Meet the Compaq Portable, launched in 1982, a 28-pound portable computer and the first 100% compatible IBM clone, with a 9" built-in monochrome monitor delivering an 80×25 text display. http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
Boing Boing is a co-signatory to an open letter
(PDF) to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, calling on them to
fix the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ban on jailbreaking and
unlocking your devices. This laudable effort was spearheaded by Public
Knowledge:
Police who rely on vulnerabilities in crooks’ devices are terminally
compromised; the best way to protect crime-victims is to publicize and
repair defects in systems, but every time a hole is patched, the cops
lose a tool they rely on the attack their own adversaries.
Case in point: fake cellphone towers.
By design, cellphones mistrust their owners. Owners are not supposed to
be able to see, control or alter the low-level communications their
phones undertake with towers, lest they figure out how to avoid being
billed for their calls and data use, or even attack other phones
connected to the same tower.
This means that attacks against these low-level systems are extremely
hard for phone owners to detect or prevent, which is why law enforcement has become so reliant on fake cell towers (called “dirtboxes,” “stingrays” or “IMSI catchers”) to spy on cellphone users and even inject malicious data into their streams.
But security flaws in cellphones don’t just make criminals vulnerable to attacks from cops: they leave everyone vulnerable to attacks on their phones.
Case in point: Swearing Trojan.
Swearing Trojan (named for the Chinese curse words sprinkled in its
sourcecode) is a piece of mobile malware used to defeat 2-factor
authentication systems like those that protect banking logins and
corporate networks. By hiding in the phone, it is able to steal 2-factor
messages and convey them to criminals at login time.
Swearing Trojan’s author is in jail, but the malware lives on, and one
of its most effective tools for spreading itself is through fake
messages sent from fake cellphone towers – towers that are
indistinguishable from real ones to victims’ phones, because police have
spent the past five years exploiting fake cellphone towers, rather than
trying to get manufacturers to make them impossible.
Fake cellphone towers are easy and cheap to make, and they’re
devastatingly effective. Your phone could be connected to one right now
and you’d never know. Think of all the data your phone protects –
especially when it comes to two-factor authentication. That’s the data
that the security services have decided to sacrifice to make their jobs
easier.
Now, Calyx is trying to raise $100K in a charitable crowdfunder to
extend key privacy technologies to two marginalized groups: people
rebuilding Puerto Rico and privacy trainers with the Harlem Cryptoparty, who provide operational security advice for #blacklivesmatter activists and the wider, oversurveilled black community.
Calyx is planning to equip 100 public libraries in Puerto Rico with
unlimited bandwidth that can be loaned to patrons to take home, and to
continue its sponsorship of Harlem Cryptoparty for another year.
The entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration resigned en masse. Board member Chris Bourg wrote publicly about the decision, and an open letter elaborates
on it, stating that their difference of opinion with publisher Taylor
& Francis Group about open access, galvanized by Aaron Swartz’s
suicide, moved them to quit.
