Joe Public

Firefox will perform DNS over HTTPS greatly increasing user privacy and security » Update » Google follows and will test DoH in Chrome

Even if you are visiting a site over HTTPS, your DNS query that your computer uses to look up the address of the site, is sent over an unencrypted connection. This means that even if you are browsing over HTTPS, a third=party could be examining the packets sent to and from your computer and know which sites you are visiting, even if the don’t know the contents.

DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) encrypts the address look up of the site you want to visit. This increase user privacy and makes it harder for third-party eavesdropping. It also makes it more difficult for ISP-level blocking.

This extra layer of security ideally prevents third-parties, such as network service providers, from easily seeing the websites internet users visit, and prevents miscreants from tampering with domain-name look-ups. Though DoH provides more privacy than the status quo, it’s controversial where lack of privacy is assumed or required, such as monitored environments that insist on content filtering, among other reasons.

Back in July, the UK Internet Services Providers’ Association nominated Mozilla for its “internet villain of the year” award because DoH breaks DNS-based content filters put in place to deny access to explicit, obscene or otherwise objectionable websites. A few days later, the trade group reversed itself after online blowback.

» How to enable DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox at TechRepublic

» Google Chrome steps up their game and follows Firefox » ZDNet

Kelsey Bressler was frustrated by unsolicited dick pics so she decided to do something about it. She make a filter to remove those unfortunate images from her Twitter account. Why don’t or won’t social media companies do this?

Wednesday, September 11, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

Why anyone, and by anyone I mean any man, would put a photo of their junk online is beyond my comprehension.

» Read about it at Slate…

18% of British people are not using the internet

Monday, September 9, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

Other survey findings:

10% do not use the net because of privacy worries

40% of those earning less than £12,500 do not go online

70% of all respondents “uncomfortable” with targeted advertising and data tracking

12% have been hit by computer viruses

11% got abusive emails

» Read more at the BBC…

Updated » Apple iPhone Safari Hack that has existed for a couple of years is revealed

Sunday, September 8, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

Aug 30

Video from SkyNews… The iPhone has been hacked!

Sept 8

This upends pretty much everything we know about iPhone hacking. We believed that it was hard,” respected security expert Bruce Schneier writes on his blog. “We believed that if an exploit was used too frequently, it would be quickly discovered and patched. None of that is true here. This operation used fourteen zero-days exploits. It used them indiscriminately. And it remained undetected for two years.” While I am unlikely to switch to Android, my trust in the privacy and security capability of their devices has eroded.

» If we can’t trust Apple, who can we trust? » Om

More at Michael Tsai, BuzzFeed, John Gruber, TechCrunch, MacRumors, The Verge, Zeynep Tufekci

Norwegians are EV obsessed and the Tesla Model 3 accounted for 12.4% of all vehicle sales in Norway from January–July 2019

Sunday, September 8, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

California’s a huge market for Tesla, the Netherlands loves Tesla, Switzerland loves Tesla, but no state or country is as Tesla obsessed as Norway.

Whereas electric vehicles are still at 1–2% market share in many auto markets, or 6–10% in good markets, fully electric vehicles accounted for 38% of new passenger vehicle sales in Norway last month.

If you’re like me, you’d like to check your senses now and confirm the 38% related to fully electric vehicles, not also plug-in hybrids. Indeed, that’s only for the purest of the pure, while another 25% were hybrids, 41% of which were plug-in hybrids. That means nearly 50% of new vehicle sales were plug-in vehicles sales.

King of the hill among all of these electric and electrified vehicles, as usual, was the Tesla Model 3. The Model 3 is so popular there that it accounted for 12.4% of the Norwegian auto market in January–July of this year. Good luck finding a country with a 12.4% EV market share, let alone a 12.4% Tesla Model 3 market share. That percentage means that one out of every eight vehicles sold in the country was a Model 3 — not for one month, not for two months, but for a 7 month timespan.

There are currently 1.7 billion websites

Saturday, September 7, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

Link…

DMVs are selling your private driver information to thousands of businesses and raking in millions, and you can’t do anything about it

Saturday, September 7, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

When you give your name and address to the Departments of Motor Vehicles in exchange for a driver’s license, many of those DMVs in the USA are selling your personal information to thousands of businesses. Some have made tens of millions of dollars a year selling your data.

When asked how much the Wisconsin DMV made from selling driver records, a spokesperson wrote in an email “Per these 2018 DMV Facts and Figures, $17,140,914 was collected in FY18 for driver abstract fees.” Examining that document shows that Wisconsin’s revenue for selling driver records has shot up dramatically since 2015, when the sale drew in $1.1 million. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles made $77 million in 2017 by selling data, a local outlet found.

Documents explicitly note that the purpose of selling this data is to bring in revenue.

But there are both real world privacy and security concerns.

“The selling of personally identifying information to third parties is broadly a privacy issue for all and specifically a safety issue for survivors of abuse, including domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and trafficking,” Erica Olsen, director of Safety Net at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told Motherboard in an email. “For survivors, their safety may depend on their ability to keep this type of information private.”

And, not only is this somehow all legal, there is no obvious way for you to opt out or control who has access to your personal information!

WSPR Explained » How radio amateurs transmitting as little as one milliwatt can be heard on the other side of the world

Friday, September 6, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

Unlike most of ham radio, this is a one-way mode. Not only is there little expectation anyone will be listening, but there’s even less that the signal would make it back. Radio propagation isn’t always a two-way path.

WSPR’s biggest selling point is you can do it on the cheap. It’s easy to set yourself up for not much more than $100 and often a whole lot less. And, though a ham radio license is needed to transmit, anyone can put up a receiver. And the US ham license test is multiple-choice, all published and online.

» Geoff Fox at Extreme Tech provides a quick overview of WSPR » Weak Signal Propagation Reporting.

NetNewsWire 5.0 Relaunches as an Open-Source RSS Reader for the Mac

Friday, September 6, 2019 / Robert Vinet / 0 Comments

I’ve started using it, and I gotta say… this might be the ticket.

Check out what The Sweet Set Up has to say.

The air conditioner is heating up the world

Friday, September 6, 2019 / Robert Vinet / Comments Off

There are just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now – about one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today. The US already uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects that as the rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13% of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year – about the same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces today.

All of these reports note the awful irony of this feedback loop: warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.

The global dominance of air conditioning was not inevitable. As recently as 1990, there were only about 400m air conditioning units in the world, mostly in the US. Originally built for industrial use, air conditioning eventually came to be seen as essential, a symbol of modernity and comfort. Then air conditioning went global. Today, as with other drivers of the climate crisis, we race to find solutions – and puzzle over how we ended up so closely tied to a technology that turns out to be drowning us.

Straightforward tech reporting

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