VPNs and Trust

Jun 16, 2021 at 6:17 AM

TorrentFreak surveyed nineteen VPN providers, asking them questions about their privacy practices: what data they keep, how they respond to court order, what country they are incorporated in, and so on.

Most interesting to me is the home countries of these companies. Express VPN is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. NordVPN is incorporated in Panama. There are VPNs from the Seychelles, Malaysia, and Bulgaria. There are VPNs from more traditional companies like the U.S., Switzerland, Canada, and Sweden. Presumably all of those companies follow the laws on their home country.

And it matters. I’ve been thinking about this since Trojan Shield was made public. This is the joint US/Australia-run encrypted messaging service that lured criminals to use it, and then spied on everything they did. Or, at least, Australian law enforcement spied on everyone. The FBI wasn’t able to because the US has better privacy laws.

We don’t talk about it a lot, but VPNs are entirely based on trust. As a consumer, you have no idea which company will best protect your privacy. You don’t know the data protection laws of the Seychelles or Panama. You don’t know which countries can put extra-legal pressure on companies operating within their jurisdiction. You don’t know who actually owns and runs the VPNs. You don’t even know which foreign companies the NSA has targeted for mass surveillance. All you can do is make your best guess, and hope you guessed well.

#schneier #security #vpn #trust

It’s much easier for democratic stability to break down than most people realize, but this doesn’t mean we must despair over the future. It’s possible, though very difficult, to back away from our current situation towards one of greater democratic stability. This wouldn’t entail a restoration of a previous status quo. Instead, it would recognize that the status quo was less stable than it seemed, and a major source of the tensions that have started to unravel it. What we need is a dynamic stability, one that incorporates new forces into American democracy rather than trying to deny or quash them.

This paper is our attempt to explain what this might mean in practice. We start by analyzing the problem and explaining more precisely why a breakdown in public consensus harms democracy. We then look at how these beliefs are being undermined by three feedback loops, in which anti-democratic actions and anti-democratic beliefs feed on each other. Finally, we explain how these feedback loops might be redirected so as to sustain democracy rather than undermining it.

To be clear: redirecting these and other energies in more constructive ways presents enormous challenges, and any plausible success will at best be untidy and provisional. But, almost by definition, that’s true of any successful democratic reforms where people of different beliefs and values need to figure out how to coexist. Even when it’s working well, democracy is messy. Solutions to democratic breakdowns are going to be messy as well.

https://snfagora.jhu.edu/publication/rechanneling-beliefs/

#schneier #security #democracy #information

Resetting Your GE Smart Light Bulb

From #schneier:

If you need to reset the software in your GE smart light bulb -- firmware version 2.8 or later -- just follow these easy instructions:

Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.

Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on

Bulb will flash on and off 3 times if it has been successfully reset.

Welcome to the future!

"Surveillance is the business model of the Internet"

• [Bruce Schneier](www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v9t_IoOgyI)

Presentation at Stanford University Law School. Brilliantly excellent.

#privacy #surveillancestate #nsa #metadata #surveillance #bruceschneier #schneier

NSA Surveillance and What To Do About It - Bruce Schneier

This event was hosted by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/events/nsa-surveillance-and-what-do-about-it-evening-talk...