Offering asides, recommended links, blogworthy quotations, and more, In Brief is the Northwest Progressive Institute's microblog of world, national, and local politics.
Ars Technica’s Timothy B. Lee has put together an incredibly good article that reiterates what security researchers and election integrity advocates have known for a long time: online voting is a terrible idea and should not be used for any elections for public office.
Launch
“President Obama’s campaigns used Yubikeys, which are security keys for protecting logins, during both the 2008 and 2012 elections as a defense against hackers, according to Yubico CEO and founder Stina Ehrensvärd.”
Launch
The voting systems many states use are so insecure that children can hack them in just a few minutes, the BBC reports.
Launch
Via The Associated Press: “The same Russian government-aligned hackers who penetrated the Democratic Party have spent the past few months laying the groundwork for an espionage campaign against the U.S. Senate, a cybersecurity firm said Friday.”
Launch
In a letter published after the massive and unprecedented cyberattack on Dyn, Maine’s Angus King and New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich called on President Obama to adopt government-wide policies to help detect vulnerabilities and communicate them to the private sector.
Launch
In a court filing, the Department of Justice asked a judge to hold off on its request to compel Apple to cooperate in breaking into an iPhone used by Syed Riziwan Farook, one of the perpetrators in the San Bernardino mass shootings. The DOJ said an “outside party” had shown the FBI a way off possibly breaking into Farook’s iPhone without needing any help from Apple.
Launch
We add security features to protect our customers from hackers and criminals. And the FBI should be supporting us in this because it keeps everyone
Launch
Bloomberg reports that Apple shareholders are supportive of CEO Tim Cook’s decision to fight a court order granted at the behest of the FBI, which the FBI sought to compel Apple’s help to break into an iPhone used by one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino shootings.
LaunchI can think of nothing that has done more harm to the Internet than ad tech… It interferes with everything we try to do on
Launch
Leading cryptographers oppose FBI’s desire for built-in backdoor to bypass encryption A group of elite cryptographers today released a paper concluding that any laws requiring
LaunchIBM was arrogant in saying, ‘We’ll give them some tech and then innovate faster than them,’ and that wasn’t the case. — Clyde V. Prestowitz,
LaunchPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Where there is a situation in which we’re trying to get a specific case of a possible national security threat — is
LaunchSony backtracks, will release ‘The Interview’ to some theaters After being criticized by President Obama and many in Hollywood for self-censorship, Sony Pictures has announced
LaunchAll U.S. Postal Service employees’ personal data exposed by hackers Ars Technica reports on some seriously bad news: Over 600,000 addresses, Social Security numbers, and
LaunchUSB (Universal Series Bus) ‘critically flawed’, researchers say The widely used Universal Series Bus standard has a serious flaw that has apparently existed since USB
LaunchJohn Chen is impressive… Management knows BlackBerry cannot be all things to all people, but the company recognizes it has a hardened technology and tested
LaunchWith Chrome, you give up a lot of control over your own security. — Blogger Chris Travers, who works on the LedgerSMB project, explaining that
LaunchMajor technology companies building technical defenses against NSA The New York Times reports that technology giants like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook are finally resisting
LaunchNSA chief: Snowden “probably not” a Russian spy The head of the National Security Agency has admitted the NSA doesn’t believe it likely that Edward
LaunchIt’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say,
Launch