Rants about corona

I'm sooo fed  up with some of the stuff that goes around corona at the moment so that I decided to revive this dead blog.

There will be rants about the claims around corona, handling of corona, the behavior etc.

I'll put them one topic per post, so that you can enjoy a bit longer! You don't have anything to do anyway, sitting there home in quarantine or doing just social distancing.

In the series scaremongering, now this report

Ok. Apps can have security holes, or they may even exploit the information intentionally.

But a security company publishes a report about security of those apps, saying that more than half of the apps it checked have security problems. 

You might think that this is a bit worrisome, and it would be if they provided some details. As they're a security company, they do have  incentive to list as many findings they can as security problems. Otherwise people might not find their services worth the money!

A threat assessment of 7 million iOS and Android apps

Come on, guys! This sounds a bit like a program from the past which reported each and every cookie as a privacy problem!

Scare mongering

As we all know, publications NEED good headlines to get themselves read, so that they get revenue.

The headlines need to raise the interest. Scaring people is a sure way to get people read the article.

This is one of those articles

How public Wi-Fi puts unprotected users at risk

 Yes, back in the time of gas lamps, the sensitive applications didn't always use encrypted connections (HTTPS et al). But those days are past, the programmers have learned this lesson, at least, and the apps use SSL.

But that wouldn't make an interesting headline, would it?

Swiss initiative to limit immigration might run into legal problems

On 9th of February 2014 Swiss voters accepted a referendum to limit immigration. This included also EU citizens, which conflicts with the international agreements Switzerland has made. The vote was very close, only 50.3% of the votes was for accepting. 9000 votes would've tipped the scales.

The campaign was fierce, SVP leading the initiative. As a foreigner living in CH, the campaign looked very shady. Hate mongering against immigrants was constantly happening.

Now the courts will have a look if the campaigning was racist, and whether the referendum should be declared invalid. Article inTagesAnzeiger

Let's see how SVP will spin this. Certainly they start screaming "the will of the people", but I really hope this will set some limits on how racist the campaigns can be.

Shoot the messenger!

Well, if not shoot, at least put him in jail.

That happened to a computer scientist in India, who exposed that the security of the India's voting machines are not as good as they should be.

Cool, instead of actually fixing the problem, put the troublemaker in jail!

Accident

Very sad news. 23 youngsters died in a traffic accident last night. A bus ran into a lorry carrying paper rolls (not your usual toilet rolls, but rolls that weight 700kg (1400 pounds).

The youngest one was 12 yrs old.

I wonder why they didn't transport that paper using railroads? They have
perfectly good, modern railroad running from where the lorry started to the place it was heading to.

Anyway, read the article here