People talking about Faraday bags as general countermeasures to phone surveillance, which they definitely are not. They have a very limited role in personal "opsec". Do you need one? Probably not. But if you DO need one, make sure it actually works, and that you understand what it does and doesn't do.
Here's an old post of mine that goes into some depth on testing Faraday bags. https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/
I've told this story before, but I just thought about it again randomly, and it makes me so happy I thought I'd tell it again. Thus:
My high school headteacher was a massive prick. Not because he was mean to kids or anything like that, he was just generally, a prick. If I met him as an adult, I would consider him a prick.
As an example, the dude caught ONE kid smoking weed at school, charged INTO the middle of a GCSE exam that had already started, with a bunch of 15/16 year olds already worried about life, and delivered a tirade about not doing drugs. THAT SAME WEEK, the headteacher got arrested for drunk driving. Irrelevant to the story, just setting the scene.
Anyway, for some reason, in my final year of High School he taught us English Lit, and that was one of my favorite subjects.
One of our big final things we had to do was write a longish story - about anything we wanted, and submit it. I loved this and I actually, which was rare for me at the time, spent hours putting this thing together. I handed it in and awaited the grade. I knew it had to be A/A* territory, and I was there for it.
So, imagine my horror, when it comes back to me as a "B" with a note, "could not empathise with the main character". Motherfucker. I was annoyed, but moved on with my life.
Fast forward like 15 years and the now former Headteacher man is running to become a UK MP as a member of Nigel Farage's UKIP party. (Recall eariler, prick).
He didn't get in thankfully, but then a couple of years later he put out a book about his experiences as a UKIP Candidate. I had to read it.
The tone and summary of the book was essentially "how UKIP tricked me into becoming a massive racist so I'd stand for them in an election." It was all bullshit, the man just took off on his own pity party.
Anyway, I left an Amazon review. 2 Stars. Could not empathise with the main character.
It was one of the best days of my life.
Today is a good day to remember that authoritarianism is not inevitable, overthrowing fascists is possible, and good things can still happen.
Saturday's Pride march came a little more than a year after OrbƔn's nationalist-populist government passed legislation and a constitutional amendment to outlaw the event, drawing criticism from human rights groups and politicians across the European Union.
That's absolutely sad to read. The CEO of @mullvadnet is not only financing the far-right Swedish Ćrebro party, but he even is their main financer. 70+% of their money is his donation. He is the reason why they go nationwide this year.
For obvious reasons i cease to trust this service. Also i do not finance parties that aim for forced deportations.
https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/
Next up, a #DEFCON #VPN service sounds awesome. Like with email there is plenty of expertise on how to build VPNs. Technically it is a realistic goal, so let's investigate!
To be attractive to a large customer base you need to offer a lot of locations with an ever changing pool of addresses for when some get blocked by someone in the world.
Those two things mean you need a pool of providers and great automation playbooks where you can easily spin up and provision "secure" VPN gateways all over the world.
Because of the reliance on 3rd parties, unlike with email, you now have to worry about the legal concept of the 3rd party doctrine, so have some more lawyers ready to do battle.
Then two things happened, I spoke with two different people with experience in the VPN game. First someone who served as a CTO to a large VPN provider.
They spent all their time trying to save money, automate more, and respond to non-stop customer complaints from over seas business people. China would block some VPN addresses and they could no longer connect to their company back home and they needed to do that RIGHT NOW. So a sort of daily fire drill. The increasing VPN competition meant they had to keep spending on advertising and cost control.
The second person put the final nail in the coffin. They explained as far as they could tell about half of all VPN providers had ties to intelligence services. Either as fronts or investors or super friendly "partners". Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, some Middle Eastern countries, all play in this space.
This means half of the VPN providers have a different business model than the other half. Their goal is maximum people at the least cost to cast as large a monitoring net as possible, and revenue from paying customers doesn't have to actually cover your operating costs.
Building a #VPN service the right way would mean we would be more expensive, in fewer locations, and support only the strongest technologies - all things that would reduce your pool of potential customers.
So, like the private email idea, it was interesting to investigate, we learned a lot, and we will never enter the VPN market.
Instead we run free #Tor relays and support @torproject Please support Tor and other privacy technologies.
Ok, just to sum it up for those following along at home:
NordVPN: confidence scam, the Raid: Shadow Legends of VPNs
Surfshark: owned by NordVPN
Mozilla VPN: reseller of Mullvad
Tailscale: partners with Mullvad
ExpressVPN: Israeli
Private Internet Access: ditto
ZenMate VPN: ditto
CyberGhost VPN: ditto
Windscribe: edgy branding, transphobic, uses slurs on social media
ProtonVPN: sponsors French fascists
MullvadVPN: donates millions to Swedish fascists
am I missing any?
e: if you are here looking for ones you SHOULD use, these were recommended to me and seem to check out:
https://vpn.ccrypto.org
https://njal.la
or self-host your own:
https://amnezia.org/self-hosted
When a car passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), its plate is captured and instantly compared against a list of vehicles that police are actively looking for or that police have identified for real-time surveillance. These are called āhotlists,ā and EFF has learned that one used by...
Matt Blaze
Mike Sheward
highly praised and little read
Daniel Aragay šøšŖšŖšøš³ļøāšš³ļøāā§ļøš»
evacide
Jƶrg Seidel
Jeff Moss
Tael š AC26
Global Voices
Electronic Frontier Foundation