The Doctor

The golden rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

People want to be lied to.

So much for going on a Shodan safari in South Korea.

News flash: IoT doesn’t always mean “backend is on AWS.”

Sheesh.

The only way you won’t have to provide PII is if you buy it from someone outside of the exchange ecosystem (from somebody face to face with cash or a gift card (note: Local Bitcoin has been gone for about a year now)). Exchanges have to comply with KYC (Know Your Customer) laws if they want to operate in the US, which is why they’re asking for PII.

I was serious. BBSes would be an ideal long-distance communication method under some circumstances.

Or perhaps an unassuming office building that only has outbound VPN connections.

Librewolf on my personal laptop.

A few of us have a long-running joke that World War III will be started because somebody can’t reach Pornhub anymore.

Still have a modem?

Depends on which lines are affected.

Originally it was a portmanteau of “stalker-fan.” Think “super fan.”

Not all of these kids have any other computer.

Just as securicams in schools in the 90’s conditioned a lot of people to accept on-street surveillance.

That’s pretty much what it’s for.

• https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-02-18/high-school-issues-laptops-uses-them-to-spy-on-students/
• https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-02-23/more-from-the-lower-merion-school-district/
• https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-03-08/lower-merion-quietly-places-two-of-their-it-staff-on-leave/
• https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-04-18/lower-marion-school-districts-stash-of-surveillance-photos-found/
• https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2010-08-22/an-interesting-development-in-the-lower-marion-school-district-s/

Gee. What a shock.

Let’s see here…

Potato Chat - This is the first I’ve heard of it so I can’t speak to it one way or another. A cursory glance suggests that it’s had no security reviews.

Enigma - Same. The privacy policy talks about cloud storage, so there’s that. The following is also in their privacy policy:

A super group can hold up to 100,000 people, and it is not technically suitable for end-to-end encryption. You will get this prompt when you set up a group chat. Our global communication with the server is based on TLS encryption, which prevents your chat data from being eavesdropped or tampered with by others… The server will index the chat data of the super large group so that you can use the complete message search function when the local message is incomplete, and it is only valid for chat participants… we will record the ID, mobile phone number, IP location information, login time and other information of the users we have processed.

So, plaintext abounds. Definite OPSEC problem.

nandbox - No idea, but the service offers a webapp client as a first class citizen to users. This makes me wonder about their security profile.

Telegram - Lol. And I really wish they hadn’t mentioned that hidden API…

Tor - No reason to re-litigate this argument that happens once a year, every year ever since the very beginning. Suffice it to say that it has a threat model that defines what it can and cannot defend against, and attacks that deanonymize users are well known, documented, and uses by law enforcement.

mega.nz - I don’t use it, I haven’t looked into it, so I’m not going to run my mouth (fingers? keyboard?) about it.

Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots - Depending on which ones, there might be checks and traps for stuff like this that could have twigged him.

This bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the article: “…created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.”

Stop and think about that for a second.

LEOs using what amount to phishing attacks to grab folks looking for CSAM has a long and storied history behind it.

I’ll just leave this here: https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/nordvpn-confirms-its-no-logs-claims-for-the-fourth-time-with-security-audit

I use it when I’m on travel. It’s pretty decent, and it wasn’t hard to import the Wireguard configs into Network Mangler.