Tag Archive for: life

8 Techie Gifts for the Security Expert in Your Life

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When you think someone might have hacked your social media or you hear that your email provider got breached, who do you turn to for advice? We all have somebody who keeps a finger on the security pulse, someone who knows whether you need to worry and what you should do if there’s a serious problem. Maybe it’s your neighbor, maybe it’s your niece, but they know vastly more than you about online security. Buying a present that plays into their interests is tough when you don’t really understand those interests.

That’s what we’re here for. Browse through our selection of gift possibilities for the security wonk in your life, and feel secure in knowing you’ve made a good choice.

Recommended by Our Editors

Total Network Domination

Every techies loves a gadget, and your security techie will adore this network security gadget. A shiny new Firewalla Purple will give your personal security maven a host of features to play with. They may have already chosen a favorite household router—that’s fine, Firewalla works alongside existing routers in several ways. It’s just as happy to take on the job of a router, except for its lack of a full-powered Wi-Fi hotspot. Hey, you can arrange for a mutual friend to gift them a powerful standalone hotspot.

From the associated mobile app, you can see and manage every device on the network and get notifications when a new device connects. If your neighbor starts mooching Wi-Fi, you can cut them off, and bam! You can even fine-tune controls, say, to turn off gaming on your child’s devices during homework hour. Firewalla tracks performance stats for your devices and your whole network. You can set it to block dangerous sites, suppress ads, act as a parental control content filter, and more.

Your techie friend will get a kick out of Firewalla’s advanced abilities. It can function as a VPN client, running traffic for some or all of your devices through a protected VPN server. More impressively, it can function as a VPN server, letting you tunnel back to your home network from wherever you are. When it blocks traffic from a dangerous site, it can display a map of where the attack came from. It’s a fantastic techie toy.

Firewalla Purple…

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Should hospital ransomware attackers be locked up for life? [Audio + Text] – Naked Security

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Should hospital ransomware attackers get life in prison? Who was the Countess of Computer Science, and just how close did we come to digital music in the 19th century? And could a weirdly wacky email brick your iPhone?

With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin.

DOUG.  Legal troubles abound, a mysterious iPhone update, and Ada Lovelace.

All that and more on the Naked Security Podcast.

[MUSICAL MODEM]

Welcome to the podcast, everybody.

I am Doug Aamoth; he is Paul Ducklin.

Paul, how do you do today, Sir?

DUCK.  I’m very well, Doug…

…except for some microphone problems, because I’ve been on the road a little bit.

So if the sound quality isn’t perfect this week, it’s because I’ve had to use alternative recording equipment.

DOUG.  Well, that leads us expertly into our Tech History segment about imperfection.

DUCK.  [IRONIC] Ohhhhh, thanks, Doug. [LAUGHS]

DOUG.  On 11 October 1958, NASA launched its first space probe, the Pioneer One.

It was meant to orbit the moon, but failed to reach lunar orbit thanks to a guidance error, fell back to Earth, and burned up upon re-entry.

Though it still collected valuable data during its 43 hour flight.

DUCK.  Yes, I believe it got to 113,000km above the Earth… and the Moon is just shy of 400,000 kilometres away.

My understanding is it went off target a bit and then they tried to correct, but they didn’t have the granularity of control that they do these days, where you run the rocket motor for a little tiny burst.

So they corrected, but they could only correct so much… and in the end they figured, “We’re not going to make it to the moon, but maybe we can get it into a high Earth orbit so it’ll keep going around the Earth and we can keep getting scientific measurements?”

But in the end it was a question of, “What goes up… [LAUGHS] must come down.”

DOUG.  Exactly. [LAUGHS]

DUCK.  And, as you say, it was like shooting a very, very, very powerful bullet way into outer space, well above the Kármán line, which is only 100km, but in such a direction that it didn’t actually escape the influence of the Earth altogether.

DOUG.  Pretty good for a first try, though?

I mean, not bad… that’s 1958, what…

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Server hack yields harrowing images of life inside Chinese detention camps

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Server hack yields harrowing images of life inside Chinese detention camps

A hack on police servers in China’s Xinjiang region has yielded thousands of graphic images and videos of Uighur detainees suffering in detention camps in one of the starkest accounts yet of the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country’s persecution of ethnic minorities.

The images are accompanied by training manuals, detailed police work rosters, and instructions for guarding the camps. Using a euphemism to describe inmates, one document states: “If students do not respond to warning shots and continue to try to escape, the armed police shoot to kill,” the BBC reported. Images show one prisoner in an iron torture device known as a tiger chair, which immobilizes the arms. Der Spiegel, one of the other outlets that published the tranch of hacked photos and documents, said it confirmed their authenticity in part by analyzing GPS data included in some of the images.

“The material is unprecedented on several levels,” Dr. Adrian Zenz, director and senior fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who obtained the files and shared them with news outlets, wrote on Twitter. His thread provided a broad overview of the leaked materials that included “high-level speeches, implicating top leadership and containing blunt language,” “camp security instructions, far more detailed than China Cables [that] describe heavily armed strike units with battlefield assault rifles,” and other evidence of Uighur oppression at the hands of the Chinese government.

Most of the images and documents are available on a dedicated site. Contents include the images of 2,884 detainees, training images and Powerpoint documents for security drills, and speeches and directives from top government officials…

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A Huge Winter Storm Is About to Make Life Messy for Half the U.S.

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The Northeast U.S. is still digging out from the monster snowstorm that hit over the weekend, but the rest of the country better buckle up — there’s some serious weather coming this week. A storm could hit states from Colorado to parts of Texas to Ohio by Groundhog Day, dumping freezing rain and snow and snarling travellers in messy weather.

The storm, dubbed Winter Storm Landon, is the result of a cold front that is expected to move into much of the Midwest and central U.S this week, backed by freezing Arctic air. The jet stream moving south will help spread moisture over the cold air, creating the recipe for possible snow, sleet, freezing rain, and icy conditions in a huge strip of the U.S through Friday. About 1,609 km of the U.S., extending diagonally northeast from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and parts of northern Texas to Chicago and Detroit are currently under winter storm watches for Tuesday through Thursday. Over the course of the week, Landon could impact residents from Texas to Maine.

The storm is still forming, so predicting what’s going to happen is still a pretty inexact science — a lot could change between now and Wednesday. But preliminary forecasts show a pretty gross set of conditions in several different states, beginning Tuesday night, when snow and rain — a wintry mix — is expected to start in an area spanning from the Rocky Mountains to parts of the Great Lakes. This weather is expected to last through Wednesday, which is Groundhog Day, into Thursday.

Parts of Colorado could see up to a foot of snow, while snow is even possible in parts of northern Texas. The National Weather Service shows nearly the entirety of Missouri is under a winter storm watch (which is not as serious as an advisory or a warning and is defined as conditions that are “favourable” for a storm event to develop), as well as much of Illinois. What’s in store for places farther east depends on how the storm develops, but forecasters say snow heavy snow is possible in New York Thursday, while “rain, snow, freezing rain, sleet are all on the table” for parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh said. Portions of the Northeast could see…

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