Interesting reads, 23 April 2018

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week

• Russian hackers targeting millions of devices around the world, US and UK warn — Unsurprising, but it’s unusual to hear this sort of statement from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

• astralship.org — Intriguing community work space in a converted chapel in beautiful north Wales.

• EX-99.1 — Jess Bezos' annual shareholder letter. I admire the obsessive amount of thought that’s gone into cultivating a culture of high standards, which is the topic of much of this letter.

• Random Darknet Shopper (2014) — Amazing art project, a robot which bought a random item from the “Darknet” each week.

• Palantir Knows Everything About You — Palantir “is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens”. The company also builds “predictive policing”, unaccountable algorithms which reinforce the biases of the data that trained them.

• The ticking time bomb: Fake ad blockers in Chrome Web Store — Malicious people fork genuine ad-blockers, wait till a large number of people install them, then update them with hidden malware.

• Google disables “domain fronting” capability used to evade censors — Domain fronting allows an app to obscure the true origin of a web request by passing a different TLS SNI hostname than the inner HTTP Host header. It’s an important technique for bypassing censorship systems, and while it wasn’t a deliberate feature, it’s sad that Google has broken it.

• Facebook starts its facial recognition push to Europeans — Quick! GDPR isn’t for another month, so let’s sneak in some auto-opt-in creepy facial recognition settings while we’ve got the chance.

• Securing Elections — Schneier on Security — Oh my, electronic voting is completely broken.

• One in three heart surgeons refuse difficult operations to avoid poor mortality ratings, survey shows  — Transparency isn’t always good. I wonder if this is a sample size issue, if the ratings were aggregated across a hospital, would this still happen?