Yasha Levine: “What Surveillance Valley knows about you”.

“Take MEDbase200, a boutique for-profit intel outfit that specializes in selling health-related consumer data. Well, until last week, the company offered its clients a list of rape victims (or “rape sufferers,” as the company calls them) at the low price of $79.00 per thousand.

[…] A MEDbase rep […] promised it was never sold to anyone. Yep, it was a big mistake. We can all rest easy now. Thankfully, MEDbase has hundreds of other similar dossier collections, hawking the most private and sensitive medical information.

For instance, if lists of rape victims aren’t your thing, MEDbase can sell dossiers on people suffering from anorexia, substance abuse, AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer’s Disease, Asperger Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Bedwetting (Enuresis), Binge Eating Disorder, Depression, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Genital Herpes, Genital Warts, Gonorrhea, Homelessness, Infertility, Syphilis… the list goes on and on and on and on.”

One more thing…

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.

Bon anniversaire, Monsieur Lagaffe! (Via www.google.at.)

Installing the Telegram CLI with MacPorts.

sudo port install libconfig-hr readline lua
sudo port select gcc none
export CFLAGS=-I/opt/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/opt/local/lib
cd /tmp
git clone github.com
cd tg
sed -i.bak 's/-Wno-deprecated //g' Makefile.in
./configure && make

Bash one-liner: Verify checksum of a downloaded file.

read -ep 'Enter path to file: ' file; read -ep 'Enter hash: ' hash; if [ `openssl sha1 -r $(eval echo "$file")  | sed -E "s/^(.*) .*$/\1/g"` == "$hash" ]; then echo 'Hash verified.'; else echo 'Hash not verified. Use file at your own risk.'; fi

In spite of their names, SSL/TLS and HTTPS are not secure. (Via okturtles.com)

Bruce Schneier: How the NSA Attacks Tor/Firefox Users.

MongoDB is to NoSQL like MySQL to SQL — in the most harmful way.

How nice, OS X can do some basic command-line image processing / format conversion without requiring the heavy trickery of ImageMagick:

sips -s format png image.jpg -o image.png

SyncNet is a decentralized browser built on top of BitTorrent Sync and (soon) Colored Coins.