Weekly Axis Of Easy #102
Last Week’s Quote was “To undeceive men is to offend them” …closest guess was Winston Churchill. Sounds like something he’d say. Right up there with what he called history: “It’s one damn thing after another” But no, it was Queen Christina of Sweden (1632 – 1654),
This Week’s Quote: “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice” … by ????
THE RULES: No searching up the answer, must be posted in the comments below:
The Prize: First person to post, gets their next domain or hosting renewal on us.
Please excuse the brevity of this week’s issue, real life exigencies are intruding into my life as a tech philosopher (which I almost mistyped as “philanderer”).
In This Issue:
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Facebook introducing their own crypto-currency called Libra
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Evernote web clipper exposed millions of users sensitive data
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Pinterest bans Zerohedge as JBP launches free speech platform
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Spanish football league fined for turning cell phones into surveillance mics
Facebook introducing their own crypto-currency
Long standing rumours have finally been put to rest as Facebook recently announced that they will be releasing their own crypto-currency and as we were going to transmit today, word broke that they released the whitepaper. Libra will run on its own blockchain and be backed by various assets, making it a stable coin, kinda like Tether (which is imploded over the last year when it’s peg to the USD broke and whose CEO recently shared a plane ride with an easyDNS client who suspects he was fleeing the country). Facebook will spin out a separate non-profit entity called Calibra to run it, and create separate apps to use it.
This now means we are loosely tracking the plot-line of the Mr. Robot series, where in a post-economic collapse America, EvilCorp’s “Ecoin” and Bitcoin battle it out for digital cash supremacy. Only at this time we’re more in a crack-up boom than economic collapse. Facebook employees will reportedly have the option to take their salaries in the new e-currency (I haven’t read the white paper yet, but I don’t expect it’ll be a decentralized crypto-currency as much as a digital, proprietary company scrip). Initially Bitcoin spiked after the news of impending release but seems to be coming off a touch this morning.
For my part, I would be hesitant to trust Facebook with anything with more gravitas than politically correct memes I cobble from 8chan and Reddit. People who pile their online existence onto Facebook’s single-sign-on, and now digital wallet take on ever increasing risk. What happens when you get your Facebook account nuked for “inauthentic behaviour”, especially given recent revelations that Facebook evaluates your offline behaviour when deciding whether to designate you as a “hate agent”. This is looking more like China’s Sesame Credit and less like a harmless online community.
Whitepaper (h/t ZeroHedge) https://www.scribd.com/document/413733914/LibraWhitePaper-en-US#from_embed
Evernote web clipper exposed millions of users sensitive data
I love Evernote, and I know a lot of people do. So I was chagrined to see that a critical flaw in the Evernote web snipper Chrome plugin could allow attackers to access data from users’ third-party applications. It’s a universal cross-site scripting flow (XSS) that has been cataloged as CVE-2019-12592
The good news is Evernote issued a fix within a week of it being reported to them by Guardio (security firm), just make sure you are using Chrome plugin version 7.11.1 or greater, which you can check by going to chrome://extensions/?id=pioclpoplcdbaefihamjohnefbikjilc in your Chrome browser.
Pinterest bans Zerohedge as JBP launches free speech platform
Pinterest is the latest platform to ban Zerohedge. Zerohedge, an easyDNS client, a conventionally unapproved media site that frequently runs articles by yours truly. The Project Veritas report describes how Pinterest is blocking Zerohedge, as well as some other conservative, pro-life and religious websites under a “porn block list”. Previous bannings, like the time Facebook was preventing anybody from sharing ZH articles across the entire platform, were eventually rolled back. Let’s see if this one sticks.
On a related note, Jordan B Peterson, who is neither alt-right nor racist, in case that’s where you’re going in your head, has announced his plans to create a free speech, censorship free platform called ThinkSpot.
Spanish football league fined for turning cell phones into surveillance mics
This one is straight out of that Batman flick where the Dark Knight convinces Lucius Fox to go against his ethical compass and use a Wayne Enterprises invention that enables the microphones on everybody’s cell phone to create a radar mesh network that envelopes all of Gotham in a Hail Mary move to find the demented and out-of-control Joker.
The Spanish Football League has been fined by Spain’s data protection agency after La Liga used apps installed on fans phones to pinpoint pubs that were showing their soccer games (sorry, I know it’s football, but I’m writing this from over here in Canada, eh) using unlicensed video streams. The apps were surreptitiously activated for both their microphones (to pick up the sound of the games) and their geolocation data – to cross reference pubs that didn’t hold broadcast licenses.
Authorities cried “foul” and fined the league €250,000 (roughly $400,000 USD).
Helen Keller?
“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice” Bob Marley is credited with this gem. Used it for one of my “inspirational quotes: I like to put on our co. paystubs …
“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice” is a quote of Bob Marley