Tag Archive for: Stickers

A sticky story: How, and why, hackers love stickers on laptops

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“My other computer is your computer”, “Sniff networks, not drugs”, “Hacking is not a crime”. Anybody who knows cyber security will have seen laptops adorned with such stickers and when you see one in the wild, you know you’re in the presence of a hacker.

As an accidental cyber security journalist, this reporter often uses the term “cyber community”, and as a social anthropology graduate I am fascinated by stories of human communities and ideas, and am motivated to write about hacking because I want to know why people do the things they do.

We can talk all we like about indicators of compromise and common vulnerabilities and exposures, but at its heart, the story of cyber is far more human than it is technological.

What is a community anyway?

What does this have to do with stickers? To answer this, it’s helpful to understand how stickers, and other forms of cyber swag such as t-shirts or socks, tie to concept of community.

Anthropologists have struggled to define community for as long as the discipline has existed. American anthropologist Robert Redfield proposed four fundamental elements of a community. First, they are small in scale; second, their members exhibit homogeneity in activity and state of mind; third, they are aware of their distinctiveness; and finally, they are self-sufficient and sustaining. Others went deeper; George Hillery, who specialised in observing Trappist religious communities, identified more than 90 distinct characteristics – many of them highly specific to a silent order of monks.

Broadly speaking, Redfield’s four tenets show that the idea of sticking together in a community is an evolutionary advantage in humans, whether armed with spears and facing a sabre-toothed tiger, or armed with Dells and facing a Cozy Bear.

And for a group of humans who enjoy breaking things that other humans don’t want broken, it is easy to see how and why hackers stick together.

As BugCrowd founder and CEO Casey Ellis explains, being beyond the law was a fact of life for early hacking groups such as Cult of the Dead Cow, which pioneered hacker branding in the 1980s, and disseminated ideas and content that educated a generation of hackers,…

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How to add and use stickers in the Signal messaging app

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Signal Sticker HeroSource: Jeramy Johnson / Android Central

If you are one of the millions of new converts to the private messaging app Signal, then welcome! We are thrilled that such a privacy-centric app exists on both iOS and Android users (as well as Mac, Windows, and Linux). While Signal has always been secure and end-to-end encrypted, it hasn’t always been the most fun-looking or customizable app, nor has it had as many personalization features. Thankfully, these features are finally starting to roll out to users, including one of our favorites — stickers! We’ll show you how to add and use stickers in your Signal chats. Let’s get started.

How to add and use stickers in the Signal messaging app

  1. Open the Signal app.
  2. Tap on a message thread or start a new message.

  3. Tap on the sticker icon in the Signal message composer.

    How To Use Add Stickers Signal Step 1

    How To Use Add Stickers Signal Step 2Source: Android Central

  4. Choose from your installed sticker packs, or tap the + icon to add more stickers.
  5. Pick which sticker you like and tap on it.

  6. Tap the blue send arrow to send the sticker to your contact.

    How To Use Add Stickers Signal Step 3

    How To Use Add Stickers Signal Step 5How To Use Add Stickers Signal Step 4Source: Android Central

Signal has built its privacy-first reputation on the grounds that everything in the app is end-to-end encrypted, including things you wouldn’t think about, like stickers.

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Because Signal’s stickers are so secure, there aren’t as many pre-installed options in the app as there are on some of the other best messaging apps like Telegram, Messenger, or WhatsApp. However, you can rest assured that you won’t be sending any malicious code or malware when you share fun stickers with your friends.

You do have the option to create your own custom stickers with the sticker creator feature in the Signal Desktop app, which is available on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Alternatively, you can search for stickers on Twitter with the #makeprivacystick hashtag. Signal has also added other customization features like custom chat backgrounds, text bubble colors, and profiles. Now you can truly make the app feel like your own safe space!

Our top equipment picks

Out of the best Android phones, one in particular sticks out as a secure messaging device, and that is Google’s very own Pixel 5.

We may earn a…

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Egyptian Government Plans To Track The Movement Of 10 Million Vehicles With Low-Cost RFID Stickers

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Just under three years ago, Techdirt wrote about China’s plan to install satnav tracking devices on vehicles in Xinjiang. That was just one of several early signs of the human rights abuses happening there. Today, people are finally waking up to the fact that the indigenous turkic-speaking Uyghur population is subject to some of the harshest oppression anywhere on the planet. Tracking huge numbers of vehicles might seem to be a typically over-the-top, money-no-object Chinese approach to total surveillance. Unfortunately, there are signs the idea is starting to spread, as this story in RFID Journal explains:

Egypt’s Ministry of Interior (MOI) plans to identify millions of vehicles as they travel on the country’s roads, using an RFID solution from Go+, with hardware and software provided by Kathrein Solutions in cooperation with Wireless Dynamics. The system, which will be implemented across approximately 10 million of the country’s vehicles throughout the next five years, consists of passive UHF RFID stickers attached to each car’s windshield, as well as tags on headlamps that respond to interrogation from readers installed above roadways, even at high speeds.

One justification for the move is to provide information on traffic flows. Another is to identify drivers who have been found guilty of traffic violations, and who should therefore not be on the roads. But plans to send all the data to a cloud-based data center will create a database that will eventually track every vehicle in the country. That will clearly be an invaluable resource for the country’s police and security forces, which unfortunately seem to take China’s approach to anyone who voices opposition to the authorities. Here’s what Human Rights Watch wrote in its most recent report on the country:

Since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi secured a second term in a largely unfree and unfair presidential election in March, his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists, and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government. The Egyptian government and state media have framed this repression under the guise of combating terrorism, and al-Sisi has increasingly invoked terrorism and the country’s state of emergency law to silence peaceful activists.

As well as the negative impact on human rights in Egypt, there is another troubling aspect to this move. According to the RFID Journal article, the company providing the new system, Go+, is “in discussions with four other countries about the possibility of implementing this solution once the Egyptian system is fully deployed.” China’s mass tracking of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang using satnav devices pioneered the idea of carrying out vehicle surveillance on a hitherto unseen scale, regardless of the cost. Egypt’s use of the much cheaper RFID trackers represents a worrying evolution of the idea. If the roll-out is successful, it could encourage other governments to adopt a similar approach, to the detriment of civil liberties in those countries.

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