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Joint Letter on the UK Government’s use of Investigatory Powers Act to attack End-to-End Encryption | Global Encryption Coalition
The consensus among cybersecurity experts could not be clearer: there is no way to provide government access to end-to-end encrypted data without breaking end-to-end encryption, thus putting every user’s security and privacy at risk. https://www.globalencryption.org/2025/02/joint-letter-on-the-uk-governments-use-of-investigatory-powers-act-to-attack-end-to-end-encryption/
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U.K. call for a back door to Apple devices threatens Americans, senator says | Washington Post
If the top U.S. ally does not back off, they said, Gabbard should consider limiting the deep intelligence sharing and cooperation on cybersecurity between the countries. A copy of the letter was reviewed by The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/13/apple-uk-security-back-door-adp/ Archived at: https://archive.is/2025.02.13-120308/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/13/apple-uk-security-back-door-adp/ Via:
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The Apple TV App Is Now Available on Android | Daring Fireball
“hell froze over” https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/12/apple-tv-app-for-android
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Swedish Armed Forces: “Signal should be used to defend against interception of calls & messages via the telephone network and to make it more difficult to spoof telephone numbers”
Nice to see *both* privacy *and* enhanced authenticity of end-to-end encrypted communications being mentioned in the framing for adoption of Signal. The article is worth a read, not least because Signal is not being adopted for classified communication, but instead for improved day-to-day security of all basic communication. https://cornucopia.se/2025/02/forsvarsmakten-infor-krav-pa-signal-for-samtal-och-meddelanden/ (via Google Translate)
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“The original illegal harms consultation drew flak for its sheer bulk: a tad over 1,700 pages. The final round of illegal harms documents is even weightier: over 2,400 pages in all”
The only thing better than regulation is more regulation. This makes us so much safer, and doesn’t negatively affect growth or technology adoption whatsoever: Cyberleagle: The Online Safety Act grumbles on https://www.cyberleagle.com/2025/02/the-online-safety-act-grumbles-on.html
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The NSA’s “Big Delete” | Judd Legum & Rebecca Crosby
NSA to purge web pages containing the word “privilege”. You have to wonder whether they’re going to successfully whitelist their own exploit libraries? https://popular.info/p/the-nsas-big-delete
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Audio: Ciaran Martin on BBC’s Today Programme re: the Home Office demand for backdoor into Apple encryption
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0027sx4 — starts at 1:18:45 ; my personal perspective is less like Ciaran’s (paraphrase) “this is not going to fly, especially now that it’s public” and more like “this is spectacularly illiberal and in equally spectacular denial of the reality of the modern internet”
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My father literally fought the Nazis (Anzio, Monte Cassino, Monte Grande) and he taught me one key warfare lesson applicable to all aspects of modern life
This: “Make the bastards *work* for it” I heard this unexpurgated, hundreds (thousands?) of times in my youth*, and I’ve brought it with me into my career and life surrounding it. It’s very simple advice, and if you’re an infosec nerd you already know: defence is a cost/benefit battle, and the goal is to raise
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The latest spin on the Home Office demand for a backdoor into Apple iCloud/iMessage storage is “…it’s not a backdoor, we just want existing exploitable weaknesses to NOT be removed”
Read the attached, and consider that the existing access mechanisms would ALSO remain available to malicious actors. They don’t want the architectural security holes to be bricked-up. It’s a bit like they fear that Apple & Meta are building on some sort of surveillance green-belt. Quote RecordedFuture’s Alexander Martin: But my frustration with the phrase
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QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION: where FOO is a federated protocol, can one ever be truly “deplatformed” by BAR, where BAR is an instance of FOO?
1/ FOO=Mastodon/ActivityPub, BAR=infosec.exchange 2/ FOO=AT-Proto, BAR=Bluesky 3/ FOO=Email, BAR=Gmail I suspect that losing your Gmail account would be considered deplatforming, so why not your Mastodon account? I have, perhaps unsurprisingly, received some pushback from Mastodon users who are saying approximately that “if someone gets kicked off a server for something they said somewhere else, it’s
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When you learn the lengths that Government & Law Enforcement will go to in order to get you to unlock your phone, you will partly understand why they are so attracted to “digital driver’s licences”
If they can practically guarantee an obligation for you to unlock your phone in front of a police officer at a traffic stop, that would be a big win for them. Make sure you learn and practise the available countermeasures, like however your phone (Android or iPhone) provides you a way to enter lockdown mode.
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For various reasons I’ve been musing to myself regarding “What is the traditional [male] national dress of my people?” and I’ve drawn up the following list
Fortunately this also passes as the modern “dad uniform”.
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