Questions tagged [security]
Questions about security; as it applies to any vulnerable and valuable asset, such as a person, dwelling, community, nation, or organization.
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Are phones listening to our conversations for ad targeting?
Are 'smartphones' (i.e. Google and social media) listening in on users' conversations for targetted advertising? I don't mean keeping a record of the voice commands we give virtual assistants, but ...
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Is there documented evidence that George Kennan opposed the establishment of NATO?
I have no trouble believing George Kennan opposed NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe; quotes about that are easy to find, e.g. on Wikipedia, using relatively recent thus accessible sources.
On the ...
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Were Facebook employees unable to enter their own building to fix router problems, during a recent (six hour) outage?
It's been somewhat mysteriously reported that FB employees couldn't fix some router (BGP) misconfiguration in a timely manner
because "the people trying to figure out what this problem was ...
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Are conversation-starting memes on social-media harvested by criminals?
There have been a raft of warnings circulating on Facebook for years (but seem to have had a recent uptick) warning that memes that are shared on social media that encourage people to post trivia ...
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Does Sci-Hub use malware and phishing to obtain researchers' login credentials?
There is a new BBC article, Police warn students to avoid science website about Sci-Hub, a pirate site to circumvent paywalls on science journals.
But Max Bruce, the City of London police's cyber ...
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Did US prohibit the export of the mere description of a cryptographic algorithm?
A Wikipedia page says that in the US
regulations were introduced as part of munitions controls which required licenses to export cryptographic methods (and even their description)
What concrete ...
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Did two brothers steal credit card information worth millions and walked away scot-free because banks were embarrassed?
In this DEFCON talk at around 24:52 minute mark, the speaker (a Cambridge professor) tells a story of two brothers stealing millions of dollars using a weakness in credit card terminal technology, and ...
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Is illegal immigration down since construction began on Trump's wall?
In this article the quote:
The result? Since border wall construction began in Tucson, Arizona,
illegal crossings are down 24 percent. In San Diego, California,
they’re down 27 percent. And in Yuma, ...
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Does aluminum foil safeguard your credit card from RFID attacks?
Evidence against
Does Aluminum Foil Stop Identity Theft?
Some sources say that if you actually have an RFID-enabled credit card, aluminum foil does the same job, if not better, than an expensive RFID-...
user16959
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Does having passwords cost $200 (£150) per employee, not including the lost productivity?
A BBC News article attributes a claim to Jason Tooley, chief revenue officer at Veridium:
Not only would getting rid of passwords improve security, it would also mean IT departments would not have to ...
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Did Facebook allow Netflix, Spotify, and the Royal Bank of Canada to read users' private messages?
From As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without ...
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Do the "Presidential Alerts" give the government full access to all phone functionality?
John McAfee, libertarian politician and former computer programmer, tweeted this:
The "Presidential alerts": they are capable of accessing the E911 chip
in your phones - giving them full access ...
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Why aren't we using AI to inform our militaries? [closed]
I came across this article that said AI was almost if not as good as humans in team player games like DOTA. Now DOTA has landscapes, multiple players, different abilities etc. So that immediately set ...
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Were the BOSS Linux update servers hacked in 2015?
The Hackology Blog claims that update servers for BOSS Linux were hacked in 2015, eventually allowing access to Indian military and government servers.
This website claims that:
Hackers infected the ...
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Can governments destroy the value of Bitcoin, if they wanted to?
Note that this is a question about Bitcoin that is separate from my other question, which had asked whether Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, claims that the governments ...
