The Interdisciplinary Internet Institute

Ars Technica lets us know that one FOIA request from the cops later  they know where you’ve been. And that means sometimes what you’ve been up to. Here’s looking at you Oakland.

Cybergeddon: Why the Internet could be the next “failed state” | Ars Technica.

SIM card makers hacked by NSA and GCHQ leaving cell networks wide open | Ars Technica.

“Using a fake cell tower and holding SIM encryption keys, spies are able to listen into conversations over mobile networks without asking the courts for permission for a wiretap. The method is also difficult to trace, so risk of discovery is low.”

Apple’s walled garden is good for ganja, but doesn’t like firearms in promo material. “” indeed.

Specifically, this week Apple allowed apps focussed on Marijuana on the App store and and geo-restricted them to US states where sale and consumption is legal.

At the same time, reports from multiple developers suggest that Apple is censoring pictures of firearms from apps’ promotional material and icons.

According to ArsTechnica, UK PM David Cameron commented, “Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read? My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.'”

The Guardian has the relevant portion of Cameron’s speech.

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA)  takes a stand on using terrorism to push for metadata retention laws: “The problem with citing France and Sydney as examples, apart from leveraging a number of tragic deaths for political gain, is that they are in fact fairly strong cases of why mandatory data retention may not be the critical necessity [the government] asserts it to be.“

If you read anything about privacy, encryption, and how your life will unfold through these issues, read this post by Chris Coyne. He offers some cogent arguments about why backdoors to your privacy are a bad idea.  He starts by calling out the Washington Post’s Editorial Board for advocating a golden backdoor be built our digital lives. His title: The Horror of a Secure Golden Key.

Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski claims (via Motherload) that  “[Facebook is] using some private APIs I didn’t even know were available inside the sandbox to be able to pull out your WiFi SSID (which could be used to snoop on which WiFi networks you’re connected to)” as well as more mundane analytics like which way users hold their devices, where they tap the screen, in addition to capturing the “the process list for various information on the device.”

He also tweeted that “”

While Facebook’s record on privacy suggests this type of monitoring of users is expected, Zdiarski was surprised at the sheer amount of data available to be fed back to Facebook: “Messenger appears to have more spyware type code in it than I’ve seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance….Ultimately it comes down to whether or not you trust Facebook not to take advantage of their position on your device to snoop on you,” Motherload reports Zdziarski wrote. “The technical capabilities to do so are certainly there.”