2025.04.15.News You Should Know

- 6 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

Pharmacist accused of spying on women using work, home cams • The Register - Pharmacist spent nearly a decade installing malware on coworkers PCs, including remote web cam viewers and keyloggers. Pharmacist is currently employed at another healthcare system and is not jailed. While the employer is being sued for failing to protect their infrastructure and employees. VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor • The Register - Free ESXi is back apparently…if you want it.

2025.04.08.News You Should Know

- 4 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

One of the last Bletchley Park’s heroes Betty Webb dies • The Register - Webb along with a number of other prominent women in the cryptography field worked at Bletchley Park to help decrypt some 10k German intercepts per day. Women have a long history in the Computer Science and Cryptography fields, I would highly recommend Invisible Women by Caroline Perez, Hidden Figures by Shetterly, BROAD band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet - Claire Evans,

So You Downloaded a Thousand TikToks

- 7 mins read
We’ve all been there, a friend sends over a funny TikTok, or you want to share it in your Signal chat and you know people aren’t likely to click the link. Plus who wants all that tracking and hidden redirects in a TT link? So what’s to be done? If you’re like me, a quick long press, and “Save Video” and you’re off to the group chat to laugh with your friends.

2025.04.01.News You Should Know

- 4 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

US defense contractor settles whistleblower suit for $4.6M • The Register - Out of a possible 110 points, MORSE awarded itself 104. A third party assessment of the environment found a catastrophic score of (-)142, Yes, 246 points in the opposite (bad) direction. As part of the settlement, MORSE is handing back $4.6 million to the Feds, and $851,000 of that is going to the ex-employee who blew the whistle.

2025.03.25.News You Should Know

- 4 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

US POL Federal judge blocks DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration’s banks of personal information | TechCrunch - Hollander said DOGE “never identified or articulated” a reason why it needs access to the “personal and private data of millions of Americans.” CISA fires then rehires security crew, and puts them on hold • The Register - CISA employees are back, but benched. Placed on paid-leave, Red Teamers and other security staff are still in limbo.

2025.03.18.News You Should Know

- 4 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

Privacy Amazon kills off on-device Alexa processing for Echo owners • The Register - “We are reaching out to let you know that the Alexa feature ‘Do Not Send Voice Recordings’ that you enabled on your supported Echo device(s) will no longer be available beginning March 28, 2025,” a copy of the email sent to Echo users relayed to El Reg read. GSMA Confirms End-to-End Encryption for RCS, Enabling Secure Cross-Platform Messaging - Google Messages, iOS Messages, and Android’s default messaging apps will soon all support RCS with End-to-end-encryption (E2EE)!

2025.03.11.News You Should Know

- 4 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

USCIS mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens • The Register - Social Media assessment that started under the Obama White House will be extended to all resident and documented aliens. Moves the social media scanning from before entry to all immigrants. Badbox is back and a million Android devices were backdoored • The Register - Infected Android machines part of extensive botnet. Devices exploiting residential IP space to serve malicious ads.

2025.03.04.News You Should Know

- 3 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

China compromised GOP emails ahead of Republican convention • The Register - Notified in July of 2024, the Republic leadership opted to not notify the FBI or seek their assistance. Hegseth orders suspension of Pentagon’s offensive cyberoperations against Russia | AP News - Hegseth can stop Pentagon, but not DHS:CISA or the CIA. DHS says CISA will not stop monitoring Russian cyber threats - CISA says its still in the fight.

Post-Truth is Pre-Fascism

- 3 mins read
Notes, Quotes, and Paraphrases from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case…As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes: 1) Open hostility to verifiable reality. Presenting Inventions and lies as if they were facts. The “Great Leader” lies frequently and without reason.

Disillusioned with the Church™

- 3 mins read
I have had a continuously growing unease about the churches in America. Setting aside the current political climate, it seems to be increasingly difficult to find a man or woman in a pulpit or a pew who believes in, much less advocates for Jesus’ teachings. They may pay lip service to the Sermon on the Mount, but their lives will tell you a much different story. And as much as I had become dismayed at this fact, I was excited to see that scripture already offered an answer for it.