For the third time since December, House Speaker Mike Johnson has failed to wrangle support for reauthorizing a critical US surveillance program, raising questions about the future of a law that compels certain businesses to wiretap foreigners on the government’s behalf. Johnson lost 19 Republicans on Tuesday in a procedural vote that traditionally falls along … Read more
Americans have wanted a federal privacy law for years but intensive lobbying by the tech industry and general incompetence by our federal legislators has repeatedly thwarted that desire. Well, in 2024, it’s possible that we may finally get a strong federal privacy law. The FTC Just Prescribed a Can of Whoop Ass on Health Data … Read more
You answer a random call from a family member, and they breathlessly explain how there’s been a horrible car accident. They need you to send money right now, or they’ll go to jail. You can hear the desperation in their voice as they plead for an immediate cash transfer. While it sure sounds like them, … Read more
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and take a peek at the week that is to come. Now that we are finally past Y Combinator’s demo day — … Read more
The Tor browser features: Onion routing | DuckDuckGo integration | Access to websites outside of the clear web Another great choice for improving your privacy on the web is the Tor browser, a non-profit project focused on anonymizing users online. Its proprietary web browser disguises a user’s IP address and activity by relaying it through … Read more
Congress may be closer than ever to passing a comprehensive data privacy framework after key House and Senate committee leaders released a new proposal on Sunday. The bipartisan proposal, titled the American Privacy Rights Act, or APRA, would limit the types of consumer data companies can collect, retain, and use to what they need to … Read more
The browser is part of a bigger project to keep internet browsing anonymous: Use Tor and you use the Tor Project network, a complex, encrypted relay system managed by the Tor community, making it much harder for anyone else to follow your activities online. As well as this additional layer of anonymity, Tor Browser is … Read more
It’s been a week since the world avoided a potentially catastrophic cyberattack. On March 29, Microsoft developer Andres Freund disclosed his discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils, a compression tool widely used in Linux distributions and thus countless computer systems worldwide. The backdoor was inserted into the open source tool by someone operating under … Read more
nContext secured six federal contracts to provide data in support of the National Security Agency and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, according to reporting by Byron Tau, author of Means of Control, an exposé of the data-broker industry and its ties to the US surveillance state. According to information released during a $100 million … Read more
The Journal’s story reveals that cargo hijacking fraud remains a serious problem—one that cost $500 million in 2023, quadruple the year before. Victims say load board operators need to do more to verify users’ identities, and that law enforcement and regulators also need to do more to address the thefts. Multifactor authentication (MFA) has served … Read more