This morning over at The Washington Post ([archive link]), Shira Ovide, Danielle Abril, and Hannah Natanson write about Signal use among federal workers. I’m the lede (funsies!). This is a great article capturing the mood among federal workers right now, and it makes relatively clear that while what Pete Hegseth et al are doing is… Read More »
The TIME article contains two substantive errors, several minor errors, and a curious omission.
NPR’s Ailsa Chang; Elizabeth Lair of the Equity and Civic Technology Project at the Center For Democracy and Technology; Jonathan Kamens, late of the Department of Veterans Affairs; and University of Virginia law professor Danielle Citron, talk about the risks of DOGE having access to federal government data and how the Privacy Act of 1974 is being used to push back on it.
If you can make it go from taking 30 seconds to 30 minutes for a bad actor to find something private about you online, you’ll dramatically decrease the number of people willing to go through the effort. Think of it like putting an alarm-system sign on your lawn to encourage burglars to skip your house.
I did a brief press appearance on CNN this afternoon to talk about my firing from the VA and what that means for VA.gov cybersecurity. Here’s the video, with a transcript below it. Transcript Jessica Dean: A warning from a fired cybersecurity official for the department of veterans affairs. He sounded the alarm, saying sensitive… Read More »
Author Lily Hay Newman does an incredible job capturing the high stakes of compromising the security of VA.gov.
Ads from Google are too scammy and too intrusive. I should have turned them off long ago. Now I have. If you appreciate that, please consider kicking in a few bucks to make up for the lost revenue.
I’ve run my own mail server for 30+ years. It’s a pain sometimes, but I’m a stubborn old cuss and I think it’s worth it both because I value my privacy and don’t want my emails being stored on somebody else’s servers, and because I’m a sysadmin at heart and I love a good sysadmin… Read More »
Why you might want to anonymize the email addresses for your online accounts, some techniques for how to do that, and the details of how I did it myself, including stats, stories, and scripts.
Whatever Eastern Bank’s priorities were in rolling out its new portal, good UX and security seemingly weren’t among them.