It seems that there’s no end to security-related issues, even if you get tired of and begin to ignore X.509 PKI-related ones, privacy violations by both commercial companies and governments, malware of all kinds, both software and hardware vulnerabilities, data breaches, and all the other common stuff.
Ghostery used to block trackers while tracking users on its own: a somewhat elegant scam. Recently Adblock Plus applied a similar approach, but in a bolder form: while blocking the ads, it whitelists some ads for a payment, including those of Google.
Fortunately for us, ABP was crap for a while now, so it’s not a great loss: all the cool kids use uBlock Origin now. Well, except for those from North Korea, where most can’t even dream of seeing internet ads. Or from China and—as of recently—Russia, where it is challenging to access international ads and/or ad blockers.
Among other recent IT news, which were hard to not notice: Facebook leaks user data to Cambridge Analytica, as well as to third-party trackers; Amazon DNS got hijacked for a couple of hours; banks screw up with transfers and lose client accounts; Spectre mitigation patches are still getting issued; all kinds of technologies still get reinvented and reimplemented poorly.
Probably we should limit the infosec news in The Asocial, since it’s basically the same all the time, and people are not likely to cease screwing each other or themselves. It’s an ongoing collective informational self-mutilation: rather shocking, but it’s hard to observe the poor bastards for long, since it’s disgusting if you have enough empathy, or just gets boring otherwise.