The Parallax

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Even for Signal, engineering privacy is fraught with pitfalls

The Parallax

Signal has become the privacy-focused consumer’s go-to messaging app. But a recent change to its back-end systems, designed to make the app more accessible and competitive with other encrypted-messaging services, could be putting user data at risk. At the core of Signal’s appeal is a level of digital protection and commercial disinterest in its users’ communications rarely seen by messaging-service providers.

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Increased scrutiny forces tech to clean up its language

The Parallax

Hackers generally love to embrace change, from executing new exploits to reconsidering past paradigms. But like most of the technology world, the cybersecurity companies that use it have been slow to abandon exclusionary language that has returned to the spotlight, thanks to the Black Lives Matter protests. Terms such as “whitelist” and “blacklist,” which refer to lists of approved or blocked websites, IP addresses, privileges, and services—or “master&#x

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Tough tumbler: Lock-picking vs. the pandemic shutdown

The Parallax

Hackers may be stereotyped as introverts, but at hacker conventions as big as DefCon to more local confabs, you’re almost certain to run across at least a few, and sometimes dozens, of hackers hunched over tables of metal locks and key cylinders, poking at their innards with thin metal picks and rakes. The art of lock-picking, many of them will tell you, is hacker philosophy made real, but the longtime hacker sport has faced an uncertain future since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the

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Why strategic cyberwarfare is more complex than ever before

The Parallax

When tens of millions of superfans of the Korean pop-music sensation BTS descended on the Internet in June in support of Black Lives Matter , some described them as a virtual army. But for renowned hacker the Grugq, the impact of that army was very real. By taking online action to support racial justice at the behest of BTS, their fans were engaging in the kind of cybercraft that analysts often attribute to nation-states, he said.

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Is ad fraud a cybersecurity problem?

The Parallax

Deftly sliding from desktop browsers to mobile devices to smart TVs and other Internet of Things devices, ad fraud is a multibillion-dollar business problem that has been running rampant across the Internet for years. Should chief information security officers at companies hit by ad fraud take a stronger role in stopping it? The range of companies affected by ad fraud is vast and deep, and it affects every business vertical across the globe.

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WeChat spat puts security of Chinese-Americans and immigrants on the line

The Parallax

This story was first published in The Parallax View newsletter on Sept. 28, 2020. Subscribe for free here. In the span of three days last weekend, the most important communication app of the Chinese diaspora was banned in the United States by President Trump, then unbanned by federal courts. And on September 24, the Justice Department formally asked the courts to put its ruling against them on hold.

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Perfect storm of security issues looms over 2020 election

The Parallax

Clichéd as the concept of a perfect storm is, the term feels like an appropriate way to describe the cybersecurity challenges U.S. voters face in the November 2020 election. Since 2016, cybersecurity and election experts have been sounding an ever-louder clarion call to take aggressive steps to ensure that computerized voting machines are secure enough to properly enroll registered voters, record their votes, and accurately count them.

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