Every email receipt you’ve...

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes makes a heartfelt and cogent argument for breaking up the world’s dominant social media company, Facebook. The litmus test for the US Government has focused too much on impact to consumer pricing, which has little to do with “free” services such as Facebook. It’s time to also consider social and consumer impact. In other news, a photo storag...

A disturbing study in the JAMA Network Open journal showed that almost all of 36 mental health apps they downloaded were sharing your data to some extent – many without proper or even any disclosure. Many shared basic data with Facebook and Google, and a few shared very sensitive information like health diaries and self reports of substance abuse. I’ll give you some tips on how you can...

Facebook has once again gone too far and, when caught, asked for forgiveness and promised to change. First it was revealed that Facebook has been requesting since May 2016 that new users provide their email account passwords in order to verify their email addresses – without giving any obvious way to opt out. When caught, they said they would stop doing this. However, it was then revealed th...

How do you deal with the threat of identity theft? Follow Adam Levin’s 3 M’s: 1) minimize your exposure, 2) monitor your accounts, and 3) manage the damage. We discuss these techniques and much more in part two of my interview with Adam Levin, author of Swiped: How to Protect Yourself in a World Full of Scammers, Phishers, and Identity Thieves . Adam Levin is a consumer advocate with m...

Identity theft is arguably one of the worst cyber crimes in terms of deep and lasting impact to the victim. This runs the gamut from simple credit card fraud to committing crimes in someone else’s name. We’ll talk about the entire spectrum today in part one of my interview with Adam Levin, author of Swiped: How to Protect Yourself in a World Full of Scammers, Phishers, and Identity Thi...

Bad guys have been using scary emails and pop-up messages to bilk unsuspecting victims of millions of dollars for a long time now. But recent scams purporting to be from the CIA have taken things to a new level. In today’s show, I’ll walk you through one variant of this scam and teach you how to spot similar scare scams. In other news, government spyware has made its way into everyday...

How often have you run across something so obviously bad or behind the times that you just want to scream: Hey, fix this already! Electronic Frontier Foundation to the rescue! Gennie Gebhart explains the EFF’s new #FixItAlready campaign – a “most wanted” list of no-brainer bugs and shortcomings in today’s most popular services and products that just should not be. Exa...

What happens to your digital life when you die? The answer is only slightly less philosophical than what happens to your soul. The laws, as least in the US, haven’t kept up with the times and there aren’t clear rules for who has legal rights to your online accounts or the files you’ve stored in the cloud. In today’s episode, I’ll tell you how to prepare for your inevi...

In second half of my interview with EFF’s Bill Budington, Bill helps us understand how we can at least attempt to disguise ourselves on the web and basically try to blend in with the crowd. We’ll also see how tools like EFF’s Panopticlick can hep us pinpoint the things that are making us stand out, which enables us to be tracked more easily. Finally, we’ll discuss several b...

In the first part of my discussion with Bill Budington from the EFF, we’re going to talk about some of the key ways in which we are tracked around the web as we surf from site to site. I’ll ask Bill who is tracking up, why they’re tracking us, and we’ll get into some of the clever and downright devious methods by which we are tracked and recognized on the web. In part 2 (ne...

The Mayor of Tampa, Florida, had this Twitter account hacked due to “the usual weaknesses, including poor passwords.” The hackers used the account to tweet pornographic images and even an incoming ballistic missile alert. Comcast’s Xfinity Mobile service used a default account security PIN of “0000”, which allowed several customers to have their accounts taken over. Y...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for decades, but has only recently begun to fulfill the promise of truly replicating human-like decision making. The Information Age has generated enormous quantities of data and modern technology has given us unprecedented power to ingest and analyze this data. AI systems today control airplanes, financial and insurance systems, and even criminal sente...

The European Union has recalled a GPS smart watch meant to be worn by children so that their parents can keep tabs on them. Unfortunately, due to horrible security, anyone can track these watches – and even send messages to the children. The Internet of Things (IoT) is well-known for having lax or non-existent security protections. Connecting our children’s toys to the internet in this...

Last week I told you about the literally billions of email addresses and passwords that were released by hackers as “Collections 1-5”. I also told you how you can check to see if your information was contained in these (or other dumped data) by checking haveibeenpwnd.com. And today I’m interviewing the man behind this wonderful, free service: Troy Hunt! He tells us how he gets hi...

Last week we saw perhaps the single largest data breach dump in history, close on the heels of another massive data disclosure from the same group. Dubbed “Collections 1-5”, together these data dumps represent literally billions of unique user email addresses and passwords. Using the online tool Have I Been Pwned will tell you whether your email address or password is contained in this...