iCloud scammer pleads guilty to stealing celebrity nudes
Joey davidson, Techno Buffalo
Remember two years ago when someone allegedly hacked into the iCloud accounts of dozens of celebrities, mainly women, and stole nude or otherwise compromising photos of them? The event, dubbed “The Fappening” by certain parts of the internet, turns out to have been almost two years in the making, with perpetrator Ryan Collins using social engineering techniques since late 2012 to gain access to accounts to pilfer for his collection.
While Collins pleaded to one count of unauthorized access via the sometimes useful Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, he has not admitted to most of the cases, or to disseminating the photos that he did have copies of. It just happens to be a coincidence that the photos in his possession were leaked shortly after he obtained them.
Closing Apps to Save Your Battery Only Makes Things Worse
david Pierce, Wired
Under one of those things that I didn’t think of but makes sense when explained, david Pierce describes the general five states that an app can take on (launched, active, inactive, background, and suspended) and how that affects battery performance. Turns out that the developers of our pocket supercomputers put a lot of thought and effort into developing smart algorithms that manage battery life, and our attempts to meddle are potentially making it worse.
Long story short: constantly closing apps (of which you’re likely to open again anyway, as most users keep to about five active apps) uses up more energy than letting your intelligent phone figure out how to allocate memory to them. Restarting those ups takes up even more energy, and thus the cycle continues. Plus, are you sure that your phone isn’t using a process from that app when you cancel it?
Apple’s Brief Hits the FBI With a Withering Fact Check
Kim Zetter, Wired
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understandingJustice Louis Brandeis
Apple’s latest brief in the iPhone case involving the FBI and the San Bernadino shooter explains it to the feds as though they are children who don’t understand technology, which by now they must truly believe. A walkthrough of Apple software is part of the argument, contrasting assertions of selective syncing and encryption of non-synced data with the technical realities of the software, much of which can be checked by anyone with iCloud and an iPhone. Apple’s lawyers also dig into many of the cases that the government is using in defense of prosecution of the 1789 All Writs Act, stating that they have nothing to do with that act, their case, or the technology behind it.
As Edward Snowden himself tweeted:
Today I learned that #Apple has way better lawyers than the DOJ.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 15, 2016
Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again?
Steven Levy, Backchannel
Author Steven Levy, who wrote a seminal book on Cryptography and it’s purpsose, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, is back at it. He questions why it’s taken so long to recognize Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, as the A.M. Turing Awards finally have, granting them the award 40 years after they first published their public key cryptography system that changed the world of computing for the better, leading to an internet where more trust could be placed between two parties unknown to one another, such as a product vendor and consumer. This paved the way for ecommerce and almost all interactions that take place on the internet to this day.
Levy has to bring his argument back, as the issue has never truly gone away: along with demands for privacy and security for ourselves, we demand the ability to break the privacy and security of bad actors, however we define them. The Clipper Chip and Skipjack Algorithm were defeated not only for this hypocrisy, but mainly for the demonstration that a tool that purports to have an entrance that only “the good guys” can access cannot be guaranteed to keep other third parties out.
Bonus: If you want to get an understanding of how public key cryptography works, check out this video by Brit Cruise via Khan Academy.
Facebook is eating the world
Emily Bell, Columbia Journalism Review
Marc Andreessen is famous, among many other accomplishments, for the phrase “Software is eating the world.” Emily Bell it pointing out the fact that not all software is equal, and highly leveraged software companies have even more ravenous appetites than others. When services like Facebook and Google offer up their own content distribution networks like Instant Articles and AMP respectively, the question isn’t just what we gain by using those services, but what we lose, whether we use them or not.
One of the things that we lose is control over production, display, and delivery of media. We’re increasingly living in filter bubbles that dictate what new ideas we see. We might not always want to see views that differ from our own, but it’s valuable for forming new opinions. When large companies can decide what things get displayed to who, the value of the open and free internet diminishes, where we trade convenience for the complexity that disparate voices would otherwise offer.
Don’t Post About Me on Social Media, Children Say
KJ Dell’Antonia, The New York Times
The first kids born during the social media age are coming of age themselves now, and many have problems with how freely their parents share about them. This is the first generation who will collectively grapple with how much sharing is good or not when digital media grants us a near endless perfect recall, which may not always be a good thing. Maybe they’ve got a point, knowing how much the detritus of digital personae affect our lives these days. According to the study linked in the article, three times as many children as parents were concerned with limits on what is posted publicly. And you say that your kids overshare online too much.
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