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NSA Wants to Spy on Americans Because Reasons

Andrew Orr ·

U.S. government servers have been getting hacked left and right. In response, the NSA wants us to think that approval of domestic spying will solve the problem, despite suffering an egregious hack in 2016 where its zero-day exploits were stolen.

“We truly need to look at the ability for us to see ourselves and right now it’s difficult for us to see ourselves,” Nakasone testified on Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Adversaries like China and Russia “are operating with increased sophistication, scope [and] scale, including operations that can end “before a warrant can be issued,” he warned.

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Google Bravely Blocks Apps From Scanning Your Other Apps

Andrew Orr ·

Google announced that it will stop Android apps from scanning the list of your other apps in Android 11. Why this behavior was accepted before is beyond me.

Google has another page that lists allowable use cases for Play Store apps querying your app list, including “device search, antivirus apps, file managers, and browsers.” The page adds that “apps that must discover any and all installed apps on the device, for awareness or interoperability purposes may have eligibility for the permission.”

Time to make a fake antivirus app which queries your list of apps to sell to other companies.

TMO Deals

Babbel Language Learning Lifetime Subscription (All 14 Languages): $199

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on Babbel language learning software, and it’s a lifetime subscription at that. Babbel lets you practice with 10-15 minute bite-sized lessons, and Babbel uses speech recognition technology to keep your pronunciation on point. And, it comes with 10,000 hours of online language education. That lifetime subscription is $199 through our deal, and it covers all 14 languages.

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Document Collaboration That Doesn’t Need the Cloud

Andrew Orr ·

Collabio Spaces is an interesting new office suite that allows for document collaboration without needing external servers. Unfortunately it requires a subscription, but could be a useful tool for sensitive documents.

The P2P software lets multiple people co-edit a document locally — from a mobile device or desktop computer — without A) the risk of uploading sensitive information to the cloud (i.e. as you must if you’re using a shared document function of a service like Google Docs); or B) the tedium of emailing a text to multiple recipients and then having to collate and resolve changes manually, once all the contributions trickle back.