The 84th Block: Surveillance society
More 2021 round-ups, including Twitter’s top tweets and trends and Google’s year in search
This week…
More 2021 round-ups, including Twitter’s top tweets and trends and Google’s year in search. There aren’t any big surprises: On Twitter, BTS tweeting #StopAsianHate is the most retweeted tweet of 2021 and the Olympics was the most discussed sports event while on Google, Squid Game was the most searched-for TV show and Afghanistan was the top news search.
But, remember, everyone clicks for a different reason. It’s true at least for journalism analytics, according to Caitlin Petre for CJR, but I think it extends to social media trends too. Anyway, here’s selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
TikTok drama channels are turning into online intelligence agents
Ryan Broderick for The Verge:
Drama-reaction accounts like these are riding a huge wave of popularity right now, thanks to an obsession within the TikTok community with investigating, analyzing, and passing judgment on the content going viral on the platform. The app’s young users pore over random trending videos, constructing elaborate conspiracy theories and even doxxing the people featured in them. Most often, these campaigns to unmask other users are driven by some sense of justice.
In each of these instances, the app’s aggressive recommendation algorithm awakens, pushing the controversies to millions of users, generating hundreds of videos, thousands of comments, and too many views to count. The app has become home to a teenage version of the OSINT (or “open source intelligence”) community, made famous by outlets like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab) or investigative site Bellingcat.
Train them in OSINT without training them in OSINT, huh?
Kamala Harris is right to be wary of Bluetooth headphones
Bree Fowler for CNET:
Harris’ concern about using Bluetooth earphones is bound to raise questions for people with less weighty responsibilities than the vice president. Bluetooth is widely used by countess people to connect earbuds, smartwatches and all kinds of other devices to their phones and laptops.
Turns out, the veep has a point. Cybersecurity experts say high-profile politicians, like Harris, and other VIPs, might want to skip on Bluetooth. The connections, which require two devices to pair in order to wirelessly share data, can be hacked, putting the information being transmitted at risk.
Clay Miller, chief technology officer for SyncDog, which focuses on mobile security, notes there have been successful attacks that allowed a cybercriminal to use a Bluetooth connection to take control of a device and install malicious code. The code allowed the hacker to eavesdrop on conversations, both taking place on the phone in question and those nearby, by turning the phone into a secret microphone.
As a result, Harris is “absolutely right” to be wary of Bluetooth headphones, says Jason Kent, hacker in residence at Cequence Security. “She has conversations every day that could potentially be used by those in the business of listening.”
Harris also prefers text messages to emails because of the Clinton email leaks (Wikipedia).
A mysterious threat actor is running hundreds of malicious Tor relays
Catalin Cimpanu for The Record:
Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users.
Tracked as KAX17, the threat actor ran at its peak more than 900 malicious servers part of the Tor network, which typically tends to hover around a daily total of up to 9,000-10,000.
Some of these servers work as entry points (guards), others as middle relays, and others as exit points from the Tor network.
Their role is to encrypt and anonymize user traffic as it enters and leaves the Tor network, creating a giant mesh of proxy servers that bounce connections between each other and provide the much-needed privacy that Tor users come for.
So if you control thousands of servers where traffic is encrypted at every position, you could reverse the encryption too, right?
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Adrienne de Ruiter’s essay, Why we should rethink our moral intuitions about deepfakes, on Psych.
I’m watching the 2021 World Women’s Handball Championship. Heia Norge!
I’m looking for:
Chart of the week
From the 2021 Duolingo Global Language Report: