Day 18 - A little bit more Big Little Lies; Vault 7 (?)

07 Mar 2017 100daysofwriting · books · moriarty · surveillance

I kept thinking about Big Little Lies, I completed reading it yesterday and I fell for Celeste White (who is called Celeste Wright in the TV series). Madeline is of course a different kind of a person, the exact opposite of Celeste in a lot of ways, but they are friends still because Celeste doesn’t talk too much, stays silent most of the time, disoriented and always late. Whereas Madeline is talks all the time, takes on people and causes. What a character!

The entry scene for Celeste (Nicole Kidman) in the show, glorious with her forehead frills and lost expression, is good! But it isn’t in slow motion! I was SO eager to see that scene in slow motion. This is generally what happens whenever you read a book, and have a scene in your mind and then, the movie or the TV series doesn’t really show exactly what you had in mind. Disappointment. (Case in point: Dark Places, the scene where the girls and the mom realize that their brother and son (Ben Day) has colored his hair black where the common thread in all of them is their red hair. This scene is incredibly emotional and chaotic, even in the book. And in the movie, it’s literally a breeze. Not even a big deal.)

The other episode I managed to watch today was Homeland’s 6.7. It was one hell of an episode, with some major betrayals! The turn that the show has taken from characters not liking each other to characters actively plotting against each other is incredibly disturbing. Twisting facts, pointing and aiming people at each other like countries do with their missiles, it’s incredibly dark! Homeland has been dark before, but it was always about the situation, the characters were never in conflict with each other for imaginary stuff. This time, they are.

The CIA/Wikileaks story today is about getting malware onto phones, none of the exploits are in Signal or break Signal Protocol encryption.

— Open Whisper Systems (@whispersystems) March 7, 2017

This is millions of lines of code and emails that WikiLeaks has said under a project called Vault 7. This apparently has some documents that talk about targetted attacks on iOS and Android. Curiously, there isn’t anything about Blackberry or BBM. BBM uses a proprietary protocol owned by RIM, and of course, the userbase for Blackberry is so low now that they probably didn’t want to spend any time on a dying platform, still. Blackberry is still (probably) safe because attacks haven’t been designed against it.

Of course, all these attacks require the smart TV, phone, computer to be connected to the internet. The easiest way perhaps then, is to disconnect as much as possible. Use a VPN whenever connected, and constantly keep checking that the wrong ports aren’t open on your machine. nmap -Pn localhost should always say All 1000 scanned ports on localhost are closed

Also, please sudo apt-get remove openssh-server. Such an annoying package to accidentally install.

POST #18 is OVER