This Graphene OS Feature Can Get You Arrested
Our top stories this week:
- Activist charged with felony after giving border agent “duress code” that wiped his phone
- The Pokémon Company is turning to facial recognition scans to help combat scalpers
- Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden
- Trump admin exempts SpaceX’s Starlink from FCC ban on foreign-made routers
- Inside the dystopian world of Germany’s free speech crackdown
- eBay reaches $56M settlement with e-commerce newsletter writers it terrorized in 2019
TWIP Live 🔴
Updates from the Team
New Video This Weekend
We're planning to release a new video for members in the next few days, so be sure to sign up and get early access as soon as it drops!
News Briefs
This week Fria published updates on a new "dynamic patching" in Chrome that would allow updates without a restart, over 100 vulnerabilities found in an IRS contractor's software that handled Americans' tax information, and more. Check it out!
Jonah Aragon
Sources
Activist charged with felony after giving border agent “duress code” that wiped his phone
In what might be one of the biggest privacy cases in a long while, the government has decided to press charges against an activist who used Graphene OS's duress PIN feature to wipe his phone instead of complying with orders to unlock it for a search. This is a story with a lot of layers, but it's clear the government is testing boundaries. All eyes are on this right now.
Ryan Whitwam
The Pokémon Company is turning to facial recognition scans to help combat scalpers
Official Pokémon stores in Japan are turning to facial recognition to ensure that customers don't buy more than once per day in effort to slow down scalpers and ensure enough supply for everyone. There are unanswered questions about - among other things - how the data is stored and how long it's retained for, as well as accuracy.
Elie Gould
Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden
Bruce Schneier recently summarized some of Madison Square Garden's facial recognition controversies, including how the FRT systems were disabled during Taylor Swift's recent wedding. This is raising a lot of questions about the lack of regulation over how private companies use surveillance tech.
Bruce Schneier
Trump admin exempts SpaceX’s Starlink from FCC ban on foreign-made routers
Three companies now have exemptions from the FCC's foreign-made router ban - Netgear, Amazon, and now Starlink. But these exemptions are temporary. What will happen when they're up and on what grounds are they even being issued?
Jon Brodkin
Inside the dystopian world of Germany’s free speech crackdown
Germany's free speech laws - designed to help prevent a return to fascism after the end of World War 2 - appear to be backfiring in modern times and are being used in thousands of cases to investigate people who do things as simple as calling politicians names online.
eBay reaches $56M settlement with e-commerce newsletter writers it terrorized in 2019
A conclusion to a truly insane story: in 2019 some eBay executives colluded to harass a couple who wrote negative things about the company - not just legal notices and threats but actual death threats and gifts like live cockroaches and books about how to deal with the passing of a loved one. Thankfully they were held accountable and it seems the saga is drawing to a close with this settlement.
Lucas Ropek
Forum Updates
fria