attack-surface

Once brought a laptop adorned with loads of techie stickers to a conference, and all people could ask me was the background story behind those stickers, aswell as asking specifically about the tech in question. 'Oh you have an EFF sticker, do you care about digital rights and freedom?'.

Turned me off adding stickers after that. Not that I don't like discussing them, it just perks people's interest at the worst moments, when I'm focused on preparing my next talk for example. (Or maybe I don't want to school people on digital rights)

I remember that Simpsons episode when Homer creates a website, which contained nothing controversial, and full of bells and whistles, yet thin on content. Then he wrote an article about something controversial, and his visitor numbers went through the roof.

This is content marketing 101. Discover something new, tell people about it, profit. The backlinks will happen naturally and organically. You may even have your article featured in some high profile website that gets 10,000x more traffic than your site, boosting your SEO in the process.

Came here to say this. I even tried with a VPN to see if the download speed wasn't throttled with it, but it's still ridiculously slow.

Thinking of switching to yt-dlp, but then how does yt-dlp get around the throttling? Does it emulate a browser to make it look like a normal viewing of a video?

You can encrypt your files with Cryptomator[1] if you don't want Google looking at your files. I'm not sure about their policy on that though? I mean if it's encrypted, then they can't scan for piracy / Christchurch videos and other contraband, right?

[1] https://cryptomator.org/

Go easy on me, I'm new here. I plan to comment a lot more as time goes by. My comment is purely anecdotal. I'm not saying `everyone now has malware`, just stating that classes of attacks can be killed by doing basic security like principle of least privilege & sandboxing (Android and Apple probably already do it, but then how are these attacks possible?)

Noticed a flaw in my phone and other people's phones where the default browser was not honored (on Android) and SMS links open in `Samsung Internet` which barely gets updates and is a serious vector for attack.

On top of this, why should a link containing a malicious payload be able to speak to other parts of the system? Doesn't Android do a basic security measure called sandboxing and `principle of least privilege'[0]?

I am highly suspicious of every URL in my SMS messages app now thanks to these NSO revelations. I'm not especially interesting, so I doubt I had NSO-grade malware on my phone, but we need to protect the masses, not just those with a high profile threat model (Journalists, Dissidents, Activists, etc).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege