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?