Tax farming is the practice of licensing tax collection to private contractors. Used heavily in ancient Rome, it’s largely fallen out of practice because of the obvious conflict of interest between the state and the contractor. Because tax farmers are primarily interested in short-term revenue, they have no …
Now this is interesting: Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkan’s engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the internet. The company’s work is linked to …
The Intercept has a long article on the insecurity of photo cropping: One of the hazards lies in the fact that, for some of the programs, downstream crop reversals are possible for viewers or readers of the document, not just the file’s creators or editors. Official instruction manuals …
People are trying to dig up dirt on Peiter Zatko, better known as Mudge. For the record, I have not been contacted. I’m not sure if I should feel slighted. [...]
Peiter Zatko, aka Mudge, has filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC against Twitter, claiming that they violated an eleven-year-old FTC settlement by having lousy security. And he should know; he was Twitter’s chief security officer until he was fired in January. The Washington Post has the scoop …
Someone hacked the Ecuadorian embassy in Moscow and found a document related to Ecuador’s 2013 efforts to bring Edward Snowden there. If you remember, Snowden was traveling from Hong Kong to somewhere when the US revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. In the document, Ecuador asks Russia …