Weekly Axis Of Easy #55
This week’s quote: “The problem is not so much to see what nobody else sees, but rather to think what nobody else has thought about that which everybody sees.” —by ????
Last Week’s Quote was “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”, by Bjarne Stroustrup. Winner: Walter Heukels
THE RULES: No Googling the answer, must be posted below.
The Prize: First person to post will get their next domain or hosting renewal on us.
- U.S. Supremes rule police need a warrant to obtain mobile data
- NSA to use Amazon’s cloud computing platform to store our data
- Father of virtual reality advises us to delete our social media accounts
- Twitter acquires “trust-and-safety” company and immediately shuts it down
- Think GDRP compliance is hard? Europe’s new copyright rules will be a nightmare.
- In case you missed it: Why you need to enable DNSSEC on your domains.
U.S. Supremes rule police need a warrant to obtain mobile data
Last week the U.S Supreme Court ruled that the fourth amendment applies to mobile devices and thus government needs a court ordered search warrant before it can obtain location data on cellphone customers. That decision is being widely lauded as a victory for privacy and due process, however Brian Krebs reports that this may not really slow down the sale of your realtime data to third-parties by the telecoms.
Read: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/06/supreme-court-police-need-warrant-for-mobile-location-data/
NSA moves its collected data to Amazon’s cloud computing platform
The NSA has moved its collected data to a cloud-based platform called IC GovCloud which is backed by Amazon web services. The move is a continuation of a theme started 4 years ago when the CIA awarded Amazon a $600 million dollar contract to build the cloud framework for the Intelligence Community. It’s almost as if that strategy of building one of the largest contingent of lobbyists in Washington is paying off for them.
Read: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-amazon-became-one-of-washingtons-most-powerful-players-1529509628 (paywall), or
Father of virtual reality advises us to delete our social media accounts
In 1978 a former TV advertising exec, Jerry Mander wrote “Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television”. I can’t remember the arguments now, but Mander in essence argued that “the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed.” Which sounds eerily familiar and prescient. Today, Jaron Lanier who is credited with being the father of virtual reality and an internet pioneer has his new book out, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”. I haven’t read it yet (just ordered it now), but I have read “Who Owns The Future” and I’m looking forward to this one.
Twitter acquires “trust-and-safety” company and immediately shuts it down
Smyte was a start-up that created a “trust-and-safety as a service” API which was used by other companies such as GoFundMe, TaskRabbit, Musical.ly and Meetup to combat abuse, harassment, scams and the like. Immediately upon closing, Twitter shut down Smyte’s API, leaving customers, many of whom were under contract, out in the cold. As one stunned software engineer describes:
“Twitter bought Smyte and immediately shut it down. We had a 3 years contract with them and they just disappeared overnight. No communication at all, they just turned their servers off, closed our shared support channel and walked away.”
Think GDPR compliance is hard? Europe’s new copyright rules will be a nightmare
As we all know, companies are tripping over themselves to remain in compliance with the new European data privacy rules (GDPR), even though we wondered out loud whether that even makes sense for non-European companies. We asked, rhetorically, when non-Euro companies decide GDPR applies to them, doesn’t that mean other laws from other jurisdictions also apply to them?
Soon we will all get to find out, because Europe is bringing out a new set of copyright laws which includes things like mandatory user-generated content filtering for ISPs and a licensing requirement for using of snippets of text from news publications (dubbed “the link tax”). The latter is aimed at the likes of Google, whose practice we reported on in the very first issue of #AxisOfEasy, who like to help themselves to third-party content when they display snippets in their search results. It would also affect Wikipedia.
If you’re in Europe and want to weigh in on this, do so before July 4 and start by visiting https://saveyourinternet.eu/
Read: https://webmink.com/2018/06/23/root-causing-regulatory-failure/
In case you missed it: Why you need to enable DNSSEC on your domains
Last week I posted Why You Need to Learn to Love DNSSEC where I outline my reasoning behind why I think the threat landscape has shifted in a dramatic fashion that makes DNSSEC signing any mission critical domains essential. To make it easy for our clients we also released a ground-up rewrite of our DNSSEC implementation, easyDNSSEC – Set and Forget DNSSEC.
DNSSEC support is bundled with all service levels on easyDNS.
Just a wild guess but maybe Edward Snowden…
Steve Jobs?