You've heard of the FEMA "Waffle House Index"? I raise you one "Walmart Index"

The Walmart Emergency response center has a store closing page for Florence

https://corporate.walmart.com/florence

Which has links to the google crisis map See Map

 

It's 2018: Whats the dumbest idea (by far) in Cybersecurity and Privacy?

Here's where I wish we had a lot more readers.  Well, a more than 0 is, well, a lot more.

What do you think is the dumbest idea in Cybersecurity and Privacy? Not the dumbest idea in general - there are probably lots more of those - like anything that starts with "hold my beer" - Brexit, A certain administration, etc. 

I don't think there's any question - it's electronic voting. ( AKA Internet voting, smartphone voting, etc )

Why? Because:

1. Clean elections are the most important thing (only?) thing standing between the US being a democracy and something else (like Communism, Fascism, Populism, Russia?).
2. Electronic voting allows the people (elected officials) who most desire tampering with elections the ability to do it without detection.
3. Any more don't really matter, but there are a TON more reasons.

So EV = the end of US democracy.

Unfortunately...

There are two headlines lately that are really worrying me...

1. From Slashdot: Georgia Defends Electronic Voting Machines Despite 243-Percent Turnout In One Precinct - because Politicians!

2. From Ars Technica: Experts criticize West Virginia’s plan for smartphone voting - Now with Blockchain!  WV says "Don't worry - It's secure" and "It's limited to internationally deployed military only"

"Mobile voting is a horrific idea," said Joe Hall, an election security expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology in an interview with CNN.

SO Please, I beg of you,

Don't allow electronic voting in your location, not now, maybe ever!

As a matter of fact, our privacy is getting much worse in 2018

To start, after net neutrality, our real time location data is getting sold to anyone

 Brian Krebs: Why Is Your Location Data No Longer Private?

My favorite part - (so far - I haven't read the whole thing)

"This month, it emerged that the major mobile providers have been giving commercial third-parties the ability to instantly look up the precise location of any mobile subscriber in real time. KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of these third parties — LocationSmart — leaked this ability for years to anyone via a buggy component on its Web site.

... 

We also learned that another California company — Securus Technologies — was selling real-time location lookups to a number of state and local law enforcement agencies, and that accounts for dozens of those law enforcement officers were obtained by hackers.  Securus, it turned out, was ultimately getting its data from LocationSmart.

This week, researchers discovered that a bug in T-Mobile’s Web site let anyone access the personal account details of any customer with just their cell phone number, including full name, address, account number and some cases tax ID numbers.

Not to be outdone, Comcast was revealed to have exposed sensitive information on customers through a buggy component of its Web site that could be tricked into displaying the home address where the company’s wireless router is located, as well as the router’s Wi-Fi name and password."

 

How about Uber kicking off the new year?

Happy New Year Everybody

I have to kick off the new year with Uber for obvious reasons, and now, they're leading off the Ars Technica deadpool, and probly others.   Unfortunately Twitter is on there too, and HTC ( which has a geuninely kick-ass VR rig, I think :-( )

We'll see what happens

Until then, I'll be listening to Kara Swisher's podcast for her take on the Uber ( and other ) situations, and her other awesome guests.

Perry

Adobe has completely gone to the dark side - new lightroom is completely on the cloud!

I kid you not.

According to Peter Bright at ARS:

New cloud-imprisoned Lightroom has 1TB of photo storage, same UI across desktop and mobile

You can read it yourself, but I'll pull out the best bits (further emphasis mine):

For the time being, the desktop-based Lightroom Classic will continue to be developed.

The current Lightroom CC is being renamed to Lightroom Classic CC, and a new product with an old name, Lightroom CC, will take its place.

The new Lightroom CC offers most of the photo processing features of Lightroom Classic

"likely" contentious feature: it uploads *ALL* your photos to cloud storage.

Adobe is using that cloud storage to perform object detection (and more!) on your pictures

Umm -  WHAT.  THE.  HUCK. ?

Well, CyberReason is one of the good guys!

Their claim to my respect is that they got an actual "legal" threat from a malware company's "lawyers"!  The company is "TargetingEdge", the malware is "OSX.Pirrit", and it runs on Macs.

Nice, this will tell the FBI exactly who to chase :-)

TargetingEdge claims the software isn't malware, but based on the following, this is like claiming Wilbur in Charlottes Web isn't a pig. According to Amit Serper, who wrote the analysis of the code: Maker of Sneaky Mac Adware Sends Security Researcher Cease-and-Desist Letters

As for OSX.Pirrit malware, it runs under root privileges, creates autoruns and generates random names for itself on each install. Plus, there are no removal instructions and some of its components mask themselves to appear like they’re legitimate and from Apple. And don’t forget that TargetingEdge used domains that appeared to be generated by some sort of DGA and made many attempts to hide any link between the domains and TargetingEdge.

Slashdot starts a good thread: Maker of Sneaky Mac Adware Sends Security Researcher Cease-and-Desist Letters (zdnet.com)

CyberReason's  analysis of the code can be found here

Amit - If I run into you in Boston area, let me buy you a beer!

Even the AP and the New York Times understand that the FCC is lying about Net Neutrality

Here's the AP article making a point-by-point case why Ajit Pai released "his own incomplete and misleading talking points when he suggested that internet providers had never influenced content available to their customers before neutrality rules took effect in 2015."


The New York times has even weighed in to tell us "The F.C.C. Wants to Let Telecoms Cash In on the Internet"
From Slashdot and Ars Technica - As the FCC builds barricades, they won't delay the vote in spite of outstanding court cases that would affect it stating: 

This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day as their effort to defeat Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled. The vote will proceed as scheduled on December 14.

 [ If the opponents are getting so desperate, why did the FCC wait until Thanksgiving week  to announce that the vote killing net neutrality would be in mid December ?

For those who think that the ISP's ( Along with the politicians they bought and paid for, the only beneficiaries of this mess ), won't abuse their monopoly/duopoly in killing the internet,  here's "A brief history"  of ISP internet abuse from Freepress.net ]