smartphones
New Report on Police Decryption Capabilities
There is a new report on police decryption capabilities: specifically, mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs). Short summary: it’s not just the FBI that can do it. This report documents the widespread adoption ...
Interesting Attack on the EMV Smartcard Payment Standard
It’s complicated, but it’s basically a man-in-the-middle attack that involves two smartphones. The first phone reads the actual smartcard, and then forwards the required information to a second phone. That second phone ...
The NSA on the Risks of Exposing Location Data
The NSA has issued an advisory on the risks of location data. Mitigations reduce, but do not eliminate, location tracking risks in mobile devices. Most users rely on features disabled by such ...
Modern Mass Surveillance: Identify, Correlate, Discriminate
Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville ...
Smartphone Election in Washington State
This year: King County voters will be able to use their name and birthdate to log in to a Web portal through the Internet browser on their phones, says Bryan Finney, the ...
Technical Report of the Bezos Phone Hack
Motherboard obtained and published the technical report on the hack of Jeff Bezos's phone, which is being attributed to Saudi Arabia, specifically to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. ...investigators set up a ...
SIM Hijacking
SIM hijacking -- or SIM swapping -- is an attack where a fraudster contacts your cell phone provider and convinces them to switch your account to a phone that they control. Since ...
Workarounds for Two-Factor Authentication in a Workplace That Isn’t BYOD-Friendly
Two-factor authentication can be difficult in a workplace that doesn’t allow smartphones. But it’s not impossible It’s hard to overstate how dramatically the smartphone has changed our world and our daily lives ...
Wi-Fi Hotspot Tracking
Free Wi-Fi hotspots can track your location, even if you don't connect to them. This is because your phone or computer broadcasts a unique MAC address. What distinguishes location-based marketing hotspot providers ...
A Feminist Take on Information Privacy
Maria Farrell has a really interesting framing of information/device privacy: What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the ...
