Archive 4 min read

The Internet Is Forever

You can't really remove something from the internet. Not is the owner/operator really wants it out there. That's a huge advantage and challenge for the internet community. What are the impacts of that fact?

The Internet Is Forever

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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript

Morning everybody. How are you doing today? As you can tell for those of you on the vlog, a little bit of a different look today um on podcast, I'll describe it for you. Basically, I'm shooting under an umbrella.

Remember last week we talked about mastering your tools. Um Well, I switched out the Super Fancy advanced uh smartphone stable for brand new GoPro Hero seven. I'm trying out the stabilization. This is just literally shooting at the end of my arm.

No case, no external mic um fully updated firmware. We'll see how this turns out hopefully pretty good. But as you can kind of tell um because of the umbrella because of the dreary dreary day, it's fall.

Speaking of fall, gab.com fell pretty darn hard a couple of weeks ago as they got deplatformed. Now, if you haven't heard of Gab Gab is a social media network. Now, they were um extreme free speech advocates and we all know what that ends up meaning in today's internet.

That means lots of trolls, lots of far, right wing aggressive um content, lots of hate content, lots of stuff that most people don't want to be interacting with now I'll ignore the free speech argument that's, you know, in the US very different than what we hold for Canadian free speech.

But what is relevant to today and sort of the dreary outside and, you know, the rainy theme here is the fact that they were deplatformed. So a lot of the providers they were using to stay online, cancel their accounts and kick them off their services.

But today gab.com popped up again and this is a key takeaway because it came up in a different uh conversation that I had last week as well. Um, which is somebody was talking about the risk of information that was um exposed.

Um And the fact that it hadn't popped up so it wasn't a threat anymore. Well, gab.com resurfacing after being deplatformed is a perfect example. The fact that you can't really remove anything from the internet.

I know that's a cliche but it's very, very true. So gab.com is back up and running with different providers. They moved data over somewhere else in the event of a breach. You cannot assume that that data was not copied.

So I'll give you an example about two years ago, vtech, which makes smart toys for kids and they had this feature in their smart toys which let the kids securely big quotes around that message, their parents.

Well, V tech got hacked and hackers gathered the information from these messages as well with a whole bunch of other stuff. Including identifying on the kids. Um and then notified V tech and uh you know, gave the data back to them a giant quotes, caveat I roll.

Oh gave the data back to them. Now, vtech used that in their statement and said like, hey, you know, we've got the data back, the hacker said they destroyed it. And we saw a similar response from uh Facebook with Cambridge Analytica in front of the House of Representatives this spring.

Oh You know, why didn't you control face uh Cambridge uh access to the data, we told them to delete it. It doesn't work like that. We all know how easy it is to copy data after I record this on the gopro.

And you know, I'm going to transfer it to my phone and then it's going to be streamed out and there'll be hundreds and hundreds of copies of it within the next 30 minutes. And there's no trace of most of those copies unless you do a forensic deep dive on the device that touched them.

And this is sort of the challenge. This is the challenge I wanted to highlight here. Um in the case of V tech, in the case of the conversation, I had the other day with a, with a friend um in the case of Facebook, in the case of gab, once it's out there, it's out there, you can't get this stuff back.

So what are you to do? Here's the plan as a security person, as a privacy person, what you need to do is evaluate the data that was breached or stolen. You need to then measure the potential impact.

You need to see if you can mitigate those impacts somehow and then you need to monitor essentially what that sums up is. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. That's the best we can do.

That's just the way the digital world works. There are so many upsides to the way we've structured the internet with, um, you know, decentralization with uh routing around, uh you know, uh free uh blog, all sorts of good news.

There is the bad side. The bad side is we don't have control over our information once it leaves our security perimeter. Now, some of that is trust in the case of a breach that's, you know, obviously somebody has hacked through our security perimeter.

So what you need to do is evaluate that data again, evaluate the data, um look at potential impacts, uh monitor heavily for it, plan for the worst, hope for the best. OK. As with recording this, I hope for the best, but I plan for the worst.

I should have enough time to rerecord if I need to. Um, how do you handle this? How do you deal with the reality that you just don't know once data is out there, um, what it's being used for if it's out there?

Um You know, how do you plan, how do you measure, how do you monitor? We'll just try a little low light shot here. Um Let me know online, hit me up, Mark NC A uh for those of you on the vlogs in the comments down below.

Um And as always for podcast listeners and everybody else meet at Mark N dot C A. We'll see how this works on a quick little pan. Let me go here. Oh, Dreary Canadian Day. Fortunately, it's actually warmer than it should be.

We should be about minus five. Right now. We're plus five. So, instead of snow, we get this rain. Hope you're set up for a fantastic day. We'll talk to you online and we'll see you on the show tomorrow.

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