Fragments: Some activists are raising concerns about a fragmented Internet, with two University of Southampton professors writing about four competing versions of the Internet in Wired. The two professors wrote about the same issues for the World Economic Forum earlier this year. The vision of a coordinated, global network “might change in 2020 as Internet governance will be at the centre of a number of ongoing debates coming to the fore,” they wrote. “What values should the technology support? How should it deal with free speech and association? What about privacy?”
Squirrels on wheels: Mont Belvieu, a city near
Houston, Texas, has built its own broadband network after struggling with slow
speeds from existing providers, the Dallas
Morning News reports. “I believe squirrels run on a wheel for my Internet,”
one resident half-joked on a city survey. About half of the city’s households
have signed up for the service, offering speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second
for $75 a month, since it launched in mid-2018.
Encryption warnings: Chloe Squires, the U.K. Home
Office’s head of national security, has weighed in on a U.S. Senate debate on
encryption, saying Facebook will undermine her government’s fight against
terrorists and pedophiles if it adds more encryption to its services, the Daily
Mail says. Most cybersecurity experts, however, say additional encryption
helps protect users against hackers and criminals.
This isn’t what it seems: ToTalk, a new messaging app billed as a secure way to chat with friends and family, even in countries that have blocked WhatsApp and Skype, is actually a spying tool for the government of the United Arab Emirates “to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones,” the New York Times reports. ToTok has been downloaded millions of times throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. It recently became one of the most downloaded social apps in the U.S.
Take these six actions to protect encryption and protect yourself.
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