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#31
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On 12/10/2018 11:50 AM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
if you're not logged in you can use Chrome without any problems. And if you're logged in and you don't want that, you can log out I just stay logged in to Chrome when I want to be me, and use Firefox when I want to be incognito (with javascript on-off button, StopAllAds, and cookie/history delete button extensions). And for good measure I have Firefox delete everything on exit. |
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#32
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
In article , default
wrote: Just because the phone appears to be turned off, doesn't mean it is. yes it does. Anyone can download an app that can turn it into a surveillance device. they could, but they'd have to launch it for it to take effect. I figure that the alphabet agencies can do the same thing remotely without having physical possession of the phone. no they can't. |
#33
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On 2018-12-10, Frank Slootweg wrote:
lew wrote: On 2018-12-09, Ken Blake wrote: On Sun, 9 Dec 2018 20:18:10 -0000 (UTC), lew wrote: And no one mentions that a person has to login to a google account in order to be able to use the Chrome browser? Not true. I don't like and don't use Chrome, although it's still installed here from when I tried it. So to test what you said, I just started Chrome, *without* logging into a Google account. No problems at all. Do you have Chrome installed on win10? For several years, after Chrome was installed, when I start Chrome there is a prompt to login to Google BEFORE Chrome would work. On top of that, it was difficult to uninstall as Google did a lock on being able to be deleted; had to do the "take ownership" bit to delete it. However the latest ver that was hiddenly auto installed by an app was easily deleted 'naturally'. Chrome did not require me to login on my tablets as the tablets are already signed on to Google. You could delete Chrome/Google, download Chrome & install to see if you need to signon before use. No need for all that. As Ken said, if you're not logged in you can use Chrome without any problems. And if you're logged in and you don't want that, you can log out: Click your name-icon ('(F)' in my case) in the upper-right - 'Syncing to your account email addres - You're now on chrome://settings/people which says: "your icon your name [Turn off] Syncing to your mail address" - 'Turn off' - 'Turn off sync and sign out?' - 'Turn off'. Done. Thanks for the info. Just downloaded & installed the "latest" Chrome. Now the name icon only prompts for sync which I didn't do. Chrome still need something for the user to use a "blank" page as the home page. Also the clearing of data for the session should have something for the user to exit instead of backing into the settings page/display. |
#34
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 19:52:11 -0500, nospam
wrote: In article , default wrote: Just because the phone appears to be turned off, doesn't mean it is. yes it does. Anyone can download an app that can turn it into a surveillance device. they could, but they'd have to launch it for it to take effect. Once it is on the phone the phone can be remotely monitored it doesn't require that the app be launched. yes it does. You don't understand how microprocessors work. The android operating system (any/every OS) is programmed into a chip. It is not carved in silicon, it is in a "protected" area of memory, but it can be accessed and modified. The processor chip has to (it is a requirement) to allow for something called interrupts where it is told to break the routine it is running and go off and do something else. That is done on a "machine level" (totally ones and zeros in registers - memory locations- that makes little sense to humans) It would be child's play for someone (with the knowledge) to integrate a few snippets of code that runs in the background and never alerts the operator (malicious code does it all the time - the processor doesn't know the difference) The phone doesn't have an on-off switch, it has a pushbutton that sends a request to the processor to send it into a hibernate state. (that is what "off" is to you) The battery is still connected and still feeding a trickle of power to the processor. The uP can wake itself periodically to check some variable (like sound, light, movement, etc.) It can go to sleep and wake up for a few microseconds every second or less with minimal change in battery drain. As long as the battery is connected and charged, the phone is not off, it is just hibernating and waiting for a button push. The company you bought your phone from, programs them wirelessly using wireless capability already built into wireless phones. They don't open them up and tinker with the guts - they are sales people and wouldn't know how, but they do know how to access your phone and activate it even if they don't know what activation entails. I program controllers that use all the same things a cell phone does. I needed a device to behave differently (refuse to come on when it was dark out). I just had it wake itself every 15 minutes and check the light and when it sensed enough light it would allow the operator to turn it on and become active. The operator didn't know what the processor was doing only that it didn't do anything when it was dark. That could just as easily been a sound and I could program it to check for noise every second and it would still get plenty of sleep time and not drain the battery... A cell phone can do the same things and you would never have to know about it. It could, for instance, record every conversation nearby and store it digitally in a compressed format, time stamp it, stamp the GPS coordinates, etc.. I could have it wait until it was by a wifi, or cell phone tower, and dump the recorded conversations in one fast burst transmission. Even if the phone was in a faraday shield it could still be recording and only phone home when it was let out. Minimal battery drain too.... I know you'd like to think that apps need permission and all, and IF the people vetting the apps are doing their jobs that is true. But you can't check the app yourself to see if it is doing what it claims. That's where the spy apps you can buy operate. Most of them need physical access to a cell phone to put the app on them, but once it is on there, it can hide it's operation from the OS and the operator. And when was the last time you read the boiler plate legal statements laughingly referred to as "privacy statements?" You can often find the legalese written in such a way as to allow, just what they seem to be telling you they would never do. A team of Philadelphia lawyers might understand privacy statements but they are often written to obfuscate, not enlighten. The feds can do pretty much the same things, without even having the phone anywhere nearby; as long as it is communicating with cell towers or wifi. They are using the same technology that the cell phone company uses to program your phone. Most folks get their phone and look at the pretty screen and think, "how nice it has the weather." That weather app knows your GPS location and it can just as easily tell someone where that phone is, if it is part of it's program. Nearly all apps have the ability to "update." Every time you turn the phone on, or periodically, it may be checking for dozens of app updates and sending your location back to someone else. Data mining companies are big business, there's money in it. You, my friend, are a guppy swimming in shark infested waters and are blissfully unaware of it. Anecdotal and Off Topic: I consider myself pretty damn smart, but I've learned long ago that there will always be someone smarter than me, and "If I can think of it, someone else already has." My wife was complaining about hard butter - as is my usual bent, I started thinking of how I could have perfectly spreadable butter at any room temperature. The obvious choice would be a butter dish with a Peltier module heating or cooling it as necessary to maintain one temperature. I started sketching then remembered "If I can think of it, etc.." I went on-line and sure enough someone was selling Peltier controlled heated/refrigerated butter dishes. MOdify the statement: "If you can think of it, someone else already has, AND THEY HAVE DONE IT." Now those guys who have decoded the Neanderthal DNA, are just a stones throw away from creating an actual Neanderthal person. Or are they still a stones throw away? (and why create a living being just to study them) I laughed at my old man when he told me that TV sets would one day be worn on the wrist just like the old comic strip "Dick Tracy" showed. I knew TVs' were huge heavy things that could never fit on a wrist, yet we have them today. Still don't have his anti-gravity scooter, but some folks are building quad copters a person can pilot... Technology changes faster than people adapt to it. |
#35
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 14:26:01 +0000, "David B." "David
wrote: On 11/12/2018 13:14, Mayayana wrote: "David B." "David wrote | Even if you/we THINK that a device is 'off' it COULD still be in | communication with an outside entity. | I know my Tracphone is off when I turn it off because the charge will last for months and it can't get calls. It could certainly have some kind of beacon in it, but that seems very unlikely. It only cost $10. I don't know about Android and iPhone, but I'm guessing that people think off means the screen is black because few people actually turn them off. It should be simple enough to test, if you can stand not to use your phone: Power it off. How long does the battery last? Can it receive calls? If it's actually off the battery should last and it won't get calls. If it's active it has to ping the network continually to receive calls. Unfortunately, these news reports rarely tell us facts. Just gossip. The NYT says 75 companies are spying. Which companies? Which apps? They had to find out for their article, but they won't tell us because the NYT supports business and naming names would rock the boat. So they just report gossip that people will later forget. Similarly, how does the FBI spy? The people who talked to KTRE must know, but they've left out the actual facts. The article author is mixing up facts. I suspect the author actually didn't understand the topic. "Even when it's off!" "Any recently manufactured phone is a tracking device!" Yes. We knew that. People use GPS. Years ago Apple was caught storing plain text files on iPhones, documenting weeks of location data. The news would be how the FBI is getting the data. Malware? Stingray fake cell towers? There may be enough Stingrays in use that everyone is tracked by the the FBI, local police, Chinese hackers, and Google research. Who knows? But the news media are not telling us the actual facts. They probably have no one on staff who can even understand the facts. Thank you for your comments. There's no way for anyone here to KNOW the truth. shrug The only way to be sure is to disconnect the battery. I pulled apart a cell phone (someone had dropped it in the lake and it was trash) There was a second battery in it but it looked like a non-rechargeable one so it is probably similar to the bios battery in a computer. |
#36
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 09:41:23 -0500, nospam
wrote: In article , Mayayana wrote: "David B." "David wrote | Even if you/we THINK that a device is 'off' it COULD still be in | communication with an outside entity. | I know my Tracphone is off when I turn it off because the charge will last for months and it can't get calls. It could certainly have some kind of beacon in it, but that seems very unlikely. It only cost $10. exactly. if your phone was transmitting to some outside entity, the battery would be dead within hours. That's only true if the phone is fully functioning. It could still record audio with just a tiny smidgen of the power it takes to receive and transmit. Compress the audio and transmit in a burst and you'd never know it by the battery capacity. you would definitely notice a dead battery when you turned it on, or tried to. if it received a call or text while 'off', you'd definitely know something unusual was going on. You wouldn't know if a background program was running. The uP is always on. In a well designed secure system it is only supposed to be checking the power button every few milliseconds. But off and hibernate are not the same thing. The little controllers I like to use have: sleep, nap, rest, and hibernate. They all save the battery life, but there is no such thing as off. The different sleep states are just there because some functions can be programmed to run while the thing is sleeping... It only shuts down when the battery drops below a certain level, that's an automatic function designed to prolong battery life, but I can tell it to ignore that feature and let it run until it hasn't got enough energy to function. Not a good practice with rechargeable batteries but acceptable for disposable batteries or super capacitors - the chip only does what it was programmed to do. and there's still the question how a phone that's off can be remotely turned on by some magical signal that is received by a radio that's off. I don't know about Android and iPhone, but I'm guessing that people think off means the screen is black because few people actually turn them off. you guess wrong. people are well aware of the difference between sleep versus fully off. people don't turn off their phones because if they did, they would not be able to receive calls, texts and push notifications. it would also take a minute or two to boot if they wanted to use an app or call/text someone. It can be on and still act as if it is off. You have no way of telling without some pretty sophisticated test equipment, and even then, if I thought it may be monitored I'd find a way for it to hide all activity until the threat passed. they also might be listening to music, podcasts or internet radio with the phone in their pocket, screen off. The condition of the screen doesn't indicate what the phone is doing, it is just there so the operator can tell what it wants you to know or allow you to do. |
#37
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 09:44:03 -0500, Wolf K
wrote: On 2018-12-10 19:52, nospam wrote: [...] if it hasn't been launched, it's not running, so it's not tracking anything, and if the phone is off, nothing is running and no tracking can occur. [...] You're right if by "off" you power off. However, AFAICT, most people just press the off button, which blanks the screen and stops a few apps, but leaves the phone powered on, so that they can receive calls/texts. After all, that's why they carry the phone. I rarely power off my phone. A charge lasts about two days in simple off mode. When I've activated Bluetooth, it lats about one day. Best, Not even off is off. The processor just sits there and periodically wakes up and checks the condition of the push button to see if someone is trying to turn it on. From a design point of view, if the processor uses just a few micro amps of current in the off state I'll let it decide when the button is pressed. The battery capacity is on the order of thousands of milliamp hours for the sake of argument say your cell phone is one amp/hour, and you need 1 micro amp to monitor the condition of the on-off switch it will take a million hours to discharge the battery. Check my math, but that's about 114 years! The battery would self discharge sooner, the cell phone would be obsolete sooner, and the original owner would be pushing up daisies. Up that to 25 micro amps while in a surveillance mode (not unreasonable) and the battery life is cut to ~5 years. Now, if you want Video, pictures, gps, and second by second real time surveillance it should be noticeable to most people. But a lot has to do with the way you do it and how current and complete the data you are collecting has to be. A clever software designer will find ways to maximize the battery life with various tricks in hardware and software. If the person uses the phone or keeps it on for incoming calls, you'd never notice the difference surveillance adds. If your phone is a 3G tablet computer, your battery is probably going to be in the 3,000 milliamp/hour range. The hand held phones are in the 500-1000 range last time I checked. |
#38
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
Sadly, nospam, neither you - nor anyone else reading here - has ANY idea
what is or isn't actually installed during the manufacture of ANY electronic device. Even if you/we THINK that a device is 'off' it COULD still be in communication with an outside entity. Believe me! ;-) -- Regards, David B. |
#39
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
"David B." "David wrote
| Even if you/we THINK that a device is 'off' it COULD still be in | communication with an outside entity. | I know my Tracphone is off when I turn it off because the charge will last for months and it can't get calls. It could certainly have some kind of beacon in it, but that seems very unlikely. It only cost $10. I don't know about Android and iPhone, but I'm guessing that people think off means the screen is black because few people actually turn them off. It should be simple enough to test, if you can stand not to use your phone: Power it off. How long does the battery last? Can it receive calls? If it's actually off the battery should last and it won't get calls. If it's active it has to ping the network continually to receive calls. Unfortunately, these news reports rarely tell us facts. Just gossip. The NYT says 75 companies are spying. Which companies? Which apps? They had to find out for their article, but they won't tell us because the NYT supports business and naming names would rock the boat. So they just report gossip that people will later forget. Similarly, how does the FBI spy? The people who talked to KTRE must know, but they've left out the actual facts. The article author is mixing up facts. I suspect the author actually didn't understand the topic. "Even when it's off!" "Any recently manufactured phone is a tracking device!" Yes. We knew that. People use GPS. Years ago Apple was caught storing plain text files on iPhones, documenting weeks of location data. The news would be how the FBI is getting the data. Malware? Stingray fake cell towers? There may be enough Stingrays in use that everyone is tracked by the the FBI, local police, Chinese hackers, and Google research. Who knows? But the news media are not telling us the actual facts. They probably have no one on staff who can even understand the facts. |
#40
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On 11/12/2018 13:14, Mayayana wrote:
"David B." "David wrote | Even if you/we THINK that a device is 'off' it COULD still be in | communication with an outside entity. | I know my Tracphone is off when I turn it off because the charge will last for months and it can't get calls. It could certainly have some kind of beacon in it, but that seems very unlikely. It only cost $10. I don't know about Android and iPhone, but I'm guessing that people think off means the screen is black because few people actually turn them off. It should be simple enough to test, if you can stand not to use your phone: Power it off. How long does the battery last? Can it receive calls? If it's actually off the battery should last and it won't get calls. If it's active it has to ping the network continually to receive calls. Unfortunately, these news reports rarely tell us facts. Just gossip. The NYT says 75 companies are spying. Which companies? Which apps? They had to find out for their article, but they won't tell us because the NYT supports business and naming names would rock the boat. So they just report gossip that people will later forget. Similarly, how does the FBI spy? The people who talked to KTRE must know, but they've left out the actual facts. The article author is mixing up facts. I suspect the author actually didn't understand the topic. "Even when it's off!" "Any recently manufactured phone is a tracking device!" Yes. We knew that. People use GPS. Years ago Apple was caught storing plain text files on iPhones, documenting weeks of location data. The news would be how the FBI is getting the data. Malware? Stingray fake cell towers? There may be enough Stingrays in use that everyone is tracked by the the FBI, local police, Chinese hackers, and Google research. Who knows? But the news media are not telling us the actual facts. They probably have no one on staff who can even understand the facts. Thank you for your comments. There's no way for anyone here to KNOW the truth. shrug -- Regards, David B. |
#41
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
In article , David B.
wrote: Sadly, nospam, neither you - nor anyone else reading here - has ANY idea what is or isn't actually installed during the manufacture of ANY electronic device. false. Even if you/we THINK that a device is 'off' it COULD still be in communication with an outside entity. nope. if it's off, it *cannot* be communicating with an outside entity. period. Believe me! ;-) no. |
#42
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
In article , Mayayana
wrote: "David B." "David wrote | Even if you/we THINK that a device is 'off' it COULD still be in | communication with an outside entity. | I know my Tracphone is off when I turn it off because the charge will last for months and it can't get calls. It could certainly have some kind of beacon in it, but that seems very unlikely. It only cost $10. exactly. if your phone was transmitting to some outside entity, the battery would be dead within hours. you would definitely notice a dead battery when you turned it on, or tried to. if it received a call or text while 'off', you'd definitely know something unusual was going on. and there's still the question how a phone that's off can be remotely turned on by some magical signal that is received by a radio that's off. I don't know about Android and iPhone, but I'm guessing that people think off means the screen is black because few people actually turn them off. you guess wrong. people are well aware of the difference between sleep versus fully off. people don't turn off their phones because if they did, they would not be able to receive calls, texts and push notifications. it would also take a minute or two to boot if they wanted to use an app or call/text someone. they also might be listening to music, podcasts or internet radio with the phone in their pocket, screen off. |
#43
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
In article , David B.
wrote: There's no way for anyone here to KNOW the truth. shrug yes there is, and it ain't from you. |
#44
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
"David B." "David wrote
| There's no way for anyone here to KNOW the truth. shrug | Speak for yourself. That's the first refuge of the lazy: "They got ya comin' n' goin'." "Who can keep up?" "If you worry about [x] you'll never be able to [z]!" |
#45
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Firefox SECRETLY storing your login credentials?
On 11/12/2018 07:34, default wrote:
On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 19:52:11 -0500, nospam wrote: In article , default wrote: Just because the phone appears to be turned off, doesn't mean it is. yes it does. Anyone can download an app that can turn it into a surveillance device. they could, but they'd have to launch it for it to take effect. Once it is on the phone the phone can be remotely monitored it doesn't require that the app be launched. yes it does. You don't understand how microprocessors work. The android operating system (any/every OS) is programmed into a chip. It is not carved in silicon, it is in a "protected" area of memory, but it can be accessed and modified. The processor chip has to (it is a requirement) to allow for something called interrupts where it is told to break the routine it is running and go off and do something else. That is done on a "machine level" (totally ones and zeros in registers - memory locations- that makes little sense to humans) It would be child's play for someone (with the knowledge) to integrate a few snippets of code that runs in the background and never alerts the operator (malicious code does it all the time - the processor doesn't know the difference) The phone doesn't have an on-off switch, it has a pushbutton that sends a request to the processor to send it into a hibernate state. (that is what "off" is to you) The battery is still connected and still feeding a trickle of power to the processor. The uP can wake itself periodically to check some variable (like sound, light, movement, etc.) It can go to sleep and wake up for a few microseconds every second or less with minimal change in battery drain. [snipped for brevity only] What a wonderful post! :-D Thank you for educating 'nospam' (and many others too, I'm sure!) -- Regards, David B. https://vxer.home.blog/2018/12/08/vxer-a-profile/ |
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