Anarcho-Libero-Constitutionalist-Transcendentalist

submitted by /u/lewlewwaller [link] [comments]

Does anyone have experience using prepaid gift cards to purchased gasoline, and can it be done anonymously? I'm in the US, since this probably varies from country to country due to local laws. I've never used gift cards before and it looks like a minefield. There are reports that many of them must be activated online with driver license or personal ID info. Sometimes even a bank account number. Of course that wouldn't work for privacy. Stations normally require you to enter a zip code when using pay-at-the-pump. If a gift card was bought with cash, it wouldn't have my zip. Is there a way around that? Like a gift card with a pre-defined zip? If possible I'd like to find a "recipe" that's known to work for this purpose, if there is one. I am aware that it's still possible to buy gas with cash. submitted by /u/lethargiraptor [link] [comments]

Can I make bank transactions online using kiwi browser app? submitted by /u/Doesbadges [link] [comments]

What are some ways, articles, interviews, or the like that you use to help others understand why digital privacy is important? submitted by /u/Tuna_no-crust [link] [comments]

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Your answers will help me in learning how to degoogle (and probably de-Xiaomi). Many thanks! submitted by /u/WishIWasDead2004 [link] [comments]

I’ve just purchased my firstnamelastname domain. - I use Apple and Windows devices and after all the research I’ve done I think I will settle on three email addresses. I was going to create a brand new Apple ID Account but due to the amount of app purchases and certain apps no longer available I have decided to keep the Apple Account but I have just did a massive tidy up and deleted as much of not all data I can that I know of within iCloud. Email address 1: firstnamelastname will be my primary email address. This will be used as my Apple ID Email address. Other services will be linked to this same address also: banks, any gov/legal, any paid services. Maybe business / professional interactions, Major paid for accounts maybe my Xbox/PSN. Apple has iCloud+ which is their own private relay and hide my email service so not sure wherever to use this for service signups? Can you recommend a email provider please? - I was going to use mailbox.org (domain is with godaddy so would need to look at how to set this up). Secondary email: This be a gmail / outlook account which has services like:Amazon, Uber, social media, Forums, YouTube,mobile games (not sure how for mobile games cause the Apple ID would be used?) Third email address: Any new interactions online, services I don’t pay money to nor care if the account got compromised. Have I missed anything above or mixed anything up? - Any advice would be appreciated. I’m close to factory resetting my devices once I have my own email set up! submitted by /u/JellyBeanGreen2 [link] [comments]

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I realize this may be slightly off topic for this sub, but I'm hoping others may have ideas I had not considered. I have a yubikey with NFC and usb-c that I use for my primary computer and phone. I have a secondary rugged computer that I use when outdoors (toughbook CF-20) for SDR, offgrid mapping, etc. as a bit of a throw around device. The USB slots on the toughbook are protected against dirt and such with small plastic flaps that make some USB adapters impossible to insert, so I'm looking for an adapter that I can run USB C to A. I keep my yubikey attached to my keys along with two usb drives (both type a). My issue is that my phone and primary laptop are all usb c, and I'd rather not have the need for adapters with them. It looks like samsung makes a decent option with their duo plus that I may upgrade to, although I wish it was slimmer. I'm looking for any recommendations on the following: USB flash drives that have both usb C and A (preferably something that is slim I can connect to a keychain without fear of losing the adapter) USB C to A connector like this but inverted (USB c female, USB a male) Other ideas for running a yubikey, and usb flash drives that can operate between both C and A USB types EDIT: Changed link per bot's recommendation. submitted by /u/UglyViking [link] [comments]

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Check out: https://twitter.com/thezedwards/status/1528808759027331072 or https://nitter.net/thezedwards/status/1528808759027331072 to avoid Twitter. submitted by /u/freedom-fighter-443 [link] [comments]

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I mean, no one in my circle uses it and it’s pointless for me to install it, without me playing the tin foil hat essentially asking them to go get Signal because it’s « private and end to end encrypted so the glowies can’t spy on you » I feel like privacy just doesn’t work when you have a « normal » social life, meaning, normies use whatsapp or messenger or snap or whatever and you don’t. I have no one to talk to on this app. Do you? Besides, are we a cult? submitted by /u/C-_-Q [link] [comments]

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Hi, I've recently had to download the data package since somehow my account sent spam messages to my personal contacts on Discord. The message was a server invite link with a welcoming message. I do not know this server nor have I clicked on any suspicious links or invites. Anyways, I secured everything I could think of and I've checked several suspicious logins from the data package. So I have actually 2 questions here if anyone could help me it'd be great! ​ 1) Is it normal to have a login event from a different city from where I live in? Maybe redirecting idk, but this seemed out of the ordinary as I have never even been to that city. And this login type is guild invite which I could not understand meaning what? ​ 2) Main question is; I can find the messages I have sent and I also found these spam messages with specific ids and timestamps, however, I want to check the sender ips. Is there a way to do that? ​ And since I don't know how I got my account to be hacked or used, do you guys think the account'll be safe with new password and 2FA? ​ Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/Only_Sheepherder7340 [link] [comments]

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The title is unfortunately not clickbait. Ever since discovering reddit and r/privacy years ago, I have been very concerned about my digital trail, and my first step of doing so is by removing Facebook from my life. I have deleted my active Facebook account way back August 2018, not deactivate, but deleted. However, prior to its deletion I made a Messenger only account without Facebook using my phone number. Yes, this was a feature before but they removed it. And so, I have lived without having access to Facebook for the past few years and was pretty much undisturbed in my little echo chamber of friends and family. I took pride in that fact and whenever people ask for my social media accounts, I only give them my Messenger name and they are often times shocked by my lack of a Facebook profile. This had been the case right until today, or at least a few weeks ago when I noticed that I cannot change my Messenger name and profile photo anymore. Back then there was a little pen icon beside the Messenger name and profile photo if I want to change it, which I have done so many times since 2018. I read articles about how to change profile photos and names and one answer kept coming up, and that is I cannot change without doing it via Facebook which was a slight concern since I know for a fact my Messenger only account DOES NOT HAVE and IS NOT CONNECTED to any Facebook account. But still, I guess its worth a try, so I logged in on Facebook using my Messenger account credentials, and LO AND BEHOLD, IT GAVE ME AN ACCOUNT WITH ALL MY PREVIOUS PROFILE PHOTOS SINCE THE CREATION OF MY MESSENGER ONLY ACCOUNT. It genuinely shocked me, and then felt anger towards the platform. I know for a fact that my Messenger only account is not connected to any FB profile prior to this year at the very least since I have tried to log in to Facebook using the same Messenger credentials and it gave me the "Account does not exist" error. This is a legitimate privacy concern, I never consented to Facebook creating an FB profile for me, I was only using my account as a Messenger only account to connect with friends and family. Now, I badly want to delete the Facebook profile that they created for me but by doing so I would also lose access to my Messenger account that holds my contacts. And so the best thing that I could do was to just deactivate the Facebook account but keep the Messenger activated. Generally, it functions similarly, I still will not use Facebook as a social media but keep my Messenger as a means of communication, but the fact they they created a profile without my consent is enough for me to really hate the platform. Did anyone go through the same thing? Let me know if you know of people who had the same thing happened to them. ​ PS: I really cannot leave Messenger as a messaging app, I live in a Facebook centric country and by not having even Messenger account you are essentially close to being considered as dead by the people that you know. submitted by /u/sinofpride9 [link] [comments]

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Sorry if it's an wrong subreddit, but does anyone know something about an email service with "mchsi.com" ending, is it safe? does it even exist anymore? The site doesn't load, can't find anything about it. submitted by /u/furioussn [link] [comments]

As the title suggests - my friend is a denier of the privacy issues. I’m looking for reliable resources to introduce and explain to him the danger of online privacy loss. Any recommendation will be greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/redwisdomlight [link] [comments]

I had sold off a laptop I no longer use to a local shop, but I think I made a big mistake, it had my personal my files although I stored them in an encrypted veracrypt container. It had Linux (Fedora 35) installed with full disk encryption (LUKS). When selling the laptop, I installed Windows on the SSD, I only deleted the partition, I did not use secure wipe or format the whole disk by overwriting it. Do I need to be worried about a stranger accessing my personal files? submitted by /u/technicalques98 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/n3tg33k73 [link] [comments]

U.S. democracy is at an inflection point, and how we administer and verify our elections is more important than ever. From hanging chads to glitchy touchscreens to partisan disinformation, too many Americans worry that their votes won’t count and that election results aren’t trustworthy. It’s crucial that citizens have well-justified confidence in this pillar of our republic. Technology can provide answers - but that doesn’t mean moving elections online. As president and CEO of the nonpartisan nonprofit Verified Voting, Pamela Smith helps lead the national fight to balance ballot accessibility with ballot security by advocating for paper trails, audits, and transparency wherever and however Americans cast votes. On this episode of How to Fix the Internet, Pamela Smith joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien to discuss hope for the future of democracy and the technology and best practices that will get us there. %3Ciframe%20height%3D%2252px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2Fe3f5f1a4-c2be-4cc0-8b7d-d9ffd482c080%3Fdark%3Dtrue%26amp%3Bcolor%3D000000%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com      This episode is also available on the Internet Archive. In this episode you’ll learn about: Why voting online can never be like banking or shopping online What a “risk-limiting audit” is, and why no election should lack it  Whether open-source software could be part of securing our votes Where to find reliable information about how your elections are conducted Pamela Smith, President & CEO of Verified Voting, plays a national leadership role in safeguarding elections and building working alliances between advocates, election officials, and other stakeholders. Pam joined Verified Voting in 2004, and previously served as President from 2007-2017. She is a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises, a diverse cross-partisan group of more than 50 experts whose mission is to prevent and mitigate election crises by urging critical reforms. She provides information and public testimony on election security issues across the nation, including to Congress. Before her work in elections, she was a nonprofit executive for a Hispanic educational organization working on first language literacy and adult learning, and a small business and marketing consultant. Music: Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower.  This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:  Klaus by Skill_Borrower http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Skill_Borrower/41751 commonGround by airtonehttp://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703 Chrome Cactus by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD)http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/62475 Resources Voting Security: The Verifier, Verified Voting  Election Security If It Doesn’t Have Paper Backups and Automatic Audits, It’s Not an Election Security Bill What to Do When Voting Machines Fail E-Voting Machines Need Paper Audits to be Trustworthy NSW’s online gamble: why internet and phone voting is too risky, The Conversation No to Online Voting in Virginia Election Security Is a Matter of National Security, Scientific American Elections Are Partisan Affairs. Election Security Isn’t  Voter Privacy: What You Need to Know About Your Digital Trail During the 2016 Election, EFF  Hacking the D.C. Internet Voting Pilot, Freedom to Tinker Security Through Obscurity Code Review Isn’t Evil. Security Through Obscurity Is Podcast Episode: Making Hope, with Adam Savage Transcript Pam: It's not like banking and shopping, and it's not like banking and shopping online and other things that don't require secrecy and disassociating the identity of the person doing the transaction from the content of the transaction. And that's why internet voting is so challenging. If you were to send in your ballot from remotely and then call the election official and say, "Hey, it's Pam. I sent my ballot, I voted for candidate A, is that what you've got?" That's not how elections work first of all. But if it were, why not just do that and not do the send. Just say, "Hey, I want to vote for candidate A, could you mark that down for me?" That would actually be safer. It wouldn't be private, but neither is internet voting. Cindy:  That's our guest, Pam Smith. She's the CEO of Verified Voting. And today she's going to be joining us to explain how digital technologies can help secure elections but we are also going to talk about how we need to keep a clear separation between our actual votes and the internet.  Danny:  Pam's going to spread some light and tell us how we can protect the entire process, from voter registration to vote verification through to a risk limiting audit. She'll tell us how to build a system that lets everyone feel comfortable that the candidate with the most votes was actually the one chosen. Cindy:  I'm Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Danny:  And I'm Danny O'Brien, special advisor to the EFF. Welcome to How to Fix the Internet, the podcast where we explain some of the biggest problems in tech policy and examine the solutions that'll make our lives better. Cindy:  Hi, Pam. You and I go way back and I currently serve on the board of advisors of Verified Voting.  And I'm so excited to have you here today so we can dig into these things.  Pam:  It's great to be with you again. Cindy:  So we find ourselves in a very strange situation, you and me and others who care about election integrity, where some of the arguments that we have been using for many, many years to try to make our elections more secure are being picked up and used by people who I would say don't have that same goal.  Pam:  Well I think people legitimately want to know that elections are righteous, why wouldn't they? But I think the undermining of the public's ability to trust and to know how to trust in elections is really one of the more severe dangers to democracy today. As long as there have been elections, there have been problems, issues, challenges, and even tampering with elections, that's not new. Those issues are different at different points in history. Starts out with who gets the vote and who doesn't. But also back in the day, communities used hand count votes with the whole public watching. And it was very transparent, it was low tech, no problems, but it was also not private, not secret, and there were very few voters.  Now elections are carried out with software and computerized systems in most aspects of elections and things can be hacked and tampered with and can have failures and bugs and glitches. People need to understand technology touches their elections in many places. How do we know that it's secure? So what we do is look at what are the basics in securing elections. It’s the same as securing anything computerized, it's keeping systems up and running, it's protecting data from both malfeasance and malfunction, and it's being able to recover when something goes wrong, having that resilience. Cindy:  Could you give us an example of one of the things that people were very worried about, that election officials could easily explain?  Pam:  Well, probably the biggest one, and this was anticipated, was the fact that not all the votes are going to be done being counted on election night, they're just not. And especially in 2020, where you add one more layer of complexity called a pandemic. So it made a lot of things different. When the ballots come in, if they came in before election day, my county prepares them for counting and runs a tally. First thing after the polls are closed, they can report out those absentee ballots. But those are just the ones they've already gotten in, that's not the polling place ballots, that's not the ones we allow to arrive late as long as they were postmarked on time. So there's many more ballots to be added into that count, that's just the initial count. I think people don't know that the initial count is not the official count, and that's important to know. It takes a while for all of the ballots to be processed and counted, even to make sure that they were legitimate ballots and included properly in the count. And that end part is called certification of the election. When we certify in each jurisdiction, that's the final count. Cindy:  And this is the difference between elections in the United States in elections in a lot of places around the world, we vote on a lot of things. Danny:  It's true. Cindy:  And we have complicated ballots that might change across the street depending on what precinct or whatever that you're in. Even in a place where people live very close together, there are different kinds of ballots because people are voting for their very local representative as well as all the way up to the federal level. And elections are generally governed as a legal matter locally as well. So the US constitution guarantees your right to vote, but how that happens varies a lot. One of the things that Verified Voting created a long time ago, but which I still think is a tremendously useful tool, is something called The Verifier, which is a website that you can go to and type in where you live and it will tell you exactly what counting technologies are used.  Danny:  And I think this touches on the key point here, how technology can complicate or even undermine people's trust in what is already a very complicated system. Again, a lot of the conversations in the last election were about, has this been hacked? And how do we prove whether it has or it hasn't been hacked? I know Verified Voting and EFF were very involved in the early effort to require paper records, a paper trail of digital voting technology, what we call voter verified paper records back in the 2000s. So can you just talk a little bit about where the role paper, of all things, plays in a more high tech voting system? Pam:  It's interesting to note when we got started back in 2004, there were only about eight states with a requirement to use paper and only about three had a requirement to check the paper later with an audit. Danny:  And when you say paper here, it's literally a printout. You vote and then there's a paper record somewhere that you voted in a certain way. Pam:  It's a physical record that you get to check to make sure it was marked the way you intended it. Danny:  Got it. Pam:  You may be using an interface, a machine that prints that out, but you may be marking a physical ballot by hand as well. And it's that physical record of your intent that is the evidence for the election.  So here's the thing about paper, you need to know that you can cast an effective ballot and that means you're getting the right ballot, that it's complete, there's no missing candidates or contests on it, it's feasible to mark. If you have to use an interface, that that interface is working, up and running, and that you have a way to check that physical ballot and cast it safely and privately. Then that ballot gets counted along with all the other ballots and you need a way to know it was counted correctly. And that you can demonstrate that fact to the public to the satisfaction of those who are on the side of the losing candidate or issue, and that's the key. If you have that... This is what was said about the 2020 elections, Chris Kreb, who was at the cybersecurity agency at DHS on elections and he called the 2020 election the most secure in American history. The leg he had to stand on for that was the fact that almost all jurisdictions were using paper, that almost all jurisdictions were doing some audit to check after fact. And that's why it matters, you have to have that record. Danny:  I know that some of the work that's come out of what you've been doing then has been this idea of risk limiting audits.  I'm addressing this to both of you, because I know you both worked on this, but the risk limiting audits and how they work. Pam:  Audits get done in a variety of industries, there are audits in banking, there's all kinds of audits, the IRS might audit you. It's not always seen as such an attractive word. But in elections, it's really important. What it means is you are counting, you're doing a hand to eye count, you're visually looking at those paper ballots and doing a comparison of a count of a portion of those ballots with the machine count. So software can go wrong, it can be badly programmed, it could have been tampered with. But if you have that physical record that you can then count a portion of and check and make sure it's matching up, and if it's not figure out where the problem is. That's what makes the system resilient. A risk limiting audit is one that relies on the margin of victory to determine how much you have to count in order to have a strong sense of confidence that you're not seating the wrong person in office. So it's a little bit like polling. If you poll on a particular topic, you want to know how the public feels about something, you don't have to ask every single person, you just ask a percentage of them. You make sure it's a good cross section, you make sure it's a well randomized sample. And all other things being equal, you're going to know how people feel about that topic without having to ask every single person. And with risk limiting audits, it's the same kind of science, it's using a statistical method to determine how much to count. Cindy:  We worked really hard to try to make sure that there was paper. And then we realized that we had to work really hard to make sure that the paper played the role that it needed to play when there are concerns. If you only do this when you're worried that there's a problem, you're really not fixing the situation. It needs to be something that happens every time so people can build their trust in the things. But also it needed to be lightweight enough that you could do it every single time and you don't end up with these crazy debacles, like we saw in Arizona.  Can you give us an update? How's it going trying to get risk limiting audits regularized in the law? I know this is an area where you guys do a lot of work. Pam:  Well, this extremely geeky term, risk limiting audits, is actually getting wide traction. So it's good news. Danny:  Good. Pam:  People I think are understanding it. And one of the things that we do is support election officials through the process. So maybe their state passes a law that says you'll do risk limiting audits, we help them understand how to do it and answer all the questions that might come up when they're doing it. They then use that to demonstrate to the public that it's working right and it's a tool that they are really adapting to and adopting well. There's more to do. And I think what's important to know is that really any audit is going to have some utility in telling you how your equipment's working. Risk limiting audits are a more robust form of auditing. And they will let you not do as much work if the margin is wide and they will call for more work if the margin is very narrow, but you want that anyway. You might go to a full recount in a very tight margin, talking about Florida 2000, that margin would probably necessitate that full hand recount anyway. But doing a risk limiting audit, you can get to that kind of confidence. Danny:  “How to Fix the Internet” is supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program in Public Understanding of Science. Enriching people’s lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. Cindy:  Let me flip to where I love to go, which is so What does it look like if we get this right? What are the values? What does it look like if we have a world in which we have technology in the right places, in our systems, but also that we can trust it. Pam:  I think that getting it right means that voters know the election was fair because it was conducted securely. And they know how to know that. That they know where the ground truth is and how to figure it out, that they're participating actively in watching, that they're not being hindered by failed technology at whatever point that intersects with the election. Whether it's registration or checking into the polling place or actually using a device to mark your ballot or the counting process, that nowhere along on the path they're being hindered in that process. And that means more people can participate who want to participate. This doesn't address things like voter suppression, that's a separate different issue. And it's an issue about security because elections really are only secure if everybody who wants to gets to participate and can cast an effective ballot. Cindy:  Could you explain why we want to fix the internet, we want to make the world better, and why voting over the internet isn't on the list of things that we think would make a better world? Pam:  One of the things that we talked about is the importance of the paper. That the voter gets to check at the time they're voting and make sure it represents what they meant to vote for. When you use the internet to transmit votes, you lose that. What arrives at the election's office, if it arrives at the election's office, may or may not represent what the voter thought they intended to vote for. And there's no real way to control for of that right now. Maybe in some future on a different internet that was designed for security and not just for open communication, it's possible to do. But you have all kinds of issues with internet voting that include things like voter authentication attacks, malware on the voter's devices, not just in the election's office, a denial of service attack, server penetration, spoofing, all kinds of things can go wrong. Cindy:  And ballot privacy is tremendously important if you really want to make sure that people can vote freely for who they want. You don't want them subjected to either their boss or the other people who live with them or their community, being able to see how they vote. That's not a free vote, that can often be a coerced vote. So a secret ballot is just a piece of how elections work, not just in the US but in most places of the world for really good reason. Pam:  The internet has other ways in which it's hazardous to elections health. It can be used for attacks on election officials, which we're seeing a lot these days, attacks on votes, attacks on voters’ registration. We saw in 2016 state databases being tampered with from afar. And other kinds of information hacks. Just really by way of disinformation, attacks on democracy and understanding how to know what you need to know. If we're thinking of about what would the world look like if we got it right, election officials are protected, votes are secure, and voter registration is secure and there's ways for people to check and make sure of that. And fail safes in case something happens last minute. So all of those kinds of things are really important. Fighting disinformation is probably as important as the rest. Danny:  I thought it was very fascinating in the last couple of elections in the US, I was talking to the cybersecurity side of all of this, it's very difficult to get to the bottom of these things. But one thing really stuck with me, which is that the officials I was talking to said, "Well, look, most people's model of this is someone is hacking to change the results to favor a particular person. But in fact, if you want to introduce instability into a country, the best thing you can do is just undermine faith in the system itself. You don't actually have to achieve a result, you just have to inject a sufficient amount of ambiguity into the result. Because once that trust is gone, then it doesn't matter what the result is because the other side is going to assume something happened behind the scenes. So is part of this to make the whole system transparent in a way that the average person can understand what's going on?  Pam:  We don't expect voters to have confidence, our mission has never been make voters feel confident, it's not about that. It's about giving them justified confidence that the outcome was right. And that's different.  Cindy:  But let's just say I hear that there's a problem in a critical place. What do I ask myself? And what do I look for to be able to tell whether this is a real problem or perhaps not a real problem that's being overblown or just misunderstood? Pam:  Well, I think you want to know what the election official says. There are rare exceptions, but nearly all the election officials I know they're simply heroes frankly. They're working with minimal budgets and doing very long hours on very tight deadlines that are unforgiving. But what they do is really to address problems, anticipate problems, avoid them, and if they come up, address them. So you need to know what the election official is saying. If it's observable, go observe. If there's a count happening that you can watch, go watch that count. But you can't get your information, from somebody's cousin on Facebook. Cindy:  Give us an example of where there was a concern and we were able to put it to rest or there was a concern and it went forward. Pam:  One of the things we'd hear on election day at election protection was we'd get a call from somewhere and they'd say, "I've marked my ballot and I wanted to go cast it in this scanner like I usually do. But they told me not to and they put it in a separate bin." Why did they do that? Are they taking those ballots away? Are those not going to be counted? What's happening there? And we are able to tell them that there is actually a legit reason for that.  What happens sometimes in a ballot scanner is that the bin gets full, that the ballots don't fall in a straight line, and it may be jammed. And if it's jammed, you don't want the ballots to get destroyed by trying to keep feeding more and more in. That bin has actually got a name, it's the auxiliary bin, it's the extra bin for when this happens. And it is attached to the ballot box. And what happens is once they clear that jam, which they may not be able to do in the middle of the busiest time of voting, is to feed those through. Danny:  All right. Pam:  That actually is a real simple problem with a simple resolution. But when you can tell people, "This is how that works" it puts their mind at rest. Danny:  Which brings me, I think, to something else that people often, both on the left and right, worry about, which is the companies behind these machines. How can we reassure people that there isn't something being underhand in the very design of the technologies? Pam:  We used to say that it shouldn't matter if the devil himself designed your voting system, as long as there's paper and you're doing a robust check on the paper, you should be able to solve for that. That's what makes it resilient and that's why we want to make sure every voter, not just 90% or more, but all of the voters are living in a jurisdiction where that paper record is there for them to check   Cindy:  I just think overall, this is technology, it needs to be subjected to the same things we do in other technology to try to continue to make it better. And that includes a funding stream so that when new technology is available, local election officials can actually get it. Pam:  Elections are woefully underfunded. And there's a conference that happens in California every year that's called New Laws. This is a conference that election officials hold so that they can examine all the new laws that have been passed that affect how they run elections. It happens every year. So they are constantly and continuously having to update what they do and make changes to what they do. Oftentimes there are unfunded mandates that have to do with what they do. Asking them to do additional things is hard, especially if you're not going to pay for it. So it's really important that there is federal funding for elections that gets down through to the states and to the counties to support good technology. But with things like internet voting, the most dangerous form of voting, that doesn't have to go through any certification because no one's been able quite yet to write standards for how you would do this securely. Cindy:  Because you can't right now. Pam:  Because you can't. Cindy:  With our current internet. Pam:  Not that we don't want to, you just can't. Danny:  I have one more thing to throw in which people often, often say, "Oh, we should do it like this." I'd love to know your opinion on it because our community is often like, "Well, we need an open source voting machine or a voting system. And that would fix a set of problems." Certainly the idea is that would be more transparent and you would feel more confident about it. Do you think that's an answer or part of the answer? Pam:  I think it's a very good thing. It's what some people might call necessary but not sufficient. You still are going to need to do audits, you're still are going to need paper, you still need a resilient system. But open source helps make sure that you can anticipate some of the issues right away because there are lots of eyes on the problem. With voting technology though, it gets tricky. It's not quite the same as other kinds of open source because who's responsible for what's the most current iteration? This isn't something that people can just keep applying fixes to randomly, there has to be a known version that's being used in a particular election. So there has to be an organization or entity that governs how that's being used. Cindy:  Understanding how this technology works is tremendously important for all of our security. And it's the classic security through obscurity doesn't work, that our friend, Adam Savage just reminded us of this. This is a whole other wing of secure elections, but the only way you know something is secure is that a bunch of smart people have tried to break it and they can't.  Pam:  Don't leave weak spots if you can help it because if somebody's looking to tamper, they're going to find the weakest point. So it really is crucial to try and secure all parts of our elections.  Danny:  What's the end game here? You're clearly deeply in the trenches trying to incrementally improve these systems. But do you ever have a dream where you envisage a world where maybe we do have a solution to voting on the internet or we do use a new technology to make things better? Pam:  Moving towards those options includes things like if you need to vote by mail, you can vote by mail. If you want to vote in person in a polling place, that's available to you. If you need an accessible device, one that's really, really accessible and usable, it's available to you. And it works and it was set up before you got there so it's readily available. I think knowing that every jurisdiction is using a system that's resilient to any kind of failure, hurricane, power outage, anything, that there's a physical ballot to mark, that it's easy to check, it's a usable ballot not confusing, so that you end up missing contest or anything like that. It's designed well, ballot design is really important. All of those small pieces are only possible if there's enough funding for elections. If we believe in our democracy and we believe in having good elections, then that means having good voting systems, good practices, and the resources to carry those out. Right now, election officials really struggle to recruit enough poll workers for every election. Of course, that got a little harder with the pandemic going on. Many poll workers are of an older age cohort, so we need younger poll workers. And a lot of really smart programs have led to recruiting high school students to be poll workers and it's been magical. So I think really getting everyone engaged, getting everyone to understand where they can find the ground truth about elections, and feeling the confidence that they need to really happily participate and celebrate being part of this democracy, that's the most important thing. And that's what I envision for our future. Cindy:  Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. This has been a fascinating conversation. There's so much talk about elections and election integrity right now. And it's great to have a sane, stable voice that's been here for a long time, which is you and Verified Voting on the case. So thanks. Pam:  Thank you, Cindy. And thank you, Danny. Thanks for doing this. Danny: It's always good to talk to somebody like Pam, who has years of experience, especially when a topic is suddenly as controversial or in the public eye as election integrity. I did think given how controversial it is these days, Pam was reassuringly genial. She established that we need to get to a ground truth that everyone can agree on and we need to find ways, technological or not, to reassure voters that whatever the result, the rules were followed. Cindy:  I especially appreciated the conversation about risk limiting audits as one of the tools that help us feel assured that the right person won the election, the right issue won the election. Especially that these need to be regularized. EFF is audited, lots of organizations are audited. That this is just somewhat built into the way we do elections so that the trust comes from the idea that we're not doing anything special here, we always do audits and we scale them up depending on how close the election is. And that's just one of the pieces of building trust that I think Verified Voting has really spearheaded. The other thing I really liked was the ways that she helped us think about what we need to do when we hear those rumors of terrible things happening in elections far away. I appreciated that you start with the people who are there. Look for the election officials and the organizations who are actually on the ground in the place where you hear the rumors about looking to them first, but also looking to the election protection orgs, of which Verified Voting is one but not nearly the only one, that are really working year round and working in a nonpartisan way around election integrity. Danny:  And another leg of the stool is transparency throughout all of this process. It's key for resolving the ambiguity of it. I do appreciate that she pointed out that while open source code is great for giving some element of transparency, it's necessary but not sufficient. You have to wrap it around a trusted system. You can't just solve this by waving the free software license wand all over it. Cindy:  I also appreciate Pam lifting up the two sides of thinking about the Internet's involvement in our elections. First of all, the things that it's good at, delivering information, making sure ballots get to people. But also what it's not good for, which is actual voting and the fact that we can't get ground truth in internet voting right now. And that part of the reason we can't and what makes this different than doing your banking online is the need for ballot secrecy that has a tremendously long and important role in our elections. Danny:  But that said, I do think that ultimately there was a positive thread going through all of this. That many things in this area, in the United States have got better. We have better machines, we have newer machines, we have less secrecy and proprietary barriers around those machines. Often people when we ask them about what their vision of the future is, they get a little bit thrown because it is hard to describe the positive side. But Pam was pretty specific but also pointed out perhaps why it's such a challenge. Because she highlighted that what we want in our future is a diversity of solutions. And of course, that you need the correct financial and social support in the rest of society to make that vision happen. Cindy:  Thanks so much to Pam Smith for joining us and giving us so much honestly hope for the future of our democracy and our voting systems. Danny: If you like what you heard, follow us on your favorite podcast player and check out our back catalog for more conversations on how to fix the internet. Music for the show was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower. This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes music licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported licensed by their creators. You can find those creators names and links to the music in our episode notes or on our website at eff.org/podcast. How to Fix The Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program in public understanding of science and technology. I'm Danny O'Brien Cindy:  And I'm Cindy Cohn. Thank you so much for joining us.    

I am currently using Blokada to monitor, but are there any better ways? Much thanks submitted by /u/WishIWasDead2004 [link] [comments]

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For sending an anonymous email submitted by /u/forbiddencantaloupe2 [link] [comments]

I was, and am still drunk. I went to my local cinema to watch "Northmen", or whatever it's called. It was OK, Nicole Kidman with her fish face ruined it slightly. But I shouted "fire" randomly to see if I'd get arrested. Nothing happened! We keep hearing, "free-speech means, you can say what you want, but you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre"! Free speech means you can shout fire in a theatre actually! Why can't you? We keep hearing this expression, it's just a caveat to restrict speech. All speech is free! If you say the wrong shit, at the wrong time, you might get a slap, doesn't mean it's not free though! Which speech should be stopped? submitted by /u/Coconutcabbie [link] [comments]

And Israeli money and influence is allowed in our elections because why exactly?

Pence making a live appearance for Kemp in Georgia is super interesting. Gearing up for a 2024 run against Trump? Political junkies in for an exciting/hilarious time 😎

Corporate America always reminds me of a line from Spaceballs: “We’re not doing it for money… We’re doing it for a shitload of money!”

Maybe it’s what we need. Maybe Roe needs to be overturned so chaos ensues and the SCOTUS collapses of being exposed as a political establishment.

I'm looking for a watch like a Fitbit that'll respect my privacy (or at least not connect to the internet), any suggestions? submitted by /u/nonshadowbanned [link] [comments]

“This happened because…” 1. A factory wasn’t held to regulatory standards (government’s failure) 2. That factory was almost all of the formula production in the country, with few backup facilities (capitalism failure) 3. The company owning that factory was allowed to become 40% of the market share (government

Remember when Biden announced he was running for president, and everyone was sort of confused? Someone covered a debate party at a bar or something, and like one person was enthusiastic, while a bunch of people weren’t even there for the event? This… this is why.

Robby Soave and Ryan Grim detail Ukraine updates, like Senator Mitt Romney calling on the U.S. to get serious about nuclear war with Russia, and Ukrainian President Zelensky saying the West should have better supported Ukraine more in 2014.

How neocons locked the Right into a leftward drift. Glenn Ellmers, the diligent biographer of Harry Jaffa, has called attention to the insufficiently understood friendship between Lincoln scholar and Lincoln admirer Harry Jaffa and the Southern conservative M.E. Bradford. Most historians of the conservative movement know that these two titans of post-World War II conservatism battled furiously in the pages of Modern Age starting in 1975. Given the ferocity of their polemics, it is generally assumed the two debaters must have disliked each other personally. As Ellmers demonstrates in statements taken from his deceased teacher, however, Jaffa and Bradford were close personal friends and even … Continue reading → The post Liberalism Driving the Speed Limit appeared first on LewRockwell.

Now, we’re finding out the hard way how much daily life must change, and is changing, and how disorderly that process is in every way from the imperative daily life adjustments to our spiritual attitudes about them… When I wrote The Long Emergency nearly twenty years ago, I never thought that, once it got going, our government would work so hard to make it worse. My theory then was just that government would become increasingly bloated, ineffectual, impotent, and uncomprehending of the forces converging to undermine our advanced techno-industrial societies. What I didn’t imagine was that government would bring such ostentatious stupidity … Continue reading → The post We’re in It Now for Sure appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some people are more observant than others. Some are more capable of thinking outside the box than others. Whether this is by nature or nurture is a moot point. When we are children, we tend to look upon the world in all its wonder. We are amazed at what exists and we absorb it like a sponge. Then, when we are in our teens, we begin our second wave of discovery. We begin to pay more attention to the things that we find confusing; we become absorbed in issues like world hunger, warfare and political strife. These situations seem senseless … Continue reading → The post Give Me Liberty or Give Me Debt appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks Vasko Kohlmayer The post The Great George Carlin on Germs, Viruses, Immune System, and Infections appeared first on LewRockwell.

Norway should share the “excess” profits it’s been making as oil and gas prices soar amid the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said at the National Youth Dialogue Congress on Saturday. “But should we be paying Norway gigantic money for gas – four or five times more than we paid a year ago? This is sick,” he said, claiming that the excess of the annual average gas and oil profit “will exceed €100 billion” this year for a country of five million people like Norway. “They should share these excess profits. It’s not normal, it’s unjust. This is an … Continue reading → The post Poland Tells Norway to Hand Over Oil Revenues appeared first on LewRockwell.

Rudyard Kipling once wrote: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.” In his poem, Kipling was expressing his belief that cultures of the east and west were so intrinsically different that any hope for harmony or mutual interest was little more than a delusion. As an unrepentant racist and British imperialist, Kipling was quite certain that he exemplified the best of western civilization, founded as it was upon global submission of the dark-skinned races to a British hegemon which was mandated to rule … Continue reading → The post On the Brink of a New Dark Age: The Clash of Two Western Civilizations appeared first on LewRockwell.

Are you a gay man? Specifically, are you a gay man who likes sex with lots of other gay men? Maybe in a bathhouse? Maybe names optional? Maybe with a meth bump on the side? No? Are you sure? It’s cool if you are, no judgments. They’re called glory holes for a reason, people! Still no? Okay. Don’t worry about the monkeypox thing then. — You can almost feel the public health authorities squirming right now. On the one hand, they’ve almost got another epidemic on the go – the perfect way to distract the shiny-haired robots in the media … Continue reading → The post Is it Monkeypox, or Crystalpox? appeared first on LewRockwell.

 I have a friend who hates Juan O Savin with a passion and thinks he’s an evil PSYOP but the news has been so unrelentingly dispiriting, I was drawn to this more positive upload from Sean Stone yesterday, who caught up with Juan driving around Hawaii, headed to Buzz’s, his favorite steak joint in Kailua on the Island of O’ahu. Juan O Savin tells Sean Stone that the Biden Regime wants Russia to nuke Ukraine, in order to destroy all of the evidence of the endless corruption and money-laundering that the crime families in our government have been running … Continue reading → The post Juan O’ Savin: Big Update – It’s All About the Senate appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the coming days, the Nations that adhere to the World Health Organization (WHO) will vote on resolutions regarding the WHO’s management of pandemics. These resolutions will transfer sovereignty regarding the health of citizens to a supranational body that is largely financed by the pharmaceutical industry and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. If these resolutions are approved by a majority, the WHO will have exclusive international authority in the case of a pandemic to impose all the rules, including quarantines, lockdowns, obligatory vaccinations, and vaccine passports. It should also be borne in mind that this organization enjoys immunity, and … Continue reading → The post Abp. Viganò: World Health Organization Treaty Is an Attack on National Sovereignty, Part of a ‘Global Coup’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week, President Biden signed a massive $40 billion military aid bill for Ukraine. Who cares that inflation is killing the American economy and mothers can’t even get baby formula. For Washington, spending on war and empire always seems to trump America’s interests. To put this giveaway to Ukraine in perspective: just since late February, the US has provided nearly $60 billion in “assistance” to Ukraine. That is almost half that country’s entire 2020 GDP! Washington has literally adopted Ukraine in our name and on our dime. The Biden Administration claims that Ukraine is winning the war with Russia and … Continue reading → The post What’s Biden’s End Game in Ukraine? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Daniel Greenfield, writing at Front Page Magazine, offers this gem: “Elizabeth Bartholet, the director of Harvard Law’s Child Advocacy Program, described the ‘homeschooling phenomenon’ as a ‘threat’ to society, claiming that conservative parents ‘homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy’, ‘promote racial segregation and female subservience’, and ‘question science’.” “Her paper called for a ‘presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.’ These views are not fringe.” Of course, this elite Harvard titan, Bartholet, knows which ideas and values are central to our democracy; … Continue reading → The post Home Schooling: Here’s What Our Masters Say appeared first on LewRockwell.

At some point during the next nine days, British Home Secretary Priti Patel will decide whether or not to extradite imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges for publishing accurate information revealing U.S. war crimes. Pressure is building from both sides on the home secretary.  Press freedom and human rights organizations, a Nobel laureate, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, journalists and Assange supporters have appealed to Patel to let Assange go. While it would be deemed improper for outside influence to be brought on judges, it would not be fanciful to imagine that behind … Continue reading → The post Pressure Mounts on Patel Over Assange Decision appeared first on LewRockwell.

I went to https://infotracer.com/optout/ to try to remove myself. I found three records to be mine with minor inaccuracies. I submitted the removal request and clicked the link in the email, and I was told to wait 72 hours. But 4 days later, they were still there. So I did this again. 4 days later, still there. I did it a third time, now it's been 5 days and all three records are still there..... Does https://infotracer.com/optout/ work for anyone? How do I make it work? Thanks! (PS I'm in the United States, not in California) submitted by /u/greatCelery [link] [comments]

Hello, I've had Facebook for a long time now. I've read that even after I delete my account, they still retain or hold onto my data indefinitely. Is there a point of contact to make sure it's definite and not indefinite? Could I just change my email and name instead so that when data is accessed after deletion, it would be harder to track me or to associate with me? ​ Thanks for any input. God Bless. submitted by /u/Unknown_7337 [link] [comments]

Ryan Grim and Robby Soave discuss the crowded fight for Congressional seats in New York.

Julia Manchester and Philip Wegmann weigh in on President Joe Biden’s recent low approval numbers amid his Asia tour, and how current issues such as inflation, the baby formula crisis, and the war in Ukraine could be impacting these numbers.

Robby Soave and Ryan Grim discuss Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Michael Sussman and the accusation from prosecutors that he schemed to inject the FBI into the 2016 presidential election, part of a bigger plan to create an October Surprise.

Ryan Grim and Robby Soave react to an unearthed clip of Pfizer’s CEO allegedly referencing microchip technology.

Robby Soave discusses the allegations of sexual misconduct Elon Musk is facing from a SpaceX flight attendant, and the conservatives who are rallying to his defense.

Ryan Grim and Robby Soave discuss the Monkeypox virus and its cases around the world, including new U.S. cases, as well as Bill Gates’ predictions for the next pandemic.

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Krystal and Saagar remind viewers of the ‘stop the steal’ hypocrisy when it comes to counting mail in ballots in the primary election between Dave McCormick and Dr. Oz for the PA GOP Senate nomination

Saagar takes another deep look at the gas price crisis from the angle of how it is hurting American savings and what the administration could do about it right now

Krystal and Saagar go through the competitive Democratic primary in Texas between establishment incumbent Henry Cuellar and progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros

Krystal explains why the Democrats need to drain the swamp in their party and get rid of the permanent class of corporate-backed consultants who stand against the party on issues

Krystal and Saagar explain the Elon Musk sexual harassment allegations and the money SpaceX paid to the victim in exchange for her silence

Krystal and Saagar examine the Georgia GOP Gov. primary election where incumbent Brian Kemp is expected to win easily against Trump backed former Senator David Perdue

Krystal and Saagar break down the latest round of poor polling numbers for President Biden that were celebrated by the White House publicly despite what the polls said

Krystal and Saagar talk with foreign policy analyst Elbridge Colby about the Biden administration’s policies towards Taiwan that are in the spotlight after Biden called for the military to defend the island nation

Krystal and Saagar explore the revival of GOP Congressman Mo Brooks’ Senate campaign after he was unendorsed by Trump who called him ‘woke’ as the explanation

Krystal and Saagar make sense of the Russiagate accusations that were greenlit by Hillary Clinton as was revealed by testimony in the Durham investigation of the origins of Russiagate

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For the past couple weeks, Exodus has been unable to scan any APKs. If you go to their page hoping to perform a new analysis, you are met with the following message: "It is currently impossible to submit new analysis. Sorry for the inconvenience!" According to their account on Twitter, "We currently encounter an issue that prevents us from downloading APKs from the store. We're informed regarding this issue, and we're working on a fix. But as we're only a few volunteers, it can take some time." Does anyone know of an alternative site that can be used in the meantime? I'm assuming if there is, the alternative would be in the same pickle as Exodus, but I figured I'd ask just in case I'm wrong. submitted by /u/Ms_Meadow_Muffin [link] [comments]

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When the heck did Abortion become such a hot button Libertarian issue? It’s all that my local Libertarian party chairs post and talk about. They’re all men, I am a guy, and to me that is a women’s issue. I defer that topic to women to debate and discuss - I am staying my lane on that. What I do as an elected Libertarian is battle my community on wasteful spending (we nearly went bankrupt a decade ago and now the Board is making motions on absurdly wasteful things), endlessly fight my community board’s insatiable thirst for more rules, regulations, fees, and fines. I also fight for 2A, freedom is speech, less taxes, etc…. With the current local party chair, I feel completely out of sync with my local Libertarian Party and even starting to feel tempted to withdraw from the party (I am elected on both the community board and the township). submitted by /u/godwhomismike [link] [comments]

so when you enable DoH on FireFox, for some reason it changes trr.mode (trusted recursor resolver, their doh service) to the 2 setting, which means that if it "fails", then it will fall back to your native resolver. unfortunately, in testing on browserleaks.com, i found that my native resolver was being leaked, likely thanks to the browserleaks website simulating a dns failure anyway, the solution is to set trr.mode to 3. this is "only use TRR, never use native resolver". as long as your DNS provider has good uptimes then i believe this should always be stable. submitted by /u/neontool [link] [comments]

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Who is to say which one is ultimately the lesser of two evils if we cannot see the code? But if you had to choose a second OS other than Linux, what can be said? submitted by /u/SpiritTarot [link] [comments]

Here are my most recent articles for you Anthony Sabatini Calls for All Red States to Pass E-Verify Due to how gridlocked politics is in Washington DC, many wedge issues such as immigration restriction can’t be voted on so easily, let alone be implemented via legislative action. As

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Let's say you are registered as an Independent but your state allows Independents to choose one primary (the donkey or the elephant) to vote in. Is it public record which primary you chose or just that you voted 'in the primary' for that election cycle? State is AZ. Trying to avoid a bunch of political junk mail. submitted by /u/silom88 [link] [comments]

Freedom Short Story Contest opens today! In the spirit of freedom the awards will be paid in 1 oz .999 silver coins! https://humanitasfamily.net/freedom-short-story-contest/ The Freedom Short Story Contest was created for young students who would like to write creatively about ‘Freedom’. The short story genre will allow students to write about freedom in a variety of forms: Freedom in schooling Freedom in friendships Freedom in daily life Freedom in relation to mandates Freedom in travelling etc. Freedom has been prominently discussed in the media and by adult writers. The contest is not in an essay writing format, and does thus not aim to prove a particular argument. Rather, it will provide younger students an opportunity to write about freedom in the short story genre. Awards The awards for the Freedom Short Story Contest have been generously donated by ICG Bullion and in the spirit of freedom will be paid in 1 oz .999 silver coins! In addition, all winners and finalists will have their stories published on Humanitasfamily.net. There are two age categories: 9-12 and 13-16. Each category will be awarded 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. Winners will be announced on August 1st, 2022. For full contest details visit https://humanitasfamily.net/freedom-short-story-contest/ submitted by /u/Humanitasfamily [link] [comments]

https://i.redd.it/beaqfl4m6a191.jpg (Someone told me they thought memes weren't allowed on this sub. They are but only in a self-post.) submitted by /u/Anen-o-me [link] [comments]

I'm curious to see what you all think about this topic/study from a libertarian perspective. https://uva.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7NvmAAiVVt8E7I2 submitted by /u/Antique_Ice1539 [link] [comments]

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I left an abusive relationship 8 months ago and my ex continued to harass/stalk me. I moved states, blocked all communications, had police intervention, changed all of my passwords and ensured to wipe my and reset the security on my phone. He continues to find new avenues to reach out to me. I have now realized he managed to access my Google account tied to my phone. He now knows where I live and I am very fearful. Looking for someone to walk me through securing my phone/accounts further. I keep my accounts/phones privacy settings secure but clearly not secure enough. submitted by /u/Certain-Astronaut-18 [link] [comments]

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2000 Mules is a movie which claims to expose election fraud with phone app location data. While these claims have already been thoroughly debunked, the movie also deserves condemnation for performing wildly invasive research on thousands of people’s location data without their consent or even knowledge. It is a reminder of our need to stop the industry of shady data brokers that enabled this massive privacy invasion. In its attempt to demonstrate widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 2000 Mules presents the research of True the Vote (TTV). TTV reportedly purchased 10 trillion geolocation data points from an unnamed data broker with the goal of finding a pattern of so-called “mules” that stuffed ballot boxes. The researchers claim that of the hundreds of thousands of people described in the location data, they found thousands of people who were physically present near two kinds of places – ballot boxes and unnamed nonprofits – and that this shows they were “mules.” (The actual number of people whose data was purchased may be much larger—a report by TTV claims the organization collected data from over 500,000 phones near ballot boxes in Atlanta, which is just a fraction of the total data they acquired.) This business model of making extremely sensitive location data about the general public readily available for purchase must stop Putting aside the logical flaws of TTV’s voter fraud claims, the very fact that they were able to buy this much personal location data on hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, over a span of many months leading to election day, is appalling. But this is the data broker business model working as intended: by vacuuming up geolocation data from thousands of smartphone apps, data brokers package and sell huge quantities of highly revealing location data to anyone willing to buy it. And TTV is hardly the only customer: the U.S. military, federal agencies, and federal law enforcement are all customers to geolocation data brokers. Recently, one data broker was even found selling the location data of people seeking reproductive healthcare, which soon could provide states with draconian anti-abortion legislation new digital evidence to identify and prosecute people who seek or provide abortion. While data brokers often claim that geolocation data is “anonymized,” location data is never anonymous. If a phone’s location data shows where its owner sleeps at night or works during the day, it is very easy to find that owner’s name and address. Even TTV admits as much in a report describing their methodology. Yet, despite claiming that “TTV does not ‘unmask’ or ‘de-anonymize’ owner identities of the devices it tracks,” they handed over device data to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in an (unsuccessful) attempt to spark a criminal investigation, released a partially-redacted list of device IDs in the same report, and have recently announced that they plan to “release it all” (possibly referring to location data). Further, an entire industry exists for the purpose of de-anonymizing phones based only on device ID. Although the location data acquired by TTV is extremely invasive, it can also be inaccurate. TTV has claimed that it can “pinpoint” devices, and implied that it can show that people were interacting with individual ballot boxes using GPS data alone. But cell-phone GPS data is only accurate to within about 5 meters (15 feet) under ideal conditions, meaning there is no real way of knowing if a person actually engaged with a specific object within a given time window. Despite this lack of precision, the technology is still precise enough to be dangerous by revealing where a person sleeps at night, if they visit a lawyer's office or doctor's office, or if they've stopped commuting to work in the morning. And commercially-available location data is often marred with much more dramatic inaccuracies, like “teleporting” devices that appear to travel miles in a matter of seconds. Police use of this kind of data, through techniques like “geofencing,” frequently casts false suspicion on innocent people. Relying on commercial location data alone to allege ballot box stuffing is folly. This is not even the first time an organization used location data to make public allegations of other people. Just last year, a Catholic priest was fired after an organization tracked his location and use of the app Grindr through commercially-available data. TTV’s privacy violating research is yet another demonstration that this data is easy to acquire, powerfully invasive, and can be used to harm real people. This business model of making extremely sensitive location data about the general public readily available for purchase must stop, and stopping it will require both regulatory efforts as well as preventative measures on the side of mobile operating system developers. But there is something you can do right now to protect your data from being useful to data brokers and organizations like TTV: disable Ad ID tracking on your phone.

submitted by /u/TheJimmyCramer [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/esporx [link] [comments]

Moderated platforms often struggle to draw workable lines between content that is permitted, and content that's not. Every online forum for user speech struggles with this problem, not just the dominant social media platforms. Laws protecting companies’ ability to moderate their platforms free from legal mandates benefit the public, and help to create a diverse array of online spaces, with varied editorial views and community norms. In April, EFF told California’s Sixth Court of Appeals that the Santa Clara Superior Court was correct to dismiss a lawsuit by Prager University against YouTube and its parent company, Google. The lawsuit claimed that Google’s content moderation was illegal censorship. Prager University is an educational and media nonprofit with a conservative perspective, which sued under California state law after its arguments were rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2020. The Ninth Circuit correctly held that, contrary to Prager’s arguments, YouTube is not a government actor bound by First Amendment limits simply because it hosts a forum for public speech.  Under a California Supreme Court decision in Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center, there is a narrow public forum test for a privately-owned space’s ability to curate speech. In our brief, we emphasize that even if the law were applied to non-physical spaces, it does not transform YouTube’s curation of Prager’s videos into prohibited censorship. YouTube and other social media platforms that moderate content are primarily, if not exclusively, expressive venues. Unlike a shopping center or grocery store, an online platform’s editorial vision is often at the core of its business. Additionally, social media platforms are not functionally public forums: they are not open to the public to come and go as they please. YouTube’s action against Prager is one of millions of decisions it made and continues to make. Those decision are part of the editorial discretion that platforms have as to which users and what content they allow. Prager’s broad interpretation of the law would upend those legal protections—to everyone’s detriment.