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Your car. That you own. That isn't theirs, because it's yours.

Little Brother Episode 158 2025-02-16

Your exercise bike is ratting you out. People-Tec have some makeup advice. Federal Cybersec reviews are not happening.

Links may change or disappear, so save everything locally.

Privacy news: Good news on 702 exemptions. GM agrees to stop spying for five years. Subarus can be tracked, locked, unlocked, started and stopped with very little info about the owner. Texas sues Allstate over tracking their clients. Amazon also sued over tracking. Cambridge Analytica knows too much about your guns.

Opsec tips: Use Signal or Jitsi for organizing, but more importantly, make sure you can trust everyone you invite into the chat.

Fail: Stellantis, NSA, and some scammer posing as the FCC.

Resources

Novel AI Camera Camouflage: Face Cloaking Without Full Disguise

Hacking Subaru: Tracking and Controlling Cars via the STARLINK Admin Panel

2 replies on “Little Brother Episode 158 2025-02-16”

Love your podcast and I have a question. Good advice on being safer in chatrooms when organizing and using Signal – the point I raise is about who is hosting the instance of Jitsi that you are using? It is very easy for a bad actor to host a server running jitsi and how does one vet a host? I was surprised that BigBlueButton.org was not mentioned. I have been hosting an instance for a few years with transparency. The server is hosted by a person I trust and have gotten to know over 3 years. My site CommunityBridge.com is running BBB and offers encryption as well as privacy and the opportunity to know and trust your host, yet people do not seem to value human connection over convenience very much. Hoping you can give me a glimpse at what am I doing wrong.

Hi, Mickey!

It’s a valid question about who is hosting your Jitsi instance, or any other app for that matter, because, of course, it’s an easy route for a bad actor to get into the mix. Ultimately, I’d push people to Signal anyway.

The community I inhabit is largely centered around tech, and we did actually look into hosting our own Jitsi instances back during 2020 and 2021 as we’d been using Jitsi on their own infrastructure to host our gatherings that had prior been held in person, but were kiboshed by the pandemic. We do have a community server — the Helix Foundation that you hear me reference in the credits every episode — run by some wonderful, dedicated, talented volunteer sysops for the good of the community. What we found is that Jitsi needs a lot of bandwidth. Strangely enough, I could probably host it at my house, as I have fiber Internet, but we never tried that.

I was not aware of Big Blue Button, so I’m going to try to learn more about it before the next episode and I’ll talk about this question then.

Listen for this to be discussed in the next episode. I usually do listener letters right before privacy and opsec news, just a hair past the middle of the episode.

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