SN 963: Web portal? Yes please!

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

Regarding the embossed credit cards and using the old click-clack device, here in Germany, the only legally required payment method is cash. Businesses can accept debit cards and, less likely, credit cards, but if the power is out or the electronic card reader is not working, you are required to complete the transaction with cash.

If you are in a shop, for example, you can leave your purchases behind and walkout, but if you have consumed food, used a service or filled the car up with fuel, you will have to complete the transaction with cash - even if it means leaving your car on the forecourt and walking to the next cash machine to get cash and coming back.

To find Chrome V8 just go to Settings,Privacy & Security, Click on Security then just scroll down to Manage V8 Security.

In case some people don’t know in Firefox under
Privacy & Security if you have Enhanced Tracking Protection set to Strict it still uses Third Party Cookies. You can test it at Steves Site here…

Web Browser Cookie Forensics

I have mine set to Custom & have it set to Block All Cross-Site Cookies.

My new Credit Card Also does not require a Signature. Everything is Printed on the back of the card.

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I think Leo and Steve might be missing some context in the discussion about minors and encryption. Let me throw a very real scenario out and see what we think of it - a minor has been conversing with a predator over an end-to-end encrypted chat service. The minor is now missing and authorities believe the predator has captured the minor. The predator used the chat service to arrange an in-person meeting, but it’s impossible for parents/authorities to see those details.

I’m not against encryption and I think privacy rights are very important, but I do believe the situation is very different for minors and policy should reflect that. I think Nevada is in the right, although their legal reasoning was ham-fisted.


The company I work for runs several Screenconnect instances, we had to scramble last week when the vuln was exposed. The vendor was being very opaque about what the IoC (indicators of compromise) were for an exploited target.

However, we discovered on one of our instances that the entire user account database had been wiped. Seems like an odd move for someone trying to gain discreet access to a system. My first though was some good samaritan out there was using the exploit to destroy vulnerable instances, render them inoperable to force orgs to patch.

Then it’s time for the police to do actual police work. It seems fairly unlikely that the “unavailable” messages are going to contain much that is useful–it’s not like the predator is going to play their hand. The most that’s likely there is “meet me at the end of your driveway at 11pm tonight.” There exist means to get information to the public (we have those super annoying amber alerts, for example) and there are very few places in the world where there isn’t some level of camera at street and/or door level. I think this is more of a theoretical bogey man than a very real problem that didn’t exist before the invention of social media.

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I’m sorry, but no. Endangering all children to protect a few just isn’t worth it. We come back to the old saying about giving up freedom for security, anyone giving up their freedom for security deserves neither.

How are you supposed to identify children and adolescents? The age they give in their online profiles? I never give my actual date of birth on any online service, unless it is a government site or something like a bank. On some services I’m 20 or so, on others over 50.

You would need them to verify their age, but then, you need everybody, including adults, to verify themselves, no more anonymity online, which could be highly dangerous for many people.

Parents have to sign kids up to services? That won’t be enforceable or controllable. It is just political rhetoric to get full surveillance over all of society, whilst packing it up under “think of the children,” so that anyone who opposes such drastic measures is automatically suspect, no matter how clear their arguments.

Until now, a majority of abuse has come from within family confines or close friends of the family, there are a small minority of predators that work on strangers, yes, but they are a small part of the problem.

Most cases are familiarity or opportunity, you won’t solve that problem by monitoring kids communications.

So do we just give up trying to protect kids while online and say that if a child under 16 signs up using a fake age, they deserve what they get?

It is probably true that most abusers are known to the victim but there’s nothing to stop someone from adding you as a friend just to abuse you. Even if you block someone, they can just create a new account.

So I guess the way to get around that is to teach kids not to add someone unless they know who they are.

I’m all for a fix, what is it?

No, but how are you going to catch just the children signing up? Catching adults would be illegal in many places.

This whole thing is just stupid. Monitoring children’s communications is dangerous and could be more harmful to more children than the situation we curretnly have.

Parents really need to take responsibility for bringing up their children and teaching them about the dangers. All too often these days, parents just give up their responsibilities and push it on teachers and public servants, who have basically had all of their authority removed anyway.

Society needs to change drastically to cope with modern society. But we need to find a balance between the privacy we and children need and tracking criminals. All too much these days, we have given up on actual feet on the ground, reducing their numbers for cheaper scraping of data, but when there is no data, instead of actually doing “real” police work, all too often, the money is spent on trying to lobby government for more powers to erode more civil rights to make their job easier, instead of sticking to the law and doing the job properly, which would take money.

All too often, we look for the cheapest, most expedient way of making our lives easier, even if it means destroying the security and privacy our forebears fought so hard to win for us.

Well, you tell me. Chat messages would be on the victims device, although that relies on the device being able to be acquired by forensic tools which, from the sounds of things, Apple are doing everything they can to stop. The solution to tthat would just be to have the victim show the officer the messages, and then identify the suspect that way

Is this as big of a problem as our politicians say it is? Maybe not but everyone seems to agree there is an issue, and there probably won’t be a “perfect” solution, only one that’s least bad.

I suppose the reason being able to break end-to-end encryption is a popular idea among politicians might have to do with prevention being better than a cure in so far as preventing the crime from taking place in the first place

That was my point. There is no solution, just a lot of noise and heat that we need one, any old one. The law enforcers will complain at ANY point they can’t get their own way, and make all sorts of claims about the ruination of society. I’m much less agitated about the need for a fix because I don’t see society is quite falling apart despite decades now of social media.

I do know that the laws of physics apply. You can’t have it both ways, so you have to either choose requiring all humans to identify before using the Internet, or else you can have some [perceived] anonymity. You can either have [perceived] privacy or else you can have no privacy at all. Trying to pretend there is some compromise that is possible in the middle is just lipstick on a pig.

We need to focus on the real problems here & look at ways to actually stop children from facing these issues.

If I had kids today, I would not allow any Social Media Period to prevent them from being exposed to predators in the first place. As far as I am concerned Social Media should be 18+ ONLY. Kids can also give out far to much personal information.

I hear this all the time on the news about kids who do things they should not be doing or being Cyberbullied & then committing suicide.

To achieve all this we need education for the Parents & Kids. Parents need to talk to their kids about the dangers on the Internet & have a simple rule Do Not Interact with people they do not know or have actually seen & never give out any personal information. Anyone can pretend to be a kid. Friends & Family only.

There is no need for Social Media. They can use Skype & Signal were they have control over who can contact them.

So what would you all do to protect your kids?
Would you let them watch porn? NO. So why is Social Media Okay? The problem is Age Restrictions can not be enforced on the Net.