February 19, 2018
Oh snap!! As we all know – Karma loves to strike back. And according to a post from Fortune – it is on its way to hit the head of the FCC – Ajit Pai. The FCC’s inspector general is investigating whether Ajit Pai, the agency’s chairman, improperly used his power to benefit Sinclair Broadcasting. The television conglomerate has pushed its local news stations to run commentary segments that praise the Trump administration, and is currently seeking a merger which would vastly expand its reach. As reported by the New York Times, the investigation is focused on Pai’s decision to relax rules limiting the ownership of television stations by a single company. Pai reinstated a technologically obsolete rule known as the UHF discount, giving some television stations less weight in calculating whether a single owner exceeds a legal cap limiting its reach to 39% of the U.S. population. That rule change effectively creates a loophole that would allow Sinclair’s planned $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media, which would put Sinclair stations in 72% of U.S. households. That would represent a historic level of media consolidation, which has long been criticized as a threat to healthy democratic discourse. Despite the spread […]
February 4, 2018
“Google knows quite a lot about all of us. No one ever lies to a search engine. I used to say that Google knows more about me than my wife does, but that doesn’t go far enough. Google knows me even better, because Google has perfect memory in a way that people don’t.” —Bruce Schneier, cybersecurity expert In the internet era, consumers seem increasingly resigned to giving up fundamental aspects of their privacy for convenience in using their phones and computers, and have grudgingly accepted that being monitored by corporations and even governments is just a fact of modern life. Except of course if they are using a VPN from us – our Hidden WiFi VPN Router will always protect your privacy and information. In fact, internet users in the United States have fewer privacy protections than those in other countries. In April, Congress voted to allow internet service providers to collect and sell their customers’ browsing data. By contrast, the European Union hit Google this summer with a $2.7 billion antitrust fine. To assess the internet landscape, the Gazette interviewed cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Belfer Center […]
January 20, 2018
The Story Here, at Hidden Router, we know that being online is part of daily life, with Wi-Fi hotspots, mobile internet, and broadband connections spanning almost all of the US and other developed countries. While this gives us an overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips, it also exposes surprisingly large amounts of our personal information to the rest of the online world and demolishes our online privacy. Depending on the websites and services you use, all manner of data from your browsing habits through to your birthday, address and marital status can be harvested from your online presence. Protect yourself – get the Hidden WiFi VPN Router now from our store, and protect your entire household! Even if websites, connections and devices you use do their best to hide your personal information, there are still a myriad of risks to your online privacy; we’ve selected seven to watch out for over the next 12 months. Web Tracking Browse the web for any amount of time and you’ll notice adverts following you from site to site that are filled with products you may have been looking at earlier. That’s because you’re being tracked. Website cookies have historically been used to […]
January 11, 2018
Encryption technology has reached a stage where even government agencies like the FBI don’t have the technology to unlock hidden data. In fact, it’s mathematically impossible to break many advanced forms of encryption, regardless of technology or available budget. While the world’s most well-known investigation authority is tasked with providing the US government with crucial intelligence information, it is struggling to follow up on investigations due to advances in data encryption. As reported by Reuters this week, the FBI was unable to crack over 7,800 devices that contained information the FBI considered vital to ongoing investigations from 2016-2017. The agency has been given legal authority, by the courts, to try and access the data on these devices, but they were simply unable to do so because of the high-level encryption used to protect the information. FBI director Christopher Wray delivered these statistics in an address at the International Conference on Cyber Security. While unpacking the challenges facing the bureau, Wray maintained that the FBI supports advances in encryption and information security. However, that has become a double-edged sword that is making the FBI’s life increasingly difficult: “We face an enormous and increasing number of cases that rely heavily, if not […]