Lauren Weinstein

Lauren's outlook on social media is monochromatic, apocalyptic and incorrect in one respect. When real names and pictures are required of everyone, cyberdisinhibitionism, the tendency for people to act horribly and without boundaries, is reduced and conversation becomes more civilized. Signalvnoise (Basecamp / DHH blog) points to this observation. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-relationship-b… Another thought piece: https://ericsammons.com/internet-anonymity-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ug… Interesting article about grandiose and vulnerable narcissism interacting with anonymity: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188692100827… Anonymity is necessary for some discussions (like these), but it should not be pervasive or without boundaries. https://lauren.vortex.com

Unrelated to Lauren Weinstein, the privacy activist: https://lauren.vortex.com/

(from http://lauren.vortex.com/googler-lyrics ) "Our data store of your actions makes NSA's look just like toys," bet their pr folks love that one.

A very substantial portion (~98% of all public posts) of Google+ was successfully archived, at the Internet Archive, thanks to the Archive Team. As a longtime G+ user, and one of the organisers behind the G+ "Plexodus", the existence, assistance, and capabilities of the Archive Team were hugely appreciated. AT and the Internet Archive have succeeded in preserving other content, though not all projects are successful. You can see a partial listing at https://www.archiveteam.org/ Even as notorious a "wasteland" as Google+ (a naming I've had some role in establishing: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq) had many millions of actual active users, and tens of thousands of active communities (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communi… Unlike numerous other shutdowns, Google announced the G+ shutdown well in advance, though they "accelerated" the schedule twice, from "sometime in August 2019" to April 1, 2019, the eventual shutdown date. The tools Google offered for archiving and migrating content, whilst among the best in the industry (an exceptionally low bar), were incredibly insufficient: buggy, incomplete, duplicative, and not readily portable). It was largely third-party tools and assistance -- the Friends+Me Google+ archiver and ArchiveTeam most especially -- that meaningful preservation was possible. The conceit of large-scale, free-to-use services has been…

Hi all. The original blog post on this topic is mine. Let's assume you're a very "privacy conscious" person who only accepts cookies for sites where you feel they are necessary -- say ones where you're going to login, or you really want to read articles there and you can't without the cookies, or whatever. Under Firefox (and Chrome under the old modality) your cookie setting choice was "Block but notify on new cookies." Under the old model, when you first tried to access that site, create an account, login, register, etc., you'd get the initial pop-ups that you needed to respond to, that made it very clear that there were cookies involved now that you might want to accept. This is in fact a modal decision, because not accepting those cookies at that point will have consequences (like registration sequences that keep repeating, login prompts that won't accept your input, and so on). Now the new model. As you browse the Web the little cookie icon is constantly popping up in the bar. Sometimes it shows clear and sometimes it shows blocked -- but after a while you're just going to ignore it as you go flying from page to page. There's nothing in that icon to alert the user that they've reached an important decision point about an initial cookie from a site. Even if they think to click that icon at the right moment on a new site, they have to do more clicking to dig down into the cookie management system to accept it if they wish to. Old model: You're on a page where…

Some context: http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001076.html "What they propose for the new HTTP/2.0 protocol is nothing short of officially sanctioned snooping."

As an appreciator of vintage BSTJ issues (in particular the 1948 C.E.Shannon vehicles ;-), I liked this bit: [...] it was widely argued that a single page and a single table from the November 1960 edition of The Bell System Technical Journal -- in fact, this page and this table [1], triggered the rise of telephone network hopping “phone phreaks” [...] [1] http://lauren.vortex.com/bstj-bluebox.jpg

Here's an interesting solution. CMU just put out a tool called Perspectives that runs public notary servers. The servers probe sites periodically to get a history of keys. This can go a long way toward determining whether there is a man-in-the-middle sending you a fake SSL certificate (because it will not match the history). http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/ (hat-tip Lauren Weinstein) http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000414.html

>I noticed that Chrome had moved the SSL details dialog away from the lock dropdown too. I have no idea about the rationale but here's where SSL details reside now... it's insane what they have done: >First, get into Developer tools. You can do this via Chrome’s upper-right three vertical dots, then click “More tools” — then “Developer tools” — or on many systems you can just press the F12 button. >But wait, there’s still more (yeah, Google took a simple click in an intuitive place and replaced it with a bunch of clicks scattered around). >Once the panel opens, look up at its top. If you don’t see the word “Security” already, click on the “>>” to the right of “Console” — then look down the list that appears and click on “Security” — which will open the Security panel with all of the certificate-related goodies. When you’re done there, click the big “X” in the upper right of the panel to return to normal browser operations. https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/01/28/heres-where-google-hid-the-ssl-ce…

This site was incredibly slow for me to connect to. Just in case the server goes down here's the text of the article. I will remove this if requested. Mirror for the ctrl+f folks ---------------------------------- Windows 10's New Feature Steals Your Internet Bandwidth A couple of days ago I discussed a number of privacy and other concerns with Microsoft's new Windows 10, made available as a free upgrade for many existing MS users: Windows 10: A Potential Privacy Mess, and Worse: http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001115.html The situation has only been getting worse since then. For example, it's been noted that the Win10 setup sequence is rigged to try fool users into switching to an MS browser, irrespective of their browser settings before they started the upgrade: Mozilla isn’t happy with Microsoft for changing how users change the default web browser in Windows 10: http://microsoft-news.com/mozilla-isnt-happy-with-microsoft-for-changi… Pretty bad. But we have even lower to go, as we've seen that by default, Windows 10 actually steals bandwidth from your ISP connection so that Microsoft can use your computer, and your connection, to send MS updates to their other customers. Huh? Say what? Yep. It's a devious little feature called Windows Update Delivery Optimization. It's enabled by default. For Enterprise and Education users, it operates over the local LAN. For ordinary Home type users, Microsoft can send…

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/7/11173010/verizon-supercookie-fine-1-… https://tech.slashdot.org/story/07/07/25/155200/tool-detects-in-flight… https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000337.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/01/cox-communications-i… https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/confirmed-isp-modifies-google-home-page…