All SmartPhones are spies!
that’s why Merkel keeps the Nokia from 1995 (even if that device is spied on as well, because it can not end2end encrypt sms or phone calls (*FAIL*! X-D))
Putin does not have a mobile phone AT ALL (he relies on encrypted land lines)
2014: “Earlier this month, as Russia began its takeover of the region of Crimea, U.S. spy agencies reportedly found a worrying silence in the spot where they were listening most attentively — the digital space around Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military brass.
As the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, U.S. intelligence services could not intercept any communications on the start of the Crimean invasion.
One U.S. official called it a piece of “classic maskirovka,” the Russian spy term for masking sensitive data.
But at least part of the radio silence may have a simpler explanation: Putin, by his own admission, does not have a cell phone for the Americans to tap.”
“I rarely look at that,” Putin retorted, “into that place where you apparently live, that Internet.”
“Outmoded as that may sound, the remark was in line with Putin’s long-established communication habits, which have apparently made him a very hard target for foreign spies.
Unlike German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose phone was tapped for years by the U.S. National Security Agency, Putin does not do text messaging.
He has no social-networking pages. He gets his news from the daily briefings of his own spy agencies.
…
“This is not a telephone conversation,” Russians like to say in the middle of a telephone conversation, reminding each other that only the most innocent chatter is safe to transmit over an insecure line.”
“The Russian school of cryptography, says Soldatov, has a long track record of standing up to Western spies. Most recently in 2009, both American and British spy agencies reportedly attempted to tap the communications of Dmitri Medvedev, who was then serving as Russia’s President, during a summit of world leaders in London. According to documents provided to the Guardian newspaper by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, they bugged the phones, but they could not break the Kremlin’s encryption, says Soldatov. “Our special services may not be great. But when the task is to protect the data of just a few top people, they can manage.””
(src: time.com)
Is Putin still using Windows XP?
“Microsoft’s two most popular operating systems, NT and XP, were developed primarily in Israel. Microsoft has had a strong presence in Israel for many years, and has two R&D centers in Herzliya that employ 600 people.” (src: israel21c.org)
Let’s hope his IT administrators gave him a Linux based box with encrypted harddisk, anything else would be plain silly (even on a closed/shielded/not connected to the internet network).
Or even better: Russia (as any other country) should do it like Israel and India: develop their own OS. (it seems they did!)
Countries With Linux Based National Operating Systems
2016:
- China (Ubuntu Kylin)
- Cuba (Nova 2015)
- North Korea (Red Star OS)
- India (BOSS)
- Indonesia (IGOS Nusantra Linux )
- Turkey (Pardus Linux)
- Russia + Iran (launched Zamin OS sometimes in 2012)
- Israel
src: itsfoss.com
India Develops its Own Cyber Threat-Eliminating Operating System for Aircraft
“The HAL-RTOS provides a comprehensive feature set based on international specification — ARINC-653 — to support Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture.”
“”The RTOS is a key technology for the concurrent execution of multiple applications and optimal use of hardware resources, which is of paramount importance for the increased complexity of modern avionics software,” the HAL statement read.”
“A RTOS provides for the predictability, safety, and workability of several functional applications at once in aircraft, both civilian and military.”
(src: sputniknews.com)
so it is official, all those messenger Apps are used for spying
And the latest “rage” is that a Chinese App TikTok became more popular than facebook X-D
- WhatsApp (Facebook/USA)
- Instagram (Facebook/USA)
- Telegram (USA/UK and SaudiArabia)
- WeChat (China)
- TikTok (China)
- VK(VKontakte, Russia)
The Question is:
- should not every country have Cyber-Sovereignty over the data of it’s citizens?
- and let it’s citizens 100% (spy on the spies) transparency on
“Telecommunications carriers in the U.K. face a similar challenge after the British government, following plenty of lobbying from Washington, ordered them to remove all equipment produced by China’s Huawei Technologies from their networks.
That dilemma could also become less rare.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo this week introduced a “Clean Network” initiative that would push to sever American technology ties with China.
More companies, both U.S. and Chinese, could find themselves in precarious positions if that proposal were to gain momentum in Washington.
That’s not to say, however, that this technological divide is being perpetuated by the U.S. alone.
Chinese leaders have long espoused the notion of “cybersovereignty,” which argues that governments should be allowed to set the rules for the internet within their own borders.
Such rules have kept many of America’s largest tech companies out of China.
Imagine how Beijing might react if instead of just buying TikTok’s operations in the U.S., Microsoft were to acquire the app globally, including the version within China that’s named Douyin.
It seems entirely reasonable for governments to have security concerns about how data on their citizens is collected, stored and used.
The issue is whether addressing those concerns necessitates pulling a digital iron curtain across the world.”
“Senior American and Chinese officials are expected to meet later this month to review progress on their first-phase trade deal.
Signed just six months ago, the question is whether the pact still makes sense today.
After all, the world has changed dramatically since January.
Tensions between the U.S. and China have surged, due in no small part to Covid-19.
The signals out of Beijing though suggest China is keen to maintain the deal.
The country has recently sped up its purchases of American farm goods, for example.
The White House’s thinking, though, is somewhat less clear.
The last time senior officials from both sides spoke by phone in May, they pledged to jointly create favorable conditions for implementing the agreement.
But shortly thereafter, President Trump wondered aloud during an interview if the deal was still worth keeping.”
Bejing wants to help Hong Kong with COVID19 testing:
“Activists in Hong Kong though were quick to raise concerns that authorities could use the tests as a pretext to collect DNA,”
src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-08-07/next-china-a-digital-iron-curtain
“U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to ban dealings with ByteDance Ltd., owner of video-sharing sensation TikTok, appears to codify what his administration has already been warning.
A second edict targeting messaging app WeChat and its parent, Tencent Holdings Ltd., seems weirdly overdue.
The executive orders issued by the White House go beyond stopping average Americans from becoming unwitting spies for the Communist Party through their postings and data.
The implications could hurt not only the Chinese targets, but the U.S. companies they work with, including Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”
Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022
what can users do to protect their data?
- ask and pay (!) for products that respect the user’s privacy
- COVER TAPE FRONT CAM OF (surveillance) SmartPhone
- on PCs and Laptops: use great Open Source software like the easy to install GNU Linux Debian 10
- use LibreOffice instead of M$ Office or Google Docs
- it is Java based and works well (Writer = Word, Calc = Excel)
- use Mozilla (ex Netscape) Firefox instead of Chrome browser!
- it is available for ALL PLATFORMS (Windows, OSX, Linux)
- even as App for Android and IPhone
- while surely not perfect, Mozilla at least seems to try to protect the user’s private data (aka not upload it to Google/Facebook)
- alternative Smart Phones
- affordable! Pine64Phone NICE! https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
- https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- well at $749.00 it is rather pricey but still cheaper than the latest IPhone (which is guranteed to spy on the user)
- FairPhone + Privacy! NICE 🙂 GO GET IT!
- remove Google from existing SmartPhones
- alternatives to Google:
- https://yandex.com
- superb picture search
- https://duckduckgo.com
- runs on Amazon cloud… well X-D
- https://www.startpage.com/
- acts like a proxy between the user and Google
- https://yandex.com
- alternatives to gmail: https://mail.tutanota.com/
- use Thunderbird and Enigmail
- it will store the user’s mails ONLY in encrypted format (even when using gmail’s infrastructure)
- stay away from the cloud madness as much as the user can
- only share absolutely essential data with “the cloud” aka hybrid-cloud where the user stores 100% of data on a local server and uploads only the data that is not privacy intrusive and that really needs to be easily accessible via clouds
- instead of: cloud per default
- now the toughest: uninstall WhatsApp, WeChat and Telegram or move on to a different device not installing those Apps there
- they are all privacy intruding Apps
- or: remove the sim card, move the sim card over to (of course) Librem 5 or LineageOS enabled Phone
- leave the non-sim enabled phone with WhatsApp, WeChat and Telegram at home, not carrying around
- conferencing:
-
ASK YOUR GOVERNMENT TO BUILD THEIR OWN COMPUTERS! 🙂
- with a little investment! it can be done! see “building a RISCV based computer”
- this also needs to be done “ANYWAY” if citizens should be able to compute safely and securely in order to tackle the Intel SPECTRE and MELTDOWN problems
untested but interesting:
Escape from surveillance capitalism
ArcaOS is an operating system based on the last IBM release for OS/2.
“Proprietary software with open-source components” (argh!) X-D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArcaOS
“Personal, which retails for $129 per license, and Commercial, which retails at $229 per license”
src: techradar.com
Links:
https://fossbytes.com/linux-based-smartphone-volla-phone-protects-anonymity/
https://itsubuntu.com/tools-create-custom-linux-os/
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