Facebook publishes the tool that shows how they track everything you do on the web even when you don't use Facebook or Instagram

Having promised more transparency in the way they collect and use user data, Facebook has finally launched a tool that they say "provides us with more control over our data." Its name is' Off-Facebook Activity 'or' 'Activity outside of Facebook', and it is basically what its name indicates: a sample of everything Facebook collects about our activity on the web outside its services.
On the Activity page outside of Facebook you will find all the information that companies and organizations that share data with Facebook keep about you. This includes all kinds of interactions we make with applications, pages or web services that are not part of Facebook, but that also send data of what you do to the Mark Zuckerberg company.
You can also download all your information or access it in a category view
Off-Facebook activity includes information that businesses and organizations share with us about your interactions with them, such as visiting their apps or websites. Learn More

A WhatsApp video sent by the prince of Saudi Arabia managed to hack Jeff Bezos's cell phone in 2018, according to The Guardian

Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, was hacked with a WhatsApp video. At least that is what The Guardian extracts from a digital forensic analysis conducted on the phone of Amazon CEO. This alleged hacking that took place in May 2018 was made possible by a video that was apparently sent by Mohammed bin Salman, prince heir of Saudi Arabia.

As the investigation indicates, in an exchange of messages between the CEO of Amazon and the prince, the latter sent him a seemingly normal video. However, the video contained a virus that once downloaded the video was able to access data from the phone and extract personal information. Digital forensic analysis sees this possibility as "highly probable." It is believed that large amounts of information were extracted in the following hours, although there are no exact details of what type of information.
read the full story at The Guardian

This app used by the US and Canadian police has millions of photos obtained from social networks to identify you

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a report on Clearview AI: an (until now) unknown company that offers facial recognition services to some 600 law enforcement agencies in the United States and Canada.
Using this app, if someone takes a picture of you on the street, you could upload it to the platform and in a matter of seconds compare it to a gigantic database, being able to get your name, address or other details.
More than 3,000 million images

To give us an idea of ​​its capacity, this company has an image library that is seven times larger than the FBI. Using Clearview AI software, these agencies can compare uploaded photos with a database that has more than 3,000 million images.

To create this database, Clearview has fed it with content that they have extracted from social networks and even from the classic "about me" (about me) sections that appear on company websites
Currently, this Clearview tool is not available to the public, but The New York Times says that both investors and police believe it will be in the future.

Microsoft launches a free technology to combat child abuse on the Internet

The Internet has completely changed the way we interact with other people, enabling us to connect with strangers who are thousands of miles away.

The problem is that some people may not have very good intentions, and it is something we have seen with many cases of sexual exploitation, an issue that is much more sensitive when the victims are minors.

For those companies that offer chat services

Microsoft claims to have developed a new technique to detect and report to predators trying to attract children through the Internet. They have christened this tool as ‘Project Artemis’, and say it will be available for free to those companies that operate over the Internet and offer a chat feature.
    "Project Artemis" is a significant step forward, but that does not mean it is a panacea.

    The exploitation and sexual abuse of children on the Internet and the detection of grooming of minors are weight problems.

The term “grooming” is an anglicism that refers to a series of behaviors and actions carried out by a pedophile to win the friendship of a minor through the Internet, with the aim of obtaining sexual benefits.
Much of this deception involves chatting with the victim, and ‘Project Artemis’ will review these text conversations to assess whether a case of “grooming” is occurring.
A technology is already integrated into Xbox and that could soon reach Skype

This technology will be responsible for assigning a score to each conversation, so that conversations that have a certain rating can be reviewed by human moderators to see if it is a case of child abuse.

Microsoft says that this project began to be forged at the end of 2018, in the ‘360 Cross-Industry Hackathon’. The company says that this technology is already integrated into the Xbox platform, and that it could soon reach Skype.

When singning and dating legal documents, dont use 20 as the year 2020

Why? This year's abbreviation is easily changeable and could be used against you. The concern is that scammers could easily manipulate a document dated "1/1/20" into "1/1/2000" or even "1/1/2021."
 Say you agreed to make payments beginning on 1/15/20. The bad guy could theoretically establish that you began owing your obligation on 1/15/2019, and try to collect additional $$$,"





via

How to create a strong password in windows

Password Guidelines to create a strong password

To protect access to the computer, every user account should have a password. Consider the following guidelines for passwords:

• Always assign a password to the Administrator account to prevent unauthorized access to the account.

•  Determine whether the Administrator or the users will control passwords. You can assign unique passwords to user accounts and prevent users from changing them, or you can allow users to enter their own passwords the first time they log on. In most cases, users should control their passwords.

• Use passwords that are hard to guess. For example, avoid using passwords with an obvious association, such as a family member’s name. Using a real name, a user name, or a company name makes for an easy-to-guess password. Also avoid using common passwords such as “letmein” or “password.”

• Using a common dictionary word makes you vulnerable to automated programs that are designed to guess passwords.

• Usmg any password that you write down or that you share with someone else is not secure.

• Passwords can contain up to 128 characters, a minimum length of 8 characters is recommended

• lInclude both uppercase and lowercase letters (unlike user names, user passwords are case sensitive), numerals, and the valid nonalphanumeric characters (such as punctuation).

• Using no password at all is not a good practice because it is then easy for other users to just walk up to an unsecured computer and log on.

If users find that complex passwords are difficult to remember, tell them that Windows 10 allows the use of pass phrases instead of passwords. For example, a perfectly valid password in Windows 10 is “My dog ate 2 turkeys last Thanksgiving." Another technique is to join together simple words with numbers and symbols. An example of a password that uses this technique is “2eggs+2bacon=lbreakfast”.

You should understand the guidelines for creating strong passwords. In particular, remember that a password should be a minimum of eight characters and should include a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.

You can use a blank password by default on Windows 10 if the computer is a member of a workgroup. However, you will only be able to use this password to log on and access local resources on the computer. By default, the local security policy in Windows 10 prohibits you from logging on to a remote computer if you have a blank password. The name of this security setting is Accounts: Limit Local Account Use Of Blank Passwords To Console Logon Only.

Create Strong Paeswords

Weak passwords are a big security risk. You should encourage users to select and use strong passwords, even if they do not really want to. You can use the following guidelines to create strong passwords:

•  Passwords should be at least eight characters long-and longer is better.

•  Passwords should use a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, andsymbolsCforexample,‘ ~!@#$%/&*()_+-=ll l] “ ‘ < > ? , . / or a space character).

• Passwords should be changed regularly.

An example of a strong password using these guidelines is JSlifASD.

Google knows (almost) everything you buy, and has a website that proves it

Over the past few years we have repeatedly repeated that privacy has been shown to be an illusion.
In that sense, the email service that has been successful for more than a decade is Gmail. It is an important detail, because in your accounts we receive many of the order confirmation emails that we have made on websites such as Amazon, Aliexpress, Gearbest, etc. Google has long recognized these emails as orders, and even offers an interface that indicates it.

However, the thing is not there, because the Mountain View company has a website dedicated to show all the purchases that have been made from a Gmail email. Once we enter we can see a chronology of orders from those stores, subscriptions contracted, applications purchased on Google Play, etc. That Google treats somehow the information it shows classified is not strange, but the existence of this website (which is not a story of spending on its platform), it may surprise some people.
"Only you can see the orders"

According to Google, only users can see their own orders, and "your order information may also be saved with your activity in other Google services." That is, what in principle occurs in the rest of its services, that our information is not accessible by others, although it is processed for advertising purposes and to "improve the experience".

Google shows if the order has been sent, canceled or is ready to pick up, something that the company explains: "We collect the purchases and reservations you make with your Google account from sources such as 1) Orders placed through Google services, such as Google Play Store, Google Express or Google Assistant or 2) Receipts or confirmations of orders you receive in Gmail. "

Google allows you to delete orders and consult more advanced information such as the particular ID, and takes you to the original email from which you obtained the information. Deleting is a positive option, as well as removing a subscription (they give the option to unlink them so that Google stops knowing about their existence), but if you really want the company to not access this data in any case, the most drastic recommendation is to leave of using the Gmail account to receive those emails.

You can now try ProtonCalendar: the ProtonMail encrypted calendar service

Hundreds of millions of people use their Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts every day assuming that in those services their mail is not encrypted: whoever intercepts that communication could have access to our messages, and in fact companies like Google offer those services for free , but "read" our emails to offer us publicity.

ProtonMail, the ultra private email developed by CERN and MIT scientists that aims to safeguard the privacy of its users' communications.

Proton, the company behind ProtonMail, has just introduced a new product: ProtonCalendar. As the name implies, it is a calendar and (as you can imagine) has privacy as the main strength.

"A calendar is much more than a tool"

Through a blog post, the company ensures that "a calendar is much more than a tool. It is a record of the moments that make up your life: your big meetings, your meetings with friends and children's birthdays."

Proton states that this calendar service encrypts the locations, title, participants and descriptions entered in ProtonCalendar. They ensure that the information remains encrypted when it is on their servers, helping to protect the user from hackers and other possible problems.

"For a long time, to easily organize these events, you had to let the big corporations monitor these special moments. These companies snoop around your calendar and use that information to inform the advertising company."

ProtonCalendar claims to be the first service of its kind to offer this level of security in a calendar tool. However, it is not the first product born after ProtonMail, since in mid-2017 they launched a VPN service.

In terms of design, we will find the classic calendar interface to which we are accustomed: a clean design, ability to change the view according to month, week or day, and colors for different events.

Also, as expected, it will be linked to a ProtonMail email account, and we will find the app icon in the menu on the left of the mail client. So, if you have a ProtonMail account, you can already try the beta of this calendar service.

How to avoid being spied : so you can turn a Raspberry Pi into your own Tor server

Access to the network of networks in a safe and anonymous way is possible thanks to projects such as Tor. And with Onion Pi, Tor joins Raspberry Pi to create an anonymous home proxy

In case you don't know him yet, Tor is an interesting project that aims to make our internet connections something secure and anonymous away from the control of companies or governments. And among its main exponents we have Tor Browser, a web browser based on Mozilla Firefox plus several add-ons and configurations that allow us to access web pages without a trace.

Although Tor Browser is available for Windows, macOS and Linux, and there are also official and unofficial versions for other platforms such as Android, iPhone or iPad, if you have several devices connected to the internet and you want them all to access anonymously, you may want use a solution like Onion Pi.

Onion Pi is a Raspberry Pi device that has Tor installed and works as an anonymous proxy. Thus, if you access the Internet from Onion Pi as an intermediary instead of directly from your router, you can navigate more freely avoiding security and privacy problems.

You can purchase Onion Pi from the official website of its managers, Adafruit, but like any open source project, you can set up your own Onion Pi yourself. Let's see what you need for it.

To create our own anonymous proxy based on Tor and Raspberry Pi we will need, on the one hand, the necessary hardware to start up a Raspberry Pi device.

Although the configurations may vary, the basic elements we need are a Raspberry Pi motherboard, a housing to protect it from dust and external elements, a Wi-Fi module to send and receive signal in good condition, an Ethernet cable to connect the Raspberry Pi to the router, a power adapter and, finally, a microSD card to host the software.
Optionally, you will need a keyboard and mouse to configure the Raspberry Pi and connect it to a monitor or TV.

As usual, from the official Raspberry Pi website we can find packages that include everything you need to launch a fully functional Raspberry Pi device.

Installing and configuring the software

Once the hardware is assembled, the first time we start it, we must install the software. In this sense, if we have purchased a microSD card with pre-installed NOOBS, it will offer us a graphic menu to choose which operating system we want to install. In our case, to create the anonymous proxy based on Tor we will use Raspbian, a version of Debian Linux adapted to Raspberry Pi.
Once we have an operating system in our Raspberry Pi, now we must install Tor. To do this, we open the terminal and first execute an order to update the available packages, sudo apt-get update, and then the order to install Tor: sudo apt-get install tor.

With Tor installed, we edit your configuration file with the command sudo nano / etc / tor / torrc and paste the following text in the first lines of the file, below the FAQ questions.

Log notice file /var/log/tor/notices.log
VirtualAddrNetwork 10.192.0.0/10
AutomapHostsSuffixes .onion, .exit
AutomapHostsOnResolve 1
TransPort 9040
TransListenAddress 192.168.42.1
DNSPort 53
DNSListenAddress 192.168.42.1

Then we edit the configuration of the access point with the command sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf to change the default password for a more secure one. We will also have to edit the routing tables with the sudo iptables -F and then sudo iptables -t nat -F commands and, to verify that everything is fine, we can test the tables with the sudo iptables -t nat -L command. If everything is correct, we will execute the sudo sh -c "iptables-save> /etc/iptables.ipv4.nat” command to update the NAT file.

If you want to get information about the connections and traffic handled by your anonymous proxy, we must create files to save that information. To do this, we must launch the following orders from the Terminal:

sudo touch /var/log/tor/notices.log
sudo chown debian-tor /var/log/tor/notices.log
sudo chmod 644 /var/log/tor/notices.log

To verify that they were created correctly, we will execute the command ls -l / var / log / tor.

We only have to launch Tor to activate the anonymous proxy Onion Pi. To do this, we launch the sudo service tor start order and then the sudo service tor status order to verify that Tor works correctly.

Finally, in order for Tor to run automatically every time we start Raspberry Pi, we must launch the sudo update-rc.d tor enable command in the Terminal.

From now on, to get the protection and anonymity of Onion Pi you must access its Wi-Fi connection instead of connecting directly to the router. To do this, you must search for the Onion Pi connection and enter the password that we have previously set.

And to verify that the proxy works and that your browsing is anonymous, try any web page that indicates your IP and location. If the proxy goes well, the result should not match your IP or where you are.

If you have questions about how to start an anonymous proxy with Tor and Raspberry Pi, you can take a look at the documentation available at Adafruit.