Fuel Rip off as government does NOTHING!

Aussies have been getting ripped off by the petrochemical industry for decades, and the people in government have stood by doing nothing about it.

Why should they? The higher the prices, the more tax is ripped from the ‘consumer’s’ wallet to feed the leeches blood sucking sociopaths in government.

The (Labour Day) long weekend is upon us in a few states; SA, ACT, Tas, Vic, which means MANY people jump in their cars to get away from the hustle and bustle.

So what do the companies do?

They jack up the price 50 cents per litre to $2.319 per litre.

No outrage from motorists?

- Obviously quite satisfied with the price hike.

No ‘Royal Commission’ into this decades long scam?

- No need, as nothing will change just like it didn’t with the RC into the banking & financial institutions industry.

That’s life in a corporatocracy/totalitarian colony, ‘advertised’ as a democracy.

The sinister web of deception by Freemasons detrimental to ALL Australians

The Anglo-Masonic system of governance over Australians is deeply rooted into this colony’s history, where it ultimately works only for the benefit of its members and to the detriment of the general population as a whole.

From falsified tenders, ripping off the public purse to the tune of billions per year, to courtroom theatrics, it is ultimately the ‘ordinary’ Australians that lose, MANY of them unaware of the sinister actions in play, telling 'conspiracy theorists' to put on their tin foil hats, how sad of them to be so ignorant.

At the end of the day irrespective of whether it’s the Fabians, Masons or the Hillsong cult, or whether it’s (Matthew) Guy or (Dan) Andrews, where in the case of Andrews, he has the full support of the Anglo-Masonic courts and police to aid his criminal, oops ‘alleged’ criminal activities (e.g. Red shirts), not forgetting his staff of thugs that dig up dirt on anyone and threaten them and their families.

See also:

Who ‘owns’ the courts in Australia?

Courts acting under dictation owned by financial services institutions (see pdf)

Cracking the Canberra Code

Here is one story that you, the general population are allowed to know a little about:

Guy silence on Freemasons membership raises ‘conflict’ questions

Former opposition leader and planning minister Matthew Guy did not declare his years-long Freemasons Victoria membership, at a time when the secretive order pursued significant property developments around the state.

Guy’s membership of Freemasons Victoria was confirmed by grand master Anthony Bucca, leaked internal documents and five internal Freemasons sources, who spoke anonymously due to rules prohibiting members from speaking publicly.

Former opposition leader Matthew Guy, also a former Liberal planning minister, in 2022

Documents obtained by The Age show Guy was registered as a Freemasons Victoria member in 2018 in the rank of “mark mason”, which is the third level of membership of the secret fraternity. Guy lost the state election that year to Labor’s Daniel Andrews.

It is not known what year Guy’s membership began, but Bucca said it had ceased in recent years, without providing an exact date, and dismissed questions about potential or perceived conflicts during the politician’s membership.

“What a minister chooses to do and doesn’t is a matter for the minister,” Bucca said. “What’s it got to do with us? Did we deal with Matthew Guy personally? Did we approach him on a one-to-one? I very much doubt it.”

One former senior freemason, who had a leadership position in the fraternity from 2000 to 2011, said he was aware of Guy’s membership during that period.

The Dallas Brooks Hall was turned into luxury apartments in a deal between Mirvac and Freemasons Victoria. 

“He would have been a rising star in the Liberal Party. It would come up when we were looking for support. Whether anything ever happened, I don’t know,” he said.

Two other freemasons said they were aware of Guy’s longstanding membership but could not recall what date he joined.

Freemasons meet regularly at the organisation’s all-male clubs to raise money for charity, network and practise ancient rituals. Once a community of society’s most powerful – notable past members in Australia include Sir Donald Bradman and Sir Robert Menzies – membership has declined in recent decades.

Guy has not disclosed the membership on his parliamentary register of interests, which are annual statements that require politicians to report investments and associations with clubs, religions or groups that could represent an actual or perceived conflict of interest.

Dallas Brooks Hall

In 2018, Guy did declare membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge and the Sir Henry Bolte Lecture Trust.

The Age is not suggesting that Guy acted inappropriately in making any planning decisions or that he made those decisions based on any relationship with the Freemasons, only that he may not have made necessary declarations.

Guy declined an interview request saying he would not be “replying to a vague fishing expedition”. “I’m not a member. Go away and cease harassing me,” Guy said.

An opposition spokesperson later clarified that Guy was a “non-financial member” in 2018 and “hadn’t been a financial member for many years before that”. The spokesperson did not answer specific questions about the duration of Guy’s membership.

Victorian Nationals leader Peter Walsh is a current member of Freemasons Victoria and appears regularly on the organisation’s newsletters to promote its charitable work.

Public records show Walsh discloses membership of organisations including the Echuca Workers Club, Swan Hill Field & Game, Geelong Football Club and the Athenaeum Club, yet does not disclose his Freemasons membership.

When contacted for comment, Walsh accepted that he had been Freemason for many years but did not think disclosure was necessary.

Former Victorian MP Ken Coghill, who is a founding member of the Accountability Round Table and an adjunct professor at Swinburne University, said Freemasons was a membership that Guy should have disclosed.

“There is an obligation to disclose any interest that might be affected by decisions you make,” Coghill said. “I certainly would have expected it [disclosure] in this case. There is a possibility that he would be influenced by his membership of Freemasons, whether as an opposition member or government member.”

Centre for Public Integrity director Joo-Cheong Tham, also a Melbourne Law School professor, said the omission of Guy’s Freemasons membership “strongly appears” to be a breach of his obligation under laws to disclose membership of organisations.

“This is especially so because of the perceived conflict of interest [if he was a Freemasons member] when he was Victorian planning minister and made consequential decisions in relation to the commercial interests of Freemasons Victoria,” he said.

Tham supported greater transparency of these memberships. “There is a good case for members of parliament to disclose their membership of Freemasons Victoria as its size and influence mean that such membership could give rise to a conflict of interest in the discharge of parliamentary duties.”

Guy was planning minister for four years to December 2014, during which time Freemasons Victoria was involved in two major property development projects, in East Melbourne and Box Hill. It’s not known whether Guy was a Freemasons member during those years, and The Age does not suggest he made decisions based on any relationship with the Freemasons.

The largest and most controversial was the re-development of Freemasons Victoria’s East Melbourne headquarters, the Dallas Brooks Hall, in a $450 million partnership with Mirvac.

The proposal was first lodged with the then Coalition state government in 2013 and generated 11 objections, including from the City of Melbourne and Epworth HealthCare. The objections related to heritage concerns, height, overshadowing and privacy concerns for the neighbouring hospital.

Mirvac and Freemasons Victoria sought permission from Guy, as minister, to substantially increase the development to two towers with 17 and 11 levels respectively.

Guy appointed an expert panel to advise the government on the project, and it reported just after the 2014 election. Labor’s then planning minister, Richard Wynne, ultimately approved a plan for the site in 2016.

Wynne said he had to make significant adjustments to ensure the development did not overshadow Fitzroy Gardens, directly opposite. “The initial application was way over the odds,” he said.

Guy was also involved in a planning decision at about the same time another property was eventually developed by Freemasons Victoria.

Freemasons Victoria mounted a strong objection when its 90-year-old Masonic centre in Box Hill was considered for heritage protection in 2011, as part of a wider planning change.

Freemasons Victoria’s expert consultant argued that there was insufficient justification for heritage protection.

710 Station St, Box Hill

“From an architectural and aesthetic perspective, the Box Hill site is a typical building from the 1920s of which there are many examples developed throughout Melbourne,” its submission from the time stated.

However, Whitehorse City Council found this did not detract from the “importance”, “historical significance” and “social memories associated” with the building.

An independent panel ultimately agreed with Freemasons Victoria and recommended to the minister that the centre not receive heritage protection. Guy approved the amendment in March 2013, according to the government gazette.

Freemasons Victoria then backed a project that razed the centre to make way for a 10-storey apartment complex.

Freemasons Victoria’s 2017-18 annual report noted the last four apartments had been sold, signalling the completion of the project.

During the same planning process another masonic lodge, in Blackburn, was granted heritage protection. This was not opposed by Freemasons Victoria, but it did request consideration be given to acknowledging its development potential.

Your Noisy Fingerprints Vulnerable To New Side-Channel Attack

Here’s a warning we never thought we’d have to give: when you’re in an audio or video call on your phone, avoid the temptation to doomscroll or use an app that requires a lot of swiping. Doing so just might save you from getting your identity stolen through the most improbable vector imaginable — by listening to the sound your fingerprints make on the phone’s screen (PDF).

Now, we love a good side-channel attack as much as anyone, and we’ve covered a lot of them over the years. But things like exfiltrating data by blinking hard drive lights or turning GPUs into radio transmitters always seemed a little far-fetched to be the basis of a field-practical exploit. But PrintListener, as [Man Zhou] et al dub their experimental system, seems much more feasible, even if it requires a ton of complex math and some AI help. At the heart of the attack are the nearly imperceptible sounds caused by friction between a user’s fingerprints and the glass screen on the phone. These sounds are recorded along with whatever else is going on at the time, such as a video conference or an online gaming session. The recordings are preprocessed to remove background noise and subjected to spectral analysis, which is sensitive enough to detect the whorls, loops, and arches of the unsuspecting user’s finger.

Once fingerprint patterns have been extracted, they’re used to synthesize a set of five similar fingerprints using MasterPrint, a generative adversarial network (GAN). MasterPrint can generate fingerprints that can unlock phones all by itself, but seeding the process with patterns from a specific user increases the odds of success. The researchers claim they can defeat Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) readers between 9% and 30% of the time using PrintListener — not fabulous performance, but still pretty scary given how new this is.

Source: hackaday.com

Medical test company’s ‘serious and systemic failures’ led to cyber-attack, watchdog says

Australian Clinical Labs hack alleged to have resulted in more than 200,000 health records and credit card details being published on dark web

OAIC alleges significant failures by ACL to protect customer data from the hack by a group known as Quantum. Photograph: Wietse Michiels/Alamy

Medical testing company Australian Clinical Labs had “serious and systemic failures” that resulted in a cyber-attack that led to more than 200,000 customer health records and credit card details being published on the dark web, the Australian information commissioner has alleged.

In October last year, in the midst of the Medibank and Optus cyber-attacks, Medlab’s parent company, ACL, confirmed it had been the victim of a cyber-attack eight months earlier in February.

The hacker group responsible – known as Quantum – was able to exfiltrate 86GB worth of data, including customer passport information, health information, and credit card details including number, expiry date and CCV.

The data had been published on the dark web on 16 June last year, four months before ACL publicly confirmed the attack.

This month, the Office of the Australian information commissioner (OAIC) took ACL to court over its failure to protect customer data during the breach. The OAIC’s concise statement, released last week, alleges significant failures by the company to protect customer data and inform the commissioner about the breach when required.

According to the documents, within four hours from the time the first employee noticed the ransomware message on a desktop computer in Medlab, it had spread to other computers in Brisbane and Sydney, which were then encrypted by the attackers.

ACL, which generated revenue of almost $1bn during the 2022 financial year, did not have a dedicated cybersecurity team, the documents state. Its response was led by an IT team leader, overseen by ACL’s CIO and head of technical services, but the OAIC alleges none of these staff had formal cybersecurity qualifications or experience in responding to a cyber-attack.

The head of technical services provided the IT team leader with the company’s playbook for ransomware and malware, but the IT team leader had not been trained to use these books, and OAIC alleges critical steps in the playbook were not followed, including analysing the ransomware.

The company then brought in a third-party company, StickmanCyber, to assist in the response. The OAIC found that monitoring agents were only deployed on three of the at least 121 computers infected with ransomware.

StickmanCyber’s short engagement with ACL, including reviewing one hour of firewall logs and dark web scans, concluded at the time no data had been taken.

By 21 March 2022 the IT team leader, after a conversation with the company’s general counsel, sent an email stating “as per information available to the IT department there was no unauthorised access, disclosure, or loss of any personal information … as a result of the incident”. The company did not inform the OAIC about the attack.

On 25 March, the Australian Cyber Security Centre informed ACL it had intelligence that Medlab may be a victim of a ransomware attack, and reminded ACL of its notification requirements. ACL did not investigate further, OAIC alleges.

ACSC alerted ACL again on 16 June that data had been published to the dark web. It would take the company nearly one month (10 July) to inform the OAIC, which OAIC alleges is in breach of the act. ACL would take until October to announce the breach publicly.

The OAIC alleges ACL was “aware of serious deficiencies in its cybersecurity framework” at least nine months before the cyber-attack, and did not take appropriate steps to protect personal information.

The OAIC said the failures were “serious and systemic”, noting that ACL’s IT budget was $1.3m in 2022, with a cybersecurity budget of $350,000 – “significantly lower than that of industry standards”, the OAIC alleges.

The OAIC is seeking civil penalties and costs.

A spokesperson for ACL said the company is “vigorously defending the action”.

The case continues.

The OAIC is still investigating Optus and Medibank over cyber-attacks last year, which could lead to similar court action against the two companies.

Source: The Guardian

Australian's will see more of these so called failures with regards to their 'private and confidential' data, where only huge fines may wake up corporations to better protect their 'consumer's' data.

Windows BitLocker Hacked in 43 seconds!

A security expert has managed to break Windows’ BitLocker encryption using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller.

It took him just 43 seconds to steal BitLocker’s master key and access a locked laptop. He claimed to have exploited a flaw in the TPM security standard.

(For privacy and security, Microsoft products are not recommended.)

See video:

The Full Charles Murray: Race and IQ Government Welfare and Crime - John Stossel

See interview with the author:

Which VPN? Be careful of the reviews!

Trust, but verify: An in-depth analysis of ExpressVPN's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week

In light of ExpressVPN's double-whammy of troubling news, we take a deep dive into the facts, and whether you can feel safe or suspicious about using one of the world's most popular VPNs. 

ExpressVPN has been all over the news for the past week, and not in a good way. Because we recommend ExpressVPN here at ZDNet as one of the top VPNs out there, I've gotten a flood of reader questions asking for an objective read on the news. In this article, I'll do my best.

 Sitrep

Let's start with a sitrep (situation report). There are two key items which are tangentially related.

The first item is that Kape Technologies has announced plans to acquire ExpressVPN for $986 million. I do have concerns about this because Kape was once considered a malware provider. I'll talk more about this in a bit.

The second item is a report in Reuters indicating that ExpressVPN CIO Daniel Gericke is among three men fined $1.6 million by the US Department of Justice for hacking and spying on US citizens on behalf of the government of the UAE (United Arab Emirates).

I'll discuss each of these reports individually, and then share with you some thoughts about how these situations might impact your decision to use (or not use) ExpressVPN.

Kape Technologies

Kape Technologies has had quite a convoluted history. According to a report in Forbes, a company called Crossrider was formed in 2011 by "billionaire Teddy Sagi, a serial entrepreneur and ex-con who was jailed for insider trading in the 1990s. His biggest money maker to date is gambling software developer Playtech," and Koby Menachemi.

Menachemi was a developer for Unit 8200, an Israeli signals intelligence unit responsible for hacking and collecting data (think of it as part CIA, part NSA, and part high school, because the unit hires and trains teenagers in hacking and coding skills).

Crossrider's business was ad injection. Remember back in the day when companies like Yahoo tried to convince you to download their browser extension with their search bar? Crossrider's business was creating tools that allowed them to inject ads into other companies' web pages, sometimes overriding even ads that were paid to run on the sites that were being compromised.

Ad injection skirted the line between just being scummy and being malware. Forbes reported that Symantec's anti-malware identified software based on Crossrider's product as malware, in part because the product effectively stole the ad revenue from the sites its users visited, and in part because it collected whatever data it could find in the process.

According to Publift, an ad partnering service founded by ex-Googlers, the ad injection business is still out there. But Google has been fighting it for about five years now, meaning it's not nearly as lucrative a business as it once was.

According to a 2018 report in the Israeli business daily Globes, Kape Technologies was a rebranding effort on the part of then relatively new Crossrider CEO Ido Erlichman. Crossrider's share price had fallen to a low of £0.27 on the London Stock Exchange and the company was seeking a new strategy.

What better strategy for a company dedicated to siphoning users' data and eyeballs than to branch out into the one area of cybersecurity where users are obsessed with anonymity and information security?

You can cut the irony with a knife.

In any case, the newly renamed Kape Technologies set out on an acquisition binge. The company started buying in 2017, acquiring CyberGhost VPN for about $9 million. Next, in 2018, came Mac antivirus company Intego for $16 million. A few months later, Kape gobbled up another VPN provider, ZenMate, for about $5 million. A year later, in 2019, Kape spent $95 million for Private Internet Access, one of the best known VPN providers at the time.

After a 2020 IPO on the London Stock Exchange (which raised $115 million), and a year of record earnings where the pandemic and work-from-home cybersecurity concerns drove VPN demand, Kape was riding high. Back in March of this year, the company bought Webselenese for $149 million. This is worthy of further discussion.

At first glance, it's tough to pin down what Webselenese does. The company describes itself as "an online platform specialising in consumer-focused privacy and security content." What does this mean? According to investment site The Twenties Trader, Webselense owns two very high profile review sites, VPNMentor and Wizcase. According to Alexa (Amazon's traffic monitoring service, not Amazon's voice assistant -- I know, it's confusing), VPNMentor has a rank of 5,807. Wizcase has a rank of 7,280.

Are you seeing where this is going? Adware provider pivots to become a provider of VPN services, then that company buys up two of the largest VPN review sites on the internet. Does anyone think those reviews will remain unbiased? According to site RestorePrivacy.com (which itself traffics in VPN reviews), VPN rankings on both VPNMentor and Wizcase changed in Kape Technologies' favor just as soon as Kape bought Webselenese.

Can you spell "conflict of intererest?" Sure. I knew you could.

And then, last week, Kape siphoned up ExpressVPN for $936 million, its biggest deal to date. With Kape's somewhat sordid history, you can see the concern. I'll mention one other issue about Kape, and then we'll move on.

 Last year, my CNET colleague Rae Hodge did an extensive analysis of Kape Technologies. At the time, she was looking at Kape as it pertained to its ownership of CyberGhost. But one thing she pointed out should be a concern. She pointed out that even after the change from Crossrider to Kape, "Kape still operated the infamous scareware Reimage -- a potentially unwanted program that positions itself as a computer performance enhancer but which has been known to signal false positives on security threats in order to persuade you to pay for its premium service." She also pointed out that as recently as 2019, "new Crossrider-Kape mutations have been cropping up on the web."

So, there's that. Now let's get to know Daniel Gericke a little better.

ExpressVPN CIO Daniel Gericke

Last week, as a completely separate story from Kape's acquisition of ExpressVPN, Reuters reported that, "Three former U.S. intelligence operatives who worked as cyber spies for the United Arab Emirates admitted to violating U.S. hacking laws and prohibitions on selling sensitive military technology."

They were Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and...Daniel Gericke. Gericke, as it turns out, is also ExpressVPN's CIO.

Baier, Adams, and Gericke were not good boys. They were hired guns for a special intelligence unit set up by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to gather intelligence on journalists, activists, dissidents, and rival governments. According to some excellent in-depth reporting by Reuters, Raven was a substantial project, using money from Arab royalty to hire at least a dozen former NSA and CIA operatives to hack into networks in the US and other countries on behalf of their clients.

Remember Project Raven. We'll come back to that in a bit, with even more irony.

Unfortunately, Gericke doesn't have a profile on LinkedIn. There is a profile for a Daniel Gericke listing his sole position as "IT Director at Professional Corporation," so if that's our Daniel, it's not much to go on. The most we know is in the 1,563-word statement issued by ExpressVPN regarding Mr. Gericke. ExpressVPN said it hired him in 2019. It did not say whether he was still doing work for Project Raven or the UAE at that time.

If you're deeply interested in this, the best thing to do is read ExpressVPN's statement. It's a bit of a marvel. It goes on to say that the company knew Gericke was involved in spy stuff, but did not know about anything illegal, immoral, or fattening. The company explains that it's necessary to hire someone "steeped and seasoned in offense" in order to build the best defenses. Then it goes on to state how it protected its services from corruption from within and have subsequently hardened its services from external attack.

As of September 17, the company reaffirmed its support of Gericke and did not indicate any plans to terminate him.

 Edward Snowden and his glass house

Y'all remember Edward Snowden? Back in 2013 and 2014, Snowden used up a lot of my column inches. For those of you doomed to forget history, Edward Joseph Snowden was a former NSA employee and CIA contractor who stole and then leaked more than a million top secret documents from the governments of the United States, Australia, and Great Britain.

After the leak, he ran from the US to Hong Kong, and then from Hong Kong to Russia, where he received asylum after living in the Sheremetyevo Alexander S. Pushkin International Airport for about 40 days and 40 nights. In 2020, Snowden applied for and was granted permanent residency in Russia. He then went on to apply for dual Russian-American citizenship in December of that year.

In his years subsequent to his theft and escape to Russia, Snowden has made quite the name for himself. A movie was based on his exploits. And he makes a living doing remote speaking engagements for willing and credulous audiences.

So how did Mr. Snowden wind up in our story? As it turns out, he weighed in on ExpressVPN and Daniel Gericke when the news broke last week. On September 15, he tweeted, "If you're an ExpressVPN customer, you shouldn't be." This came out the day after the Reuters report on Gericke and ExpressVPN and was picked up by media sources across the internet.

You've probably heard the phrase, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." Well, here's Snowden's glass house. According to Reuters' in-depth report on Project Raven, two months before Snowden's fateful theft of US government top secret information, he was recommended for work at military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (which then subcontracted him out to the three letter agencies) by Lori Stroud, who herself was later recruited to Project Raven by Marc Baier. Baier worked at NSA Hawaii along with Snowden. Baier was also one of the three men indicted by the Justice Department along with ExpressVPN's Gericke.

So, as we wade deeper in irony, we have a former NSA operative who stole millions of documents from the US Government and ran to Russia, who is complaining about the employer of a former colleague of a former colleague, both of whom were involved in shady activities, but nothing as vastly criminal as his own actions.

 What now?

Okay, so now you're up to date. You know about the company that just acquired ExpressVPN and its somewhat shady past and, at the very least unethical juking of the stats when it comes to VPN reviews. You know about the  background of ExpressVPN's CIO.

But what of ExpressVPN itself? The key question is, should you use it or skip it?

What I use

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is which VPN service I use. This week, it's been all about whether I'm going to stop using ExpressVPN as my VPN service.

Here's the hard truth: I don't use a commercial VPN service. I don't like the idea of my data going through any of the VPN players' servers. But I'm a bit of an outlier. I've long run my own bare-metal Linux VPN server network located across a few cloud infrastructure providers. I've been hacking my own Linux kernel mods for years, and I'm just as comfortable spinning up a series of servers that bounce traffic as I am making a cup of coffee in the morning.

I do test all the VPN services I review, but only for a limited time, and only on dedicated test machines. Any that I have concerns about have been documented in my reviews. So far, at least among the top players, I haven't found anything much worse than a VPN connection indicating that the connection is routing through a VPN.

But it's important to note that I personally only use a VPN for communication security at airports, hotels, and coffee shops -- which I'm visiting a whole lot less these days. I don't have any need to obfuscate my location in order to illegally route around sports viewing restrictions, or to cheap out and not pay for new episodes of Star Trek Discovery or Picard.

I am also not a dissident, or someone running from an abusive relationship. I don't do financial transactions online when away from my home network. As such, I don't need all the services and all the clients offered by many of the VPN service providers I've profiled.

None of the VPN services I recommend are bad -- I just don't need them in my day-to-day life because I built my own.

But what about ExpressVPN?

What about ExpressVPN? Do these revelations change anything? To answer that for yourself, you'll need to ask yourself three questions.

How good is ExpressVPN for my needs?

When I looked at ExpressVPN, I called it "an easy-to-use VPN with middle-of-the-road everything." I did find that an ExpressVPN connection routed through Security Firewall Ltd, a firm with a surprisingly high Google fraud rating. ExpressVPN reached out to say that Security Firewall is just one of many companies it leases infrastructure from, and its network is secure. You can read the company's statement in my review.

Also: ExpressVPN review: A fine VPN service, but is it worth the price?

Overall, I didn't find that ExpressVPN was the fastest or the cheapest VPN, but it did have great documentation, support for a whole lot of clients, a nice user interface, and was easy to setup. So, from a functional point of view, it's fine. Not great, but generally good enough.

Will the Kape acquisition change things?

Kape has genuinely been going hard after acquiring cybersecurity companies. I'd be comfortable with its pivot (we all did things in the past we regret) if it weren't for the Webselenese acquisition this year. Acquiring those review sites for $149 million just has terrible optics. I reviewed both CyberGhost and Private Internet Access well after their acquisition by Kape, and both products were good.

Also: 

• CyberGhost VPN review: More than just VPN, an all-in-one security kit
• Private Internet Access review: A cheap, powerful VPN

Kape has had a past that's at odds with the mission of a VPN provider. Kape, back when it was Crossrider, liked to hoover up users' data, probably to sell to advertisers. Will it continue to do so? I don't know, but it'd be really foolish if it did. The VPN market is a vastly more profitable business than ad informatics, and Kape's VPN brands are now its golden geese. It'd be insane to risk those cash cows (I know, the mixed metaphor hurts), in favor of selling out its users' data.

What about keeping Gericke on staff?

The company's blog post went to great lengths to show how it is restricting Gericke's access so he won't do baaaad things. But I agree with the premise that you need some offensive warriors when you're at war. I'm not sure Gericke should stay as the company's CIO with any infrastructure responsibility, but keeping a stable of folks who know and understand the enemy is important in this business.

So what's the bottom line?

One thing I'm asked regularly is whether or not ExpressVPN (or any other VPN) is going to share information with the FBI (or name your favorite intelligence agency). The prevailing wisdom is that VPN vendors located outside the various "Eyes" intelligence sharing treaties are somehow safer for those hiding information from government access. This is generally not true. As I discussed in my analysis of NordVPN, most VPN providers have enough of a footprint in MLAT treaty countries that if a three-letter agency wants your information, it'll get it.

So, unless you're a very serious dissident (or, I guess, a criminal) on the run from the government, the whole issue of jurisdiction is merely VPN theatre for the benefit of good marketing hype. And if you are relying on a VPN service to protect your life and freedom, why are you relying on something you read online for your truth? I just showed you that the biggest VPN review sites are owned by a VPN conglomerate. You need to do some very serious investigation and testing on your own, if you want to be truly safe.

If you're currently using ExpressVPN for general-purpose safe computing (like checking your mail at the local coffee shop) and you like it, I wouldn't say you should give it up. If you're relying on any of the Kape brands for a life and death situation, I'd say it's probably not worth the risk.

If you're shopping for a VPN, read all the reviews and try them out. Most give you thirty days, so see how they actually work for you. Again, I wouldn't necessarily dismiss ExpressVPN out of hand because of these reports, but it's up to you to gauge your risk level.

In the mid-1980s, US president Ronald Wilson Reagan was preparing for a summit with Soviet president Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and wanted to bond with his Soviet counterpart. When Reagan spoke with Russian history scholar Susanne Massie, an American, she introduced him to the phrase doveryai, no proveryai. In English, that's trust, but verify. Reagan apparently liked the phrase so much, he overused it, much to the annoyance of Gorbachev.

In any case, that's how I recommend approaching ExpressVPN: trust, but verify. We'll keep an eye on how the company behaves. Does Kape do anything else that indicates their moral compass is askew? Does Gericke's access become more limited or does he leave the company? Does data secured by ExpressVPN turn out to be less secure?

I don't believe we need to pillory ExpressVPN just yet. All the bad news is tangential to its operations. But I'd advise the company to walk very carefully, to hold its new masters at Kape accountable, and to both know where the line is and stay firmly on the angels' side of that line.

---

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

See source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vpngeeks/comments/e0gr9p/expressvpn_review_reddit_review/

Smart Watches are DUMB

Apple:- "The king of manufacturing problems and then selling us the solutions"

Apple invented sneakily a whole now product class, that they could have people replace in every year or two with planned obsolescence. 

It's truly a great business model, terrible for the environment and everyone else, but a great business model for them.

If we're outsourcing our self-awareness and motivation to these smartwatches, we're basically setting ourselves up to be controlled by them.

Police snoop 'breached the trust of us all'

Here is another corrupt cop, which you (the people) are allowed to read about.

There are plenty more corrupt cops out there in every state and territory of this colony, but the mainstream media are limited as to what and whom they can write about, as exposing corruption in government, will give the public a 'vote' of no confidence.

That's life in the colony!

India bans ‘private’ email service under false pretences?

Worldwide, governments hate the general population/serfs/plebs having ‘private’ communications, citing the obvious excuse, that being not crime but this next level thing called ‘terrorism’, where some nation’s governments are the very definition of terrorists.

End-to-end encrypted services such as Proton Mail, Signal, Telegram et al, are under attack by governments where in the colony called Australia, the uneducated MPs in government want the manufacturers to build a “systemic weakness” or a backdoor into the product.

Apple or Meta 'encrypted' products aren't truly 'private' as your communications data is handed over to authorities, once requested. 

They do not want the plebs to have ANY sort of (digital) privacy, where if they could in the colony, they would install a law that bans houses from having curtains/drapes/shutters.

The Indian government used a ‘convenient’ excuse to ban Proton Mail, alleging that hoax bomb threat was sent to 13 schools.

See article: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/it-ministry-looks-to-block-proton-mail-on-request-of-tamil-nadu-police-101707938167006.html

The Indian government 'supports' the criminal actions of 'scammers' from call centres specifically set-up to rip-off westerners.  

As if they (the Indian government) cares that some pensioner in the US/Australia was robbed of their life savings, because if the government factually did care, these criminal actions would have stopped decades ago.

In any event, would this also have been the case if a Hotmail or Gmail address was used?

Was the source of the email an actual hoax or a job seconded by the government?

In reality we will never know, as governments lie to people every single day.

What we do know is that end-to-end encryption services are under attack!

We therefore encourage more people to use them and support them financially if one can.

This action is part of the global Nanny State agenda.