Technology

So the past few years I have actually seen several “fake news” story’s posted in various places. It’s not as huge of a thing as it’s currently being made out to be but I have seen several people fall for them. It’s just a learning experience of to be critical of news sources from everywhere.

In my experience Google+ only had a few satire/fake stories spread, Facebook several more and Voat (a Reddit alternative I frequented for a while) had a ton of them.

The most common hoax/satire websites I’ve seen posted on Google+ and
Facebook are:
CBSnews.com.co (Hoax notice .co domain)
National Report (Hoax/Satire website)
Tribune Herald (Satire)
The Daily Currant (Satire)

The worst of were the fake CBS news site and National Report which sometimes post hoax news stories that were very well setup to be believable. If readers didn’t look further to more ridiculous content, they could be easily fooled. With the Tribune Herald and the Daily Currant some of their satire is based on recent news that sometimes confuses people.

The craziest hoaxes I saw were posted on Voat and the domains appear to now be dead. I think the sites talked about run by teenagers from the Republic of Macedonia might have used that for a testing area. The English that appeared to have been run through Google translate was always a good indicator to me.

At any rate, this is all just a lesson to be critical of your news sources. Before sharing a link, look at the URL to see if it’s copying another site. If it’s too crazy to be true, it just might not be true. If the spelling is atrocious, it might also be a hoax but it might just be a demonstration of editors missing from modern news rooms.

Threat: New iPhone exploit discovered by the FBI.
Solution: Keep sensitive information encrypted on other devices.
URL: http://thehackernews.com/2016/03/fbi-iphone-unlock_28.html

The FBI has recently dropped it’s case against Apple after it found it’s own way to unlock the dead terrorists iPhone 5c. Currently experts suspect the technique involved NAND Mirroring (a technique used to copy the contents of the phone’s NAND memory chip and flash a fresh copy back onto the chip when the max number of attempts is exceeded) but the FBI is not revealing the details of it’s technique.

One thing I do know is that once an exploit is out, it’s difficult to keep it secret. Now that the FBI has this method to unlock encrypted devices, it won’t be long until people with bad intentions also learn similar techniques. In general to protect your personal information I would recommend keeping as much of it off of your portable device as you can and to use multiple security layers when possible.