I remember asking people who supported Google before or after their IPO how they make money with your Data. No one cares. I remember pushing for Firefox instead of Chrome in 2009, no one cares. Not even on HN.
The sad thing is that those who stood up for privacy got bashed down for so many years and never received an apology. Those who defended Big Tech like Google is safe to use our data never apologised.
People do care, they are just sort of powerless to do anything.
Try the following exercises:
- try not to use google docs at work
- try to block google sites from your phone
- try to pay for things on the internet without accessing google/recaptcha/etc
it is both too big and too small of a problem for most people to deal with.
I know most technical people have done these sorts of things, but it is sort of like being your own sysadmin/security researcher. It's probably easier to run your own mail server in comparison.
BTW, I don't live under a rock, I do online banking from the PC and have pretty much given up telling my lawyer and doctor not to use Whatsapp to send and receive sensitive documents, then keep them in their unencrypted phones, but that doesn't prevent me to be worried by how easy it has become to obtain personal data about someone for those who can.
… but apple sells ads too therefore every option is equally bad!
It’s funny to see people admit with the AI stuff that apple is getting it right, introducing privacy-protecting approaches and services, etc, yet refuse to admit that the same perspective and approaches have informed all their services for a long time. In the day to day, there is no legitimate debate that Apple Maps is vastly more privacy preserving than google maps, etc. People use some weird purity test where because App Store ads exist suddenly apple is the same as a literal adtech company.
A new AirPort Extreme with an M Series I would be all over that though.
and see, the problem is that people think this passes for a rebuttal, or even civilized discourse. You're literally the exact cliche that pops up in every discussion around privacy that I was referring to in my comment above.
It truly costs you nothing to have a little bit of civility and class. Most of us are here to discuss and not to meme about “le apple CSAM”.
I'm guessing that you're arguing about something that literally doesn't exist, to be honest. Endpoint CSAM scanning was never rolled out to consumer devices, it was a proposal from the EU (that popular savior!) that Apple successfully stalled and navigated until E2E was ready for rollout, upon which they said "lol no, that's stupid" and then the push fell apart.
Regardless though, complying with lawful authorities inside their jurisdictions is something that every corporation is gonna have to do... even in china. If the EU makes dumb decisions, it's not exactly Apple's fault. EU sovereignty cuts both ways, sometimes you get GDPR and sometimes you get mandatory nannyware. But since it didn't pass, I don't know why you'd bring it up as even an issue, let alone as being something caused by apple?
And again, to go back to the start, the fact that this vague "apple bad" argumentation is so routine and so tolerated is silly. You're mad about something that wasn't caused by apple and didn't actually happen anyway. It's vague tonal FUD and virtue-signaling to other people who are similar haters, and there's enough people who upvote/echo similar sentiments that it is self-sustaining. You can address the point without ducking out to random "but what about that one unrelated-to-apple bad-thing that almost happened that one time???" virtue-signaling points.
The ever-relevant Paul Graham: https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
Yes.
It also doesn't help that said device vendor has been trying to destroy computing freedom while sabotaging open standards left and right.
> It’s funny to see people admit with the AI stuff that apple is getting it right, introducing privacy-protecting approaches and services, etc, yet refuse to admit that the same perspective and approaches have informed all their services for a long time.
It's funny that different people on the Internet express different and sometimes conflicting opinions?
It's included in GrapheneOS, so you can backup things like WiFi passwords to a local NextCloud server.
That said, I haven't considered Linksys routers to be fit for purpose at all for years now anyway.
The real problem is cars, IoT Devices. Do you drive a vehicle newer than model year ~2015? That thing is sending all kinds of telemetry to OEM manufacturer and their entire supply line of OEM suppliers. That data is firstly used to audit and evaluate functions in the vehicle for future iterations....but then that data is sold as many times as they can to research firms, advertisers, gov't planning boards etc.
Taking ownership of the vehicle is you signing away any investigation or litigation rights, or even access to those data/data systems.
I think THIS is where data privacy awareness needs to be pivoted to, Geolocating "iot" devices like vehicle CPU that no one, not even service techs can ever access.
No, I don't, for that exact reason. Some things are important enough for me to go to the effort to find a way to mitigate the security threat they pose. Other things, like relatively modern cars and IoT devices that I can't control, aren't important enough to do that. Instead, I just don't use them.
But if that day comes, I'll figure out how to disable the radio. If that's not possible, then I'll stop owning a car.
The US, for example, allows one to build a kit car totally by ones-self, and the waitlist for VIN certification is fairly short. If you want to shortcut the VIN certification you can build a car on a car that has at least 30% of the original frame in tact and piggy-back onto that VIN number with proper certification. If that frame is older than the mid 70s, go hog-wild; you can operate it with a coal engine if you want to.
If you're a 'dedicated individual' that is concerned with having a modern car that is engineered well for safety's sake, then go buy a kit from the hundreds of companies that do nothing but engineering work.
If you're afraid that there will be electrification mandates, no worries -- there are hundreds of startups focused on the conversion of existing ICEs into EVs.
What I'm trying to say : a world locked down to prevent all forms of vehicular autonomy is a lot different than the one we exist in today; it's not something easily predictable to assume when that will end, given the many different venues one can explore to express vehicular autonomy and individualistic choice.
Auto OEMs as a rule have more "data points" for inference than any other hardware platform/software integration. IE; actions you take in the car and the info gleamed from those actions ar more valuable to marketers than data from your cell phone. None of this needs a gps signal, there are dozens of speed,time,weight,weather,delta, sensors..
Ford for example can brag that it, more than any other manufacturer on the planet, knows exactly how often you go to gas station X from location Y, if you get gas, and where you go after. They can tell where you look, how much you weigh, your common routine, even your contacts PID. You type of "personality" can be determined trivially (IE buying/travel habits).
Your vehicle is 100 percent complicent in building a marketing/safety profile for you. Is this^ even "bad"? I think so. But I am not an expert and have yet to have an issue with it in my life.
While I do still encourage people to do this as any security is better than no security, it is worth noting that you can entirely bypass things like a DNS block (i.e. pihole). For example, your browser probably does. Idk where it is in Chrome, but in Firefox you can go to Settings > Privacy & Security[0] and down at the bottom is "Enable DNS over HTTPS using:". Which, in general, I'd also encourage people to use. Cloudflare suggests this feature is available in Brace, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox[1]
So I'm saying there's an extra step to be aware of because if you rely on only DNS to perform the blocking, then it may not catch everything because there might just be a host file with the IPs manually specified. Which isn't unlikely.
I think the bigger problem is the complexity of all of this and how we're all being spied on unknowingly and in unexpected ways (you might know that you're being spied on in some ways but I'm willing to bet there's also ways you don't know). It's pervasive, invasive, and quite difficult to escape for even technologically adept people. And we shouldn't have a society where people are victims of things just because they do not have domain expertise in that subject matter. No one is a domain expert in all domains and it would be ludicrous to suggest one could be in even several of the critical ones.
[0] or about:preferences#privacy
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-ove...
I'm waiting for more of the post-2015 models to hit the secondary markets before the legal system sorts this out. When someone buys a used car for cash from a independent dealership, I seriously doubt they have sufficiently signed off on such data collection.
That is most likely what _Linksys_ did.
Please! Lets not just accept this poor state of security and somehow try to be apologetic for this issue. The BAR IS SO LOW .. Do not send unencrypted PII over the internet. And bonus points for not sharing someone's WiFi password with a third party. A third party in the US. We can probably assume that some three letter US government agency has intercepted all these requests.
The bar is really low. This is basic stuff. Zero need to be nice to Linksys.
Either way, not connecting your TV to wifi isn't an excuse for the behavior. Good for you, but that doesn't justify their actions or make anybody who is not up to date with what kind of spying happens any less of a victim. It shouldn't happen even if you are able to get around them. You should be able to use wifi AND not be spied on. Full stop.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.dev...
Anyway while I would not call the original accusation of the TV using any open WIFI automatically out of the question this experiment provides little evidence of that. It's hardly unthinkable that your neighbor or someone using their TV just clicked OK on some prompts to make them go away and thereby selecting the first network in the list. It's also not unthinkable that your neighbor wanted to use some functionality that requires an internet connection to setup and just didn't pay attention to the WIFI network selection.
Also, it could connect to an open WiFi without telling the user since it wouldn't need any input to enter credentials. It is becoming a lot harder to remain offline, at least with TVs.
I’m skeptical of this. Why would my Apple TV cheerfully proxy my TV’s request to send packets to the Internet?
And hell, I can't even find any evidence that there's TVs that support HEC.
After that point, the outcomes are not my problem. It is less work to do it this way.
The most you can expect from PR damage like this is that maybe an update goes out faster that fixes the problem (or at least hides it better). Nobody is afraid of bad PR. The most hated companies in the US are also massively wealthy and successful. If people refused to by routers from companies that pulled shit like this, nobody could buy a router. You can enter pretty much any major brand of wireless router into google next to words like "hardcoded" "backdoor" and "plaintext" and get results going back decades.
Next step is trawling procurement records for public purchasers of their products, and prompting their return.
No, it's probably devs not even caring about it (or not caring enough to push back on deadlines). It's surprising what people will do if they aren't forced to do the right thing (passwords checked to version control, proprietary code pasted in Stackoverflow) and so on.
You must live in an unbelievably beautiful world to consider that comment to be "hate speech".
I wonder what term you would use to refer to actual vile racist speech? And how you would differentiate between them when you use the term so freely?
Not Wi-Fi routers, but I don’t see why those developers wouldn’t be able to slowly churn through Jira tickets for a router software.
Audits are but a means to try champion that trust. And, indeed by no means a silver bullet at that.
Yes but, depending on how the ecosystem is built, the amount of trust needed can be smaller or greater. Reality isn't black or white, we also have shades and colors.
They have some fascinating papers about it, if I recall.
What has happened to some password managers though is that they don't store the metadata encrypted (like username, website name, etc.) so that leaks have revealed which sites you use but I don't think any decent password manager has leaked passwords without a client being hacked, right?
At least with Comcast it seems like they have the ability to modify and (I assume) see this stuff in plain text. Who thought that was acceptable from a security standpoint I will never understand.
The idea that your LAN is a security boundary is out of date by decades.
Famous last words.
> The idea that your LAN is a security boundary is out of date by decades.
I'm sure there are plenty of device and software vendors that haven't gotten the news. And exploits exist - no reason to carelessly discard a defensive layer just because it isn't 100% perfect.
SSID = [google] agrees to the following ToS.
psword = use of this password confers in perpetuity, unlimited use of any and all google products and services with no cost or liability, as the owner of the password sees fit
I work on SPR @ https://www.supernetworks.org/,w e keep data self hosted, instead of a database in someone else's cloud.
We need a privacy bill of rights. It’s time! The GDPR shows the way, and we can even improve on it with hindsight.
We’ll never get ahead of the data harvesting and exploitation of that data without it and all of this becomes quite an acute problem when we add low cost cognitive digital intelligences to the equation.
Take a poll and see how many iPhone users are here. Now realize the remainder are on some OEM Android! 50/50 I am the only one to reply to you running GrapheneOS. People WANT it to be this way, because any other way is too much work. It's how oligarchy arises!
I am not being hyperbolic, y'alls bitlocker codes are going to Microsoft soon if not already with 24H2.
Being into technology on a tech hacking [orange] subreddit does not put one into the same group as the tradecraft-savvy.
I would not expect my password to be sent to the server in the first place.