Micah Lee 🔑 @micahflee@mastodon.social

ICYMI: In July I presented at the Circle of HOPE about the amazing things that the Qubes operating system makes possible, like

- opening email attachments in "disposable VMs"
- managing anonymous identities with Whonix
- keeping secrets like password databases, PGP keys, and sensitive documents stored in vaults without Internet access
- anonymously connecting to VPNs over Tor

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U8YbXKwog&feature=youtu.be

Hacking Team Hacker Phineas Fisher Has Gotten Away With It

Leaked court documents show that Italian authorities have no idea who hacked the government spyware maker Hacking Team, and a judge ruled the investigation should be shut down.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3k9zzk/hacking-team-hacker-phineas-fisher-has-gotten-away-with-it

"That’s why we at Twilio banned not just hate speech, but any organization whose primary purpose is spreading hate. It’s in our control to decide who uses our product, and from whom we take money. We choose not to profit from this hatred, or those who spread it."
https://medium.com/@jeffiel/words-matter-and-theyre-destabilizing-the-american-tribe-afaba172e4d1

New Signal privacy feature removes sender ID from metadata
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/new-signal-privacy-feature-removes-sender-id-from-metadata/

Mastodons have big mouths

Signal is testing out a new feature that encrypts message metadata. Once it's widely deployed, their server will facilitate delivering messages but without having access to who is sending them

https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

Supermicro hack stickers at BSides PDX lol

Apple CEO Tim Cook calls for Bloomberg to retract their SuperMicro supply chain attack story.

“We turned the company upside down,” Cook said. “Email searches, data center records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There’s no truth to this.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/apple-tim-cook-bloomberg-retraction

Wow how lucky am I to get selected?!

Support FBI whistleblower Terry Albury, who is set to be sentenced next week https://freedom.press/news/support-fbi-whistleblower-terry-albury-who-set-be-sentenced-next-week/

Really interesting Twitter thread about how radical the Sears catalog was and it's role in fighting white supremacy during Jim Crow https://twitter.com/louishyman/status/1051872178415828993?s=19

I don't know how many GPG Sync users there are in the wild, much less ones that also use Qubes and Split GPG. But if that sounds like you, I wrote a wiki thing for you https://github.com/firstlookmedia/gpgsync/wiki/Using-GPG-Sync-in-Qubes-with-Split-GPG

lol

Check it, I just released a new version of passphraseme: https://github.com/micahflee/passphraseme

Now you can make diceware passphrases uses wordlists scraped from Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and Star Wars.

pip3 install passphraseme

A good reason to be skeptical of this story https://twitter.com/securelyfitz/status/1049699417840791552

Bloomberg now has a follow-up story claiming that an unnamed "major U.S. telecommunications company" discovered a malicious implant in an Ethernet port on a server manufactured by Supermicro https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evidence-of-hacked-supermicro-hardware-found-in-u-s-telecom

House Approves the National Quantum Initiative Act https://science.house.gov/news/press-releases/house-approves-national-quantum-initiative-act

Berkeley Police Posted Mugshots Of Activists To ‘Create Counter-Narrative’ Of Protests Against Far-Right https://shadowproof.com/2018/10/03/berkeley-police-posted-mugshots-activists-create-counter-narrative-protests-far-right/

And here's Amazon's strong denial about the supply chain attack https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/setting-the-record-straight-on-bloomberg-businessweeks-erroneous-article/

Apple's longer response to the Bloomberg China supply chain story https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong-about-apple/