No News is Good News? Q&A Episode
Our top stories this week:
- Slow news week, come say hi!
- Announcing Mozilla.org
- Following user outcry, AMD reinstates memory encryption in consumer CPUs
- White House app auto-downloads to government phones, can’t be uninstalled
- 50% of LG and Samsung smart TV apps embed residential proxies
TWIP Live 🔴
Updates from the Team
It's Time to Ditch Plex Media Server...
After Plex announced their astronomical price hike a few weeks ago, we realized that there would be a huge influx of users looking for ways around it and thought it might be a good time to suggest people try out Jellyfin. In addition to being free, FOSS, and privacy-respecting, Jellyfin is also one of the easiest services you could host to dip your toes into "homelab" stuff. Our video is now out to the public. Enjoy!
News Briefs
This week's news briefs included several stories that you may have missed from other parts of the web, like how the DOJ has been haled in their efforts to get Apple and Google to hand over data on 100,000 people, facial recognition coming to Kansas City public transit, Meta's AI training program paused after a disasterous internal leak, and more.
Jonah Aragon
Sources
Q&A Episode
This week was a slow news week, so we decided to lean into it. If you're reading this as we're live, please come say hi and hang out with us!
"The web is evolving. So are we."
Mozilla has stood up a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit - Mozilla.org - to manage the Mozilla brand. While the Mozilla Foundation remains at the top of the hierarchy of Mozilla's numerous projects, Mozilla.org appears to have been granted control of the direction and stewardship of things overall. It remains to be seen what the actual real-world effects of this restructuring will mean for users and Mozilla, and it's also unclear why Mozilla felt this was the move worth taking.
Mark Surman
Following user outcry, AMD reinstates memory encryption in consumer CPUs
Last week, AMD removed TSME - a cybersecurity feature which encrypts the entire contents stored in the memory - from their lower-end CPUs. While this feature was never explicitly promised on lower-end models, it was always there in the past for one reason or another. The reason for removal was never explicitly made clear, but AMD has promised to return to the feature in an update soon.
Dan Goodin
White House app auto-downloads to government phones, can’t be uninstalled
Government phones now automatically download the White House app, and if you remove it it simply redownloads. In addition to employees feeling that the app is "propaganda," experts in the past have examined the app and found a massive list of privacy concerns such as near-realtime location sharing with third parties, ties to Russia, and more. This move raises questions about where is the line between "expectation of privacy" and work/life balance.
WIRED
50% of LG and Samsung smart TV apps embed residential proxies
Residential proxy abuse is starting to become a serious, rampant problem in the world of stopping cybercrime. Commercial VPNs can often be easily flagged as coming from a data center and thus blocked, but a residential proxy looks just like a normal home IP address. The problem is that illicit proxies often exist without the user knowing, having been downloaded under false pretenses. In this article, they note that apps like games, screensavers, and clocks are common examples of malicious apps that secretly install residential proxies on smart TVs. Home users often have no idea but can still suffer from slower speeds, more CAPTCHAs/blocked sites, and in some cases can even get a visit from the cops when a malicious activity gets traced back to user's IP address.
Amar Ćemanović
Forum Updates
nombrefalso