[AxisOfEasy] The International Grand Committee of Truthiness

In this Issue:

• EU Article 13 copyright rule finalized
• The International Grand Committee of Fake News
• Russia making preparations to decouple from larger internet 
• AI “Deep fakes” text generator too dangerous to release
• Deep Dive on Recent DNS hijacking attacks
• Amazon caught selling counterfeit tech books
• Target app hikes prices as prospects near the physical store
• Apple dumps “do-not-track” from Safari browsers
• India’s Aadhaar – like Sesame Credit only hackable

EU Article 13 copyright rule finalized

On the evening of February 13, European Union legislators finalized the text of Articles 11 & 13 of the forthcoming EU Copyright Rules. If adopted, these new rules promise to do for the internet at large, what the GDPR did for whois, which was totally mangle it and render it unusable.  Article 11 specifies the so-called “link tax” wherein reproducing more than single words or very short extracts of websites will require a license – I wonder what that will do for Google, specifically the very first issue of this newsletter where we commented on how Google pilfers content from websites to display within their search results.

Meanwhile Article 13 requires ISPs maintain upload filters, and make “best effort” to acquire licenses for anything users may possibly upload.

The International Grand Committee of Truthiness

No, I’m not riffing on Orwell’s 1984. This is actually a hearing which will take place in Ottawa, Canada on May 28, when members of parliament from numerous countries will convene to grill the heads of Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and Amazon about misinformation. (Not being grilled: CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Fox, CNBC or any other mainstream media outlet that routinely and repeatedly get’s it wrong, either willfully or cluelessly……)

Russia making preparations to decouple from larger internet

Another one from the “we told you so” files, as Russian tech providers, led by Kaspersky Labs co-founder Natalya Kaspersky are preparing a test-run of a plan mandated by Russia’s “sovereign internet” legislation. Under the new laws, Russian internet providers must be prepared and able to run all internet traffic through routing points controlled by the Russian state – ostensibly to “protect Russia from cyber-attack”. The “we told you so” part is that a couple years back when we blogged that various foreign policies were driving the world toward an eventual global network split. And I’m telling you now – when similar laws come to North America, making state surveillance effectively mandatory, they’ll sell it to you as a defense from cyberattack.

AI “Deep fakes” text generator too dangerous to release

OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence firm backed by Elon Musk and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, has taken an unusual step in refusing to release their AI powered GPT2 text generator, for fear it is “too good” at generating believable, authentic sounding text. Their claim is that the software, dubbed “deep fakes of text” may be abused, although I personally don’t understand how an AI powered text generator could output anything more dangerous than something any conventional humanoid could. I’m going to call “b/s” on this one and if it comes back on me I’m totally blaming the intelligent agent I programmed to write #AxisOfEasy for me while I drink coffee and read Snowcrash.

Deep Dive on Recent DNS hijacking attacks

We touched on this briefly in #AxisOfEasy number 81 where FireEye security released a report detailing how hackers were taking over domains by compromising their domain registrar or DNS provider control panels. This week Brian Krebs did a major deep dive into this phenomenon looking at how Iranian hackers targeted various middle-east targets and attacking them via their vendors.

DNSSEC per se, not a big help since they can control the DNSSEC once they get into the control panel, so as we always say, make sure you have event notifications enabled, multi-factor authentication, and an Access Control List setup for your account, all available via your security settings in the control panel.