,,, but iTunes is an interface abomination.

5-digiters represent!

Yes, that's the translation of the latin, but it's use in law is correct as to "accident implies negligence". Please read beyond the first sentence in Wikipedia.

Maybe I've been living under a rock (shut up, it's a comfortable rock!), but I have not heard of either of these two companies so... why should I care?

You say it can't be trusted, but it's still the most trustworthy thing there is at the moment. So, just like hundreds of years of science before it, you assume it's true while continuing to prove or disprove it further, and then when better evidence comes along, you shift your position appropriately. Right now, the "better evidence" says it's true.

I do agree it's been highly politicised. Who's fault was that?

Yes. I can do 2**(32-12) as well as the next pythonista... but I said "hundreds of thousands" since the actual number of addresses _used_ in that range is probably only about a tenth of that.

It's probably something lodged up your nose. See your doctor.

Blocking that /12 will unfortunately block hundreds of thousands of "perfectly legitimate" sites... essentially anyone deigning to use AWS. Kontera just happens to be one of the users. No idea about the sbcglobal.net one, though.

The user agent is probably a perfectly valid one from some version of Safari (version 8.0, I believe), but one the Kontera coders decided to "appropriate" for their crawling software. However, if it _is_ Safari, Safari users will likely have updated their browsers long since afterwards, thus changing the User Agent, so this corroborates your analysis that they're all bots.

And I would guess that, at least the Kontera ones, all come from some user visiting your site that was running the WoT plugin.

I found this very thing out as a result of a email-based survey I'd sent to about 500 people. Here's a copy of the email I'd sent out to those affected:

-----

tl;dr version:

* The “Web of Trust” plugin is highly likely to be sending your browsing history, after it reaches the Web of Trust servers, to advertising companies.

* It’s likely that they’re _not_ sending personal details, but simply the list of URLs that you visit. This includes “private” urls such as what you received for the survey, but could also include things like the URLs you send when you share files via Dropbox, Hipchat, etc.

* If you’re not okay with this behaviour, I recommend you un-install the Web of Trust plugin.

* If you haven’t yet responded to my question of “do you have Web of Trust” installed, I’m still interested in hearing from you.

Detailed version:

* Shortly after folk started to respond to the survey, by chance I noticed unusual requests hitting the web server. An hour or two after the flurry of requests that I’d consider normal, I saw another request to _just_ the main URL, all from the same IP address (52.71.155.178), and the same user agent (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.1.25 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Safari/600.1.25)

To me, this implies that the supposedly secret URLs were not very secret.

* The address 52.71.155.178 has a DNS entry "nat-service.aws.kontera.com”. Kontera is an advertising company (remember those “in text” ads with the double underscore? Kontera was one of the players in that), which was bought by Amobee, a market research company. Amobee own the kontera.com domains and likely is related to the above activity.

* From some research, I discovered that others have seen these requests too, all to private URLs, and that the plugin “Web of Trust” was implicated.

https://www.abuseipdb.com/chec...
http://www.liveipmap.com/52.71...

* I saw 15 of these requests. I contact each of the 15 people and received 11 responses. 9 of the respondents were using the Web of Trust plugin.

* I don’t know what could explain the other 2. Certainly, Web of Trust can’t be the only company sending Kontera/Amobee data. Unfortunately attempts to replicate the issue for those two users have failed: it may be that Kontera have some kind of limit on how many URLs per domain they’ll probe per time period? I’d certainly want to do that if I wanted to stay under the radar, or thwart further analysis.

Conclusion:

Given that 9/11 is far, far above the expected install base of Web of Trust. It is very likely that Web of Trust is indeed forwarding your browser history to at least one advertising company: Kontera/Amobee

Sharing “non personal information” is not inconsistent with Web of Trust’s privacy policy: they do not consider the URLs you visit to be “personally identifiable information”.

Response:

What you do with the sites you visit is up to you. But if you don’t approve of what the company behind the plugin is doing, I suggest you uninstall this plugin. Apart from the risk of “private URLs” becoming non-private, I don’t think there’s any further security risk.

I am disinclined to make a wide announcement about this, especially not on WoT’s forums. From research, the company readily squashes any criticism against it, and a small but vocal fraction of its users have embarked on attacks against any persons or sites that have raised concerns against WoT’s activity. In many ways, WoT has become an extortion engine, such as offering a paid-for “badge of trust” to remove bad ratings.

http://mywot.info/
https://mywotlies.wordpress.co...

(Remember, this is the Internet: Take everything with a ten-tonne block of salt.)

I’ll be sending my analysis to some security-industry friends of mine.

Also, I have blocked that IP address from querying my server (at the web server level, so I will still see the request if it is made it’ll just get back a “403 Forbidden” code every time), and also modified the survey page to only show first names. In the future I’ll make the URLs we distribute less shareable in some fashion, such as being “single use” or “locked to the first IP address that queries it”, or something similar. Having full fledged accounts, with a username/password, is also a possibility.

well, if you're phone is swelling up and smoking you're NOT going to spend the time to crack the back off and remove the battery. You're going to drop that whole thing like a hot rock.

Also, having non-removable batteries (mostly) stop people using cheap, and likely increasingly-dangerous, third-party batteries. I personally had a chinese knockoff "OEM" battery do the die-and-swell-up thing (fortunately without smoke). If the _proper_ batteries die like this ,imagine what cheap knockoffs would do!

The trick big-slashdot doesn't want you to know!

It's also easy to overlook the aesthetic impact of proper character encodings!

Precisely.

On a Macbook (Pro, at least) the Esc key is on the same row as the function keys. The function key row is (ostensibly) being replaced with a touch bar and a oled display. So, it seems very clear that the Esc key will simply be part of that in the appropriate modes.

And, given it's Probably going to be right on the left hand side, it'll be easy to press by touch-typists, who just have to touch-locate the edge of that screen.

So... why all this drama?

Oh. Right.... Slashdot.

Level 5 means not having any controls that a human can use. So, unless their "future upgrade" includes ripping out the steering wheel and pedals, etc, then the car is only "level 4 ready".