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The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

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11–20 of 51 posts

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#11
post #2

Partial summary: -ESP32 based device that tries to detect bluetooth/MAC addresses of flock cameras and beeps when it does - a Stingray detector that runs on a second-hand mobile hotspot - a device that alerts you about things that are moving approximately with you (AirTags, SSIDs, etc).

Cool, I like the esp idea but won't you have to walk fairly slowly with a default ESP antenna? High gain might be better.. If you're wearing a cap you may not care as much being seem from above vs from the front. Maybe attach a little windspeed meter to the top of the antenna on your hat too ;)

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#12

idk if this is off topic or not because its an ad playing on their channel but wow the non-skippable ad about 'clearing out stuck poop fast' from an ai doctor really added a lot of value to my life before the video rolled. this is what I get for not opening in a browser with ad block. is this what youtube looks like now without ads?

Yes, it's really bad, I see that scam ad constantly. Some even use celebrity deepfakes. Logged-out YouTube ads are 90% garbage like that.

Consider yourself lucky you didn't get the outright pornographic ones for boner pills "my husband fucked me 50 times".

Reporting them does nothing. Google does not care.

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#13
post #10

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point.…

> The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace.

What does this look like in practice?

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#14
post #10

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point.…

Defcon was always the most government-aligned conference. Historically, BlackHat was Defcon's slightly more counter-culture counterpart/foil. These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#15
post #10

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point.…

Defcon was always the most government-aligned conference. Historically, BlackHat was Defcon's slightly more counter-culture counterpart/foil. These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

I think you got them confused, DEF CON is the more counterculture and Blackhat is the corporate conference.

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#16
post #6

Glad this one is getting the "second chance" bump back to the front page. It's great content and it's timely. It's a great video. If you're not inclined to watch the video I'll save you a click to the youtube description and add a bit more detail than the earlier sibling for the devices shown: Simulacra "Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning yo…

>"Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning your real devices in noise so that passive trackers, ALPR add-ons, and co-travel correlators can't reliably pick your signal out of the crowd — while passively watching for the trackers that follow you."

"Oh, it's that guy with the bluetooth spammer."

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#17
post #10

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point.…

> The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them.

Do you have a citation for this? I am not seeing anything on their website and they did not come up to me and demand I sign anything when I was there?

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#18
post #10

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point.…

> The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. What does this look like in practice?

They have a sign similar to the ones at stadiums or events that say recording is in progress and that by being there you agree to be recorded... being here means you agree... not that there is any enforcement but very flocky and thus ironic.

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#19
post #17
post #10

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point.…

> The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. Do you have a citation for this? I am not seeing anything on their website and they did not come up to me and demand I sign anything when I was there?

Last time I was there the only ways to engage with the community were via slack, google groups, github, or discord. All centralized proprietary surveillance capitalism products, and no decentralized/FOSS options.

https://cryptovillage.github.io/ shows nothing has changed.

Re: The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

#20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defcon was always the most government-aligned conference. Historically, BlackHat was Defcon's slightly more counter-culture counterpart/foil. These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

I think you got them confused, DEF CON is the more counterculture and Blackhat is the corporate conference.

While I agree that was the original intention, modern DEFCON is just as corpo but for those that cannot afford blackhat. European hacker cons like CCC are now what DEFCON once was rumored to be long ago.
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