[AxisOfEasy] Things to Know When Committing Fraud

This week’s quote:  “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I said” …by ????

Last Week’s Quote was   “In prosperity prepare for change; in adversity hope for one” by James Burgh. Nobody got it. Burgh’s book Political Disquisitions set out an early case for free speech and universal suffrage.

• PHP’s PEAR system has been breached
• Unsealed docs reveal how Facebook monetized children
• Password megabreach is several years old
• Fraud unmasked by the fonts used in forged documents 
• Massive Alexa outage sweeps the nation
• The new AG may launch anti-trust action against Big Tech
• Cuba censoring SMS messages
• Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome
• Email trapped? Our new IMAP migration assistant makes it a snap

PHP’s PEAR system has been breached

Not a lot around the web on this, but PHP’s Package Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) has been compromised and the website has been shut down for now. According to @pear on Twitter, anybody who has downloaded go-pear.phar within the last 6 months should grab the same version from Github (pear/pearweb_phars) and compare file hashes. If they’re different, your day just got shot to hell.

Unsealed docs reveal how Facebook monetized children

Facebook could be looking at a fresh round of public backlash when court documents unsealed through the efforts of The Reveal Centre for Investigative Reporting as part of a 2012 class action lawsuit launched by 2 children via their parents. The documents show how Facebook’s in-app purchases and credit system were confusing and able to be used by kids without adequately understanding what was happening and obtaining parental consent.

If Zuckerberg were to comment on this, he would probably say (check all that apply):

Read: https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-judge-unsealed-a-trove-of-internal-facebook-documents-following-our-legal-action/

Password megabreach is several years old

Yet another password and email credential breach is making the rounds via the criminal underworld, containing approximately 773 million records is reportedly available for purchase for $45. It looks like this is not fresh breach as much as another compilation of previous breaches akin to the Exploit.in or Anti-public breaches previously reported here. However, this could explain the mind blistering spike in still more “I’ve hacked your computer” blackmail spams that continue to intensify in volume.

Fraud unmasked by the fonts used in forged documents

This has happened more than once: a fraud has been exposed because documents that were forged to support said fraud, were backdated to a time before which the fonts used in the forged documents existed. In this case, the former CEO of look.ca, one of the OG Canadian ISPs was trying to shield assets from a bankruptcy proceeding and fabricated documents purporting to show that a transfer of properties to his wife and children in trust took place in 1995. The problem was, the documents used the Microsoft Cambria and Calibria fonts, which were created in 2005 and 2002 respectively. Busted.

Massive Alexa outage sweeps the nation

Last week Amazon Alexa users around the world began reporting that their Alexa home assistants had “gone rogue” and stopped listening to them. In a communique to the press Amazon stated the obvious which more or less said “for a brief period this morning, Alexa stopped working”, but declined to elaborate on why.  Recall that in order for Alexa to work at all, your voice command (along with anything you say within the listening radius of the device) is sent back to Amazon’s central processing data centres for processing (and storage). I’m shaking my head here, I can’t believe that I just typed that and they’re selling like hotcakes.

The new AG may launch anti-trust action against Big Tech

US Attorney General nominee William Barr revealed in his confirmation hearings that he may be turning the anti-trust scrutiny onto the Big Tech platforms. He doesn’t think “big is necessarily bad” but he wants to know how some of these platforms got so big under the current rules. This could spell trouble for Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Oh, right, and Twitter. My daughter says Twitter is strictly for old squares like me. Their monopoly days may already be numbered.

(Remember to create your free Mastodon account on our server: https://nojack.easydns.ca )

Cuba censoring SMS messages

CSU professor Larry Press details on CircleId how the Cuban government is censoring SMS messages based on their content. The Cubans head to the polls in a new constitutional referendum favourable to the incumbent government. Tests show that SMS messages with anti-constitution phrases like #YoVotoNo, #YoNoVoto or abstención are being blocked. Viva la Constitution, I guess.

Email trapped elsewhere? Our new IMAP migration assistant makes it a snap

By now we hope many of you know that your existing easyDNS packages come with easyMail hosted IMAP boxes included:

DNS Standard comes with 3 email boxes

DNS Pro: 10 email boxes

Enterprise DNS (we must be insane): 25 email boxes

But sometimes people tell me “I’d love to move my email with my domain, but I have 5 years of my email stuck at [ insert other place here ].

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Check out the email options here: https://easydns.com/email/easymail-hosted-imap/