The Pixel 11 is Here, Will it Support GrapheneOS?
Our top stories this week:
- Google’s new Tensor G6 brings serious performance, efficiency, and security upgrades to the Pixel 11 series
- White House taps security firms for offensive hack-back operations
- Amazon will train on Twitch streamers’ content by default, unless they opt out
- Mozilla Issues New Firefox GPG Key Following Exposure
- Signal Updates
TWIP Live 🔴
Updates from the Team
The Secret War on Encryption: Inside Bullrun
At long last, our Bullrun video is finally out in full to the public. Go check it out to learn all about how the NSA used secret agreements, manipulation, and other underhanded techniques to try to hack the entire internet - and why you still shouldn't give up hope!
Privacy Guides
This Billion-Dollar Network Is Secretly Tracking Your Car
We also released a video about Flock ahead of next week's NoALPRs' National Week of Action Against ALPRs. This is a great video to share with your friends and family who may not have heard of these or may not understand why they're bad. You can also check out NoALPRS.com to learn more and get involved on August 16-22.
Privacy Guides
News Briefs
It was another busy news week with stories about a severe two-decade-old Linux bug being discovered, a city in California declaring a state of emergency after their 911 systems were hacked, more Nightmare Eclipse/Windows releases, and more!
Jonah Aragon
Site Updates
We've made a few small changes to the website, like adding Cape as an organizational donor, and updating a few outdated links. You can get the full details below.
privacyguides
Sources
Google’s new Tensor G6 brings serious performance, efficiency, and security upgrades to the Pixel 11 series
This week, Google officially announced their Pixel 11 lineup. In addition to a beefed up Tensor G6, all 11 phones will feature the new Titan M3, which is designed for post-quantum cryptography and has earned the same Common Criteria certification that bank and SIM cards use. But will Graphene support the new 11? Can they with the hardware changes?
Pranob Mehrotra
White House taps security firms for offensive hack-back operations
On Wednesday, the White House sent out a memo instructing the National Coordination Center to establish a program to allow private security companies to apply for approval to hack foreign cybercrime organizations. This is a major departure from how things have been done before, and opens up a lot of questions about incentives, liabilities, and impact on foreign affairs.
Sergiu Gatlan
Amazon will train on Twitch streamers’ content by default, unless they opt out
In what has to be one of the biggest PR trainwrecks in recent months, Twitch announced this week that parent company Amazon will begin using creators' content to help train their AI models unless creators opt out. Twitch staff were unable to confirm if existing content had already been scraped or exactly what would be done with the training data (aside from "training models"), and defended the decision as industry standard.
Amanda Silberling
Mozilla Issues New Firefox GPG Key Following Exposure
Mozilla announced on Monday that it was issuing new GPG signing subkeys for certain Firefox and Thunderbird "artifacts" after the previous key was accidentally exposed in a GitHub repo. Unfortunately, Mozilla hasn't been very transparent or forthcoming about further details, like how this happened or how long the key was exposed for. The repo was set to private, so it's unlikely it was exposed, but they're doing this out of an abundance of caution anyways. Concerned users may want to verify hashes with new versions just to be safe.
Eduard Kovacs
Signal Updates
There were a series of Signal updates this week (plus one we missed last week) so we're sharing them in one big section. First, Signal now allows you to link multiple phones and tablets to one account, which is great for redundancy purposes or those with multiple devices. Next, Signal has introduced "automatic key verification" for safety numbers, making it easier to ensure your chats are safe from man-in-the-middle attacks. These aren't quite the same as the Safety Number verification feature, but they should still offer a layer of assurance. And finally, a third party outlet reports that Signal is starting to experiment with the ability to create accounts without phone numbers, likely by way of making a one-time payment. Still, what payment methods will be accepted and exact implementation remain to be seen.
AboutSignal
Forum Updates
PurpleDime