Policy Experts Slam ISP Privacy Vows After Congressional Vote

GeekWire

AT&T and Comcast are pushing back against concerns that the repeal of Obama-era internet privacy rules might harm their customers and lead to invasive business practices that rely on harvesting your personal data.

On Friday, AT&T and Comcast both released lengthy statements touting their commitment to privacy and reassuring customers that little has changed since Congress moved to gut regulations that would make it easier for them to sell information about their online habits to third parties. But representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Center for Digital Democracy told BuzzFeed News that the consequences of the repeal may differ sharply from the comforting messages delivered by the telecom giants.

“There is a lot to say about the nonsense they've produced here,” said Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at EFF. “There is little reason to believe they will not start using personal data they&039;ve been legally barred from using and selling to bidders without our consent now. The law will soon be tilted in their favor to do it.”

At the beginning of Comcast&039;s statement the company claims it will never sell the individual browsing histories of their customers. Comcast goes on to say that it will not share customers “sensitive” information without their permission. But “sensitive” has a very specific meaning when it comes to privacy rules.

According to the Federal Trade Commission&039;s guidelines — which Comcast has pledged to abide by — browsing history is not always considered “sensitive” information, though privacy experts say it can contain revealing information about our financial, political, religious, sexual, medical, and social lives.

“Comcast saying that it doesn&039;t sell individual browsing history is not the same thing as Comcast being prohibited from doing so.”

One crucial distinction between “sensitive” and “non-sensitive” information has to do with consent. With non-sensitive data, internet providers don&039;t need to get your explicit permission to collect and share it. In contrast, sensitive data requires that you opt-in, that you first give affirmative consent before ISPs can share it.

Perhaps one of the most important things the Obama-era privacy rules did was classify browsing history as sensitive data, giving Americans stronger protections online. The rules were passed by the Federal Communications Commission in October, and parts of the regulations were slated to kick in later this year. But the major carriers — including Comcast and AT&T — prefer the older FTC guidelines, in which customers&039; online habits can be surveilled, sorted, and sold more easily.

In his statement Friday, Gerard Lewis, Comcast&039;s deputy general counsel and chief privacy office said: “We do not sell our broadband customers’ individual web browsing history. We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so.” (Disclosure: Comcast Corp.&039;s NBCUniversal is an investor in BuzzFeed.)

But Dallas Harris, a policy fellow with Public Knowledge said she isn&039;t convinced that a mere pledge by a corporation can replace robust privacy protections. “Comcast saying that it doesn&039;t sell individual browsing history is not the same thing as Comcast being prohibited from doing so,” she said. “Without these rules, when and if they decide to start selling individual web browsing history, they can now bury it on page twenty of their privacy website and give you the option to opt-out 20 clicks away from where you log-in. That is unacceptable.”

Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy acknowledged that Comcast doesn&039;t directly share the browsing histories of individual customers, but he still characterized the company&039;s statement as “misleading.” “It’s used for direct targeting by the ISP and is supplemented by brand and other digital media data,” he said.

In AT&T&039;s statement, Bob Quinn, the company&039;s senior executive vice president pointed to the “web browsers, search engines, and social media platforms” that, he said, are actually the entities who collect and use the most consumer information online. Quinn argued that having stricter privacy rules for ISPs, “confuses” customers rather than protects them.

But Chester and other privacy advocates say that ISPs have significant visibility into our online lives, sometimes more so than Web companies like Facebook or Google. “[ISPs] have a lion’s share of geo-location and other specialized data,” he said. “They should have safeguards instead of pointing to others.”

Howard echoed that sentiment, noting that asking ISPs to implement stronger privacy rules seems a modest demand. “We are just asking internet providers to get your permission before they collect sensitive information about you,” she said.

Quelle: <a href="Policy Experts Slam ISP Privacy Vows After Congressional Vote“>BuzzFeed

This American Shero Buttchugged Mountain Dew

Susan B. Anthony. Rosa Parks. Hillary Clinton. And now add to that list of feminist icons, @lilbabybytch. On the second to last day of Women’s History Month, this fearless woman leaned in and broke a whole new barrier: the first woman to buttchug Mountain Dew.

WARNING: PIC IS OF SOMEONE BUTTCHUGGING MOUNTAIN DEW. WE WARNED YOU.

Twitter: @lilbabybytch

A second angle:

Here&#039;s the link to the tweet, which we can&039;t embed here because we can&039;t blur it.

Twitter: @lilbabybytch

NOTE: BUZZFEED DOES NOT ACTUALLY ENDORSE BUTTCHUGGING ANYTHING. DO NOT DO THIS. SERIOUSLY. WE MEAN IT.

This isn’t the first time @lilbabybytch has shattered the glass ceiling of doing dirtbag stuff. In 2015, she made headlines here at BuzzFeed for buttchugging cough syrup with the help of her friend @freakmommy. It may surprise you that both women do not drink or do drugs, nor do any of the partygoers at the Mountain Dew event.

Here’s @lilbabybytch in 2015 buttchugging cough syrup (NSFW):

Twitter: @freakmommy

I caught up with this American shero to ask her a few questions about her groundbreaking journey to fully do the Dew.

BuzzFeed: What inspired you to undertake this experiment?

@lilbabybytch: Well the same as with the alcohol-free cough syrup, I just wanted to see if it would work at all. Coffee enemas are pretty common, so I wanted to try some uncharted caffeine suppository territory.

So what happened when you did it? Did it work? Did it all just poop/splash out?

So a can of Mountain Dew only has about 55mg of caffeine in it, and I did not get anywhere near 12 oz. in there. I didn&039;t notice any obvious effects, but I couldn&039;t sleep. I lay awake grinding my teeth for about four hours&#033; I shotgunned a Mountain Dew after the buttchug though, so honestly there&039;s too many variables to speak on it definitively.

Here’s a video of it in action. WARNING: VERY NSFW

So it stayed inside you?

I didn&039;t poop for four hours. I thought I would have the runs (it felt like I would), but it was pretty mellow and ended quickly. Here&039;s a picture of my friend Carolyn next to the part that leaked out of my butt in the couple minutes afterward:

Note the wet spot on the couch ^^^^^

@lilbabybytch

Any weird poops after?

No&033; It didn&039;t get my digestion going off in any weird way. I wish it had.

Was it classic Mountain Dew, or one of the flavors, like Code Red?

Classic. My favorite flavor is Voltage.

Any advice for the fans out there?

If you wanna get a lot of liquid in your ass, do it like an enema. Handstands are not conducive to receiving large volumes of soda. But most of all, you don&039;t need to do drugs to have fun.

LINK: Meet The Girl Who Buttchugged Cough Syrup

Quelle: <a href="This American Shero Buttchugged Mountain Dew“>BuzzFeed

How To Keep Your Browsing History Actually Private

Last week, the House repealed Internet privacy rules requiring broadband companies to ask for your consent before sharing or selling your information, like browsing history, location data, app usage data, and content communications. If Donald Trump signs the legislation into law, all of your unencrypted online activity – essentially everything you do on websites without a padlock in the URL bar – is up for grabs by advertisers.

Without these privacy protections, your porn viewing, shopping, and search habits could be made public. There is, however, one very easy way to maintain your privacy: using a virtual private network, or a VPN, which is like an Invisibility Cloak for your browsing history.

Twitter: @AbbottColton

Who does the repeal affect?

You, and everyone else reading this article in the US, are subject to having their browsing history sold to the highest bidder. That is, unless you subscribe to Sonic or Monkeybrains, two California-based providers that have pledged to not sell browsing history.

What can my Internet company actually do under the repeal?

As my colleague Hamza Shaban pointed out, your Internet service provider can not only sell your browsing history, but compile web profiles, inject targeted ads, and deploy hidden tracking cookies on your phone.

Some companies (including Charter, Cogent, DirecPC) have also been known to hijack searches through a service called Paxfire, and send you to brands that paid for more traffic.

What the heck is a VPN?

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a service that will privatize everything you do on the Internet through encryption. In other words, it will hide your IP address (which reveals your physical location) and the pages you’re visiting. A VPN is like a secret tunnel that turns all of the data running through Internet cables into gibberish, so your Internet service provider (AT&T, Comcast, Charter, etc.) can’t see what you’re up to and, therefore, can’t sell that information to marketers.

It’s safer, too. Most VPNs have servers that scan data in real-time for websites with hidden malicious software.

This “VPN thing” sounds really complicated. How hard is it to set up?

Not hard at all&#033;&033; Using a VPN usually means downloading software or a mobile app, and logging onto a website, signing in, clicking connect, and then… that’s it. For some services, you’ll be automatically logged into the VPN every time you use your home Internet. You may, however, need to select a VPN server location before you can connect to the Internet. You can use a VPN anywhere you are: on your phone, on home Wi-Fi, on plane Wi-Fi, etc.

cwtv.com / Via giphy.com

How do I choose what VPN service to use?

Picking the right VPN is actually a little complicated, but hopefully this guide will make it less so.

Security expert Francis Dinha, CEO of Private Tunnel, offered a few of his best tips:

– “Stay away from free services, because you’ll go back to the same problem. Some VPNs are going to collect your information to push advertisements to monetize,” said Dinha. Hola VPN was caught violating user privacy in 2015. Just remember: There’s no such thing as a free lunch&033;

– Dinha also advised staying away from providers that use weak protocols. If you’re not sure what makes a protocol strong, VPN University has a great chart comparing different methods. It shows that OpenVPN is the strongest protocol, followed by L2TP (Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol), and the Windows PC-only SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol), which all use 256-bit level encryption. On the product site you’re looking at, look for those bolded words and you should be safe.

– Avoid PPTP (point-to-point tunneling protocol) at all costs. Vulnerabilities in the protocol were exposed in 2012, when Moxie Marlinspike (the founder of Open Whisper Systems, which is what the encryption for WhatsApp, Signal, and other apps, is based on) created software called CloudCracker that could crack any PPTP connection.

– When looking for tools to protect your privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Noah Swartz said to look for a product using an open-source technology (like OpenVPN), that would allow other engineers to verify that its code retain strong encryption and best practices.

– Also, make sure the provider doesn’t log any user activity (some VPNs keep extensive logs of users’ IP addresses) and has a strong commitment to privacy.

That detailed VPN comparison chart is the most comprehensive way to look at every aspect of most major providers, including logging, privacy policy, pricing, and connection speeds. On this chart, green means “generally good,” yellow means “something of concern,” and red means “something of major concern.” There’s even a version for the color blind&033;

So, what apps meet those requirements?

A 2015 study compared 14 popular VPN service providers and found that the only services that did not suffer from “IPv6 traffic leakage,” which is when your VPN fails to hide your unique IP address, were TorGuard, Private Internet Access, VyprVPN, and Mullvad. Astrill was not secure against IPv6 leaks, but was safe against DNS hacking, which is when a third party (like a hacker or an Internet service provider) redirects queries to a different site.

For those more technically proficient, you can try running your own DIY VPN, using Streisand or OpenVPN Install on GitHub.

What are the downsides I should know about?

First and foremost, it’s important that you select a provider with a strong privacy policy that you can trust, because VPNs have the ability to see all of your traffic, log your activity, and modify that traffic (see the How do I choose a VPN? section). Even when using a VPN, it’s important to use sites that have HTTPS turned on (any website with a lock icon in the URL bar) and apps with end-to-end encryption, like WhatsApp or iMessage (between iPhones only).

If you really want to stay anonymous, you should use Tor, which scrambles your activity through a network of servers so it’s virtually undetectable. It will, however, affect browsing speeds.

If you’re concerned about government surveillance, you should know that a VPN doesn’t completely anonymize you, especially if you’re using an account tied to your real name.

Using a VPN can also mean random connection hiccups. Usually the ol’ turn-it-off-then-turn-it-on-again method does the trick.

When using a VPN, your Internet connection is routed through a server that may be in a different state or country, which means the content you look at may reflect that VPN location.

VPN’s don’t protect you from phishing (those sketchy emails that look like password reset forms), so make sure you’re protecting your privacy in other ways, too (like using two-factor verification).

Looking to learn more about protecting your privacy? Read this guide.

Quelle: <a href="How To Keep Your Browsing History Actually Private“>BuzzFeed

You Can Play Ms. Pac-Man In Google Maps

April Fool&#8217;s came a day early.

Google Maps just released a Ms. Pac-Man game for April Fool’s Day.

To play, make sure your app is updated, then open it and hit the Ms. Pac-Man button on the side.

Then, just run away from the ghost thingees while chomping up little balls. You know, play Ms. Pac-Man —but in Google Maps. Enjoy.

media.giphy.com

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View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="You Can Play Ms. Pac-Man In Google Maps“>BuzzFeed

People In Their Thirties Can't Stop Hoarding CDs

I swear, I used to be cool. There was a time I cared a lot about music, which is the thing you care about when you’re cool. And now I’m old and not cool and don’t really care anymore and I mostly just listen to the radio or the Spotify top 50 while I’m at the gym. And even though I don’t care, I still have a box of my old CDs under my bed that I haven’t touched in years.

This box represents my musical taste from high school and college, approximately 1996–2004. It’s horrible. I’m deeply embarrassed by this box. At the time, I thought I had very cool taste in music, but a lot of that era has not aged well, and some of the buzzy bands of the early aughts have faded into obscurity (Longwave, anyone?). I’ll be blunt: There’s a lot of mid-&#039;90s ska revival.

I think of this box kind of like the painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray. As time passed and I aged, the Get Up Kids CDs got more and more gnarled and horrifying.

I’ve read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and I believe in the doctrine. I’ve purged my closet, my books, and my knickknacks, but I just can’t get rid of that box of CDs under my bed. I haven’t played any of them in years, and have no intention to.

My terrible box of CDs. Note at least FOUR Less Than Jake albums.

BuzzFeed News

The heyday of CDs wasn’t that long. The first year they outsold cassettes was 1993, and the transition to digital was cemented in 2005 when the affordable iPod shuffle came out. So the cohort of people whose prime music consumption years — high school and college — happened during the reign of CDs are now in their thirties and forties. They’ve dragged this box around for several apartment moves, but maybe now they’re having kids and need the space. (Our CDs may not be long for this world anyway; recent evidence shows that “CD rot” means that discs are degrading at around 25 years in some cases.)

Mike Pace, age 38, has hundreds of CDs stored in his parents’ basement. “I&039;ve been trying to figure out the best way to sell them but have NO IDEA,” he told me. “My mom&039;s been asking me for years to get rid of them and part of me is willing, but only if I can find them a good home.”

My coworker at BuzzFeed, Sami Promisloff, is also a fully grown adult abusing her parents’ basement as a storage space. The remnants of her middle and high school jam band phase numbers an estimated 300–400 CDs in binders, and then more stacked on spindles.

“I was on the leading edge of tape trading turning into CD trading, which then turned into LimeWire and Kazaa for any good gigs I didn&039;t yet own, plus Archive.org rips,” she told me. “I have an entire book with live Phish CDs only, and another one that&039;s gotta be 50% Dave Matthews Band followed by other H.O.R.D.E. tour alumni (ranked in order of importance, and the order is very profound/purposeful).”

Because live gig tapes are huge in the jam band community, Promisloff’s collection is almost exclusively burned CDs, which means there’s no chance of her selling it to a used CD store.

Not that she’d get much for them anyway. The market for used CDs is, well, not great. Academy Records, a used CD and vinyl shop in Manhattan, has plenty of customers, even on a rainy Monday afternoon. Ari Finkel, their 23-year-old used CD buyer, also plays in an experimental band. He’s an anachronism — a fresh-faced relic from another time when snooty record store clerks were a recognizable breed (Finkel hasn’t seen Empire Records, but admits that High Fidelity is completely accurate). He doesn’t even really own that many CDs, and admits, “most people my age want nothing to do with this.” The typical CD seller he sees is over 30, and it’s not unusual to see them unsuccessfully try to dump their whole collection. “Generally if someone brings them all in and they’re an able-bodied young person, we’ll tell them to bring them to Housing Works [a charity thrift store] a block away.”

Donation is your other option — charity resale shops like Goodwill or Housing Works will always take them. A clerk at a Paramus, NJ Goodwill told me that plenty of people still buy their used CDs, which sell for $1.99 each. Another Goodwill in Maryland explained that if they end up with more CD donations than they sell (which happens fairly often), they move the excess around to other stores or other parts of their organization. So a CD donation is always appreciated.

Academy will almost always buy classical and classic rock: A Beatles or Rolling Stones CD will sell, so they’ll buy it for $1). They’ll also take stuff that’s obscure or out of print. They may take your Belle & Sebastian album if they don’t have any on hand at the moment, but don’t expect more than 50 cents for it. Finkel swears that his personal taste doesn’t come into play when he buys for the store; he only goes by cold capitalism. He knows for certain that the following will not sell:

• One hit wonders from the ‘00s or ‘10s (sorry, The Ting Tings)

• Any U2 from the ‘00s (‘80s/’90s are ok)

• Those “chillout” electronica compilations that sound like Svedka ads. Finkel notes that somehow everyone whose entire collection is otherwise exclusively rock seems to have one of these terrible mix CDs

Academy also receives a fair amount of full CD collections coming from estates after someone died. When CDs first came out, a lot of baby boomers re-bought their whole vinyl collections onto the hot new technology — tons of Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac. Now, Academy is getting calls from widows or children who are getting rid of the whole collection. For big collections and for older people, they’ll do house calls.

Ryan Martin, a late-thirtysomething who ran a indie label called Dais for experimental music, sold off his collection through a housecall. The famous record store Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, NJ came to his Brooklyn apartment and gave him $7,000 for his full collection of more than 10,000 CDs. Of course, this was 10 years ago. “Even the appraiser who wrote me the check was like, ‘ha, good thing you are doing this now; in 2-3 years these will be worthless,’’ Martin said. He was fairly unsentimental about letting his collection go. “Seven grand was an unthinkable amount of money for me back then, so it was more like jubilation. I think I went out to a fancy dinner when the check cleared.”

Chris Capese works via word of mouth, and will come to your house, appraise your collection, buy it, and haul it off. He only works with real-deal collections, not your one box of Smash Mouth CDs.

Both he and Finkel pointed out that how many copies of a title were printed affects the market in a way you might not have considered. We tend to think of albums in digital terms now, where tangible supply is never an issue. Not so with CDs. “The more popular an artist is, the less valuable it will be,” Finkel said. “Music from the ‘90s and ‘00s was this golden era of CDs where everything was being manufactured in such huge quantities. Things like R.E.M. or Oasis, there are just so many copies in existence.”

A magic five-disc changer.

Leo-setä / Creative Commons 2.0 / Via flic.kr

Without sounding too “kids these days&#033;”, I think that kids these days will never understand the way that owning physical copies of music feels so different than streaming or mp3s. Musical taste will always be important for young people, and almost certainly more access to music means kids will love even more of it. But the intense feelings you get when you go to a store and buy a CD and bring it home and remember the track order and the liner notes – that’s different. And that’s why us old people are so attached to them. It’s hard to say goodbye to those memories not only of enjoying your teenage music, but also of being a young person who had the time to sit and read the lyrics in the liner notes along while listening to the album in entirety. Our CD collections aren’t just nostalgia, they’re part of our identities.

Elizabeth Olson, 38, kept her old CDs in a paid storage space for years while moving cross country for work and living in a small apartment. Now settled with a house and a baby in the New Jersey suburbs, she has room in the basement for her boxes. “Part of me hopes that one day my son will bring home a dusty CD player from the thrift store and be super excited to listen to It’s A Shame About Ray,” she said.

Quelle: <a href="People In Their Thirties Can&039;t Stop Hoarding CDs“>BuzzFeed