Hard Pass

Nicholas Merrill received a hand delivered National Security Letter from the FBI in 2004, ordering him to give up data on one of his ISP customers.

Merrill opened it and read the letter while the agent waited. The first and second paragraphs told him he was hereby ordered to hand over virtually all information he possessed for one of his customers, identified by their email address, explaining that this demand was authorized by a law he’d later learn was part of the Patriot Act.

The third paragraph informed him he couldn’t tell anyone he’d even received this letter—a gag order.

He then fought a landmark, decade-plus legal battle against the FBI and the Department of Justice. As the owner of an internet service provider in the post-9/11 era, Merrill had received a secret order from the bureau to hand over data on a particular user — and he refused... and won.

After that, he spent another 15 years building and managing the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that offers privacy tools like a snooping-resistant version of Android and a free VPN that collects no logs of its users’ activities.

Now the completely anonymous phone service. The full article is worth the read.

EDIT: Sorry I should have cross-posted. I forgot where I first saw the story: the Privacy community.

They state it's scheduled maintenance but the dashboard link leads to a 500 return. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

Donald Trump’s tiredness, recent MRI and hand bruise suggest he may be taking medication to treat Alzheimer’s disease, according to a “curious” California Democrat.

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., tweeted that Trump is showing signs he’s taking the Alzheimer’s disease drug Leqembi.

“The Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi:- Is administered through an infusion (for example, through the hand)- Can cause swelling, bleeding, or fluid leakage in the brain, requiring regular MRIs- Can cause tiredness,” Kamlager-Dove tweeted along with a picture of Trump’s hand bruise. “Curious.”

credit to Melonbread