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Guardy Guardy Guardy

@theflyingromana / theflyingromana.tumblr.com

Howdy gang, it's still me Robin! Wrestling fan extraordinaire!
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“Kashmir wanted to know what it would be like to live in a smart home and I wanted to find out what the digital emissions from that home would reveal about her. Cybersecurity wasn’t my focus. (I wasn’t interested in hacking her sex toy or any of her other belongings.) Privacy was. What could I tell about the patterns of her and her family’s life by passively gathering the data trails from her belongings? How often were the devices talking? Could I tell what the people inside were doing on an hourly basis based on what I saw? Using a Raspberry Pi computer, I built a router with a Wi-Fi network called “iotea” (I’m not very good at naming things) to which Kashmir connected all of her devices, so that I could capture the smart home’s network activity. In other words, I could see every time the devices were talking to servers outside the home. I had the same view of Kashmir’s house that her Internet Service Provider (ISP) has. After Congress voted last year to allow ISPs to spy on and sell their customers’ internet usage data, we were all warned that the ISPs could now sell our browsing activity, or records of what we do on our computers and smartphones. But in fact, they have access to more than that. If you have any smart devices in your home—a TV that connects to the internet, an Echo, a Withings scale—your ISP can see and sell information about that activity too. With my “iotea” router I was seeing the information about Kashmir and her family that Comcast, her ISP, could monitor and sell.”

— Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu, The House That Spied on Me

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Wired releases a surveillance self-defense guide

Wired’s new Guide to Digital Security is an excellent addition to the genre of simple-to-follow how-tos for reducing the likelihood that you’ll be victimized by computer-assisted crime and harassment, and that if you are, the harms will be mitigated.

Like Motherboard’s guide, it is formatted as a series of short articles; like EFF’s Surveillance Self Defense kit, it is structured around different kinds of threats, with separate paths for “civilians,” “public figures” and “spies.”

Some of the standout articles:

* Smartphone Security 101: The Steps That Matter Most in which Lily Hay Newman offers “quick and easy steps to make big improvements to your mobile security”;

* How to Encrypt All of the Things, where Andy Greenberg shows you “how to keep snoopers out of every facet of your digital life, whether it’s video chat or your PC’s hard drive”;

* How to Sweep For Bugs and Hidden Cameras, where Lily Hay Newman basically shows that unless you’re really technologically sophisticated, this is very, very hard;

* and What to Do if You’re Being Doxed, where Newman interviews the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Eva Galperin for really practical advice on what could easily be a nightmare scenario.

Electronic security is a team sport: that’s why the Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook has a chapter for how family members of political campaigners should armor themselves against being used as a means to get at their relatives.

This is the ideal season for you to help you up your family’s security game. When you go home for the holidays, think about how you can install software, change defaults, and teach your family good practices to help you – and them – stay safe.

If this interests you, read EFF’s Security Education Companion, which teaches you how to be an effective communicator of security precepts.

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boykeats

I’d to see anything and everything you have on Angels, your work is beautifully written

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THE ‘KEATON ST. JAMES IS ABSOLUTELY ENAMORED WITH ANGELS’ POETRY MASTERPOST

i’ve arranged the poems are in chronological order and included first lines, since there are so many pieces

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