Source: Privacy Guides
https://www.bespacific.com/the-usas-censorship-and-surveillance-plot-is-working/
Privacy Guides sits down with technology journalist Taylor Lorenz to decipher a slate of bills – including KOSA, the SCREEN Act, the App Store Accountability Act, and ongoing efforts to repeal Section 230 – being fast-tracked through Congress which threaten free speech, privacy, and your right to freely access information on the internet. There are more resources put together by @FightfortheFuture at https://www.badinternetbills.com covering these bills. Check out their site and contact your representatives while you listen to this interview! Guest: Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz (she/her) Hosts: Nate Bartram (he/him), Jonah Aragon (he/him) Writer: Nate Bartram Editors: Nate Bartram, Jordan Warne (they/them) Executive Producer: Jonah Aragon
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Abstracted from beSpacific
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Subject: Medicare.gov to deploy ID.me for beneficiary verification
Source: Fedscoop
https://fedscoop.com/medicare-gov-deploy-id-me-beneficiary-verification/
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has tapped ID.me to verify the identities of beneficiaries on Medicare.gov, according to a Tuesday announcement from the identity-proofing company.
ID.me will be available as an option for identity verification and sign-in on Medicare.gov starting in early 2026, per the release. The deal adds to the growing number of federal programs opting to use the digital identity service that leverages facial recognition technology and has been the subject of some controversy in the past.
Already, ID.me is used at 21 federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs, per the release. Opting in means an ID.me user could sign in with the same credentials at any of the other federal, state or private-sector entities that use the service, the company said in a statement to FedScoop.
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In 2022, then-Democratic leaders on the House Oversight Committee said ID.me had downplayed wait times for users applying for unemployment benefits with the IRS. The same year, civil rights organizations called on state and federal entities to halt use of ID.me, citing concerns that facial recognition technology disproportionately impacts people of color and marginalized communities.
Subject: FBI Couldn’t Read Data Pointing to Pipe Bomb Suspect
Source: Newser
https://www.newser.com/story/380465/fbi-couldnt-read-data-pointing-to-pipe-bomb-suspect.html
Cellphone data that proved crucial in the arrest of the suspect accused of planting pipe bombs on the eve of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot sat disregarded for four years, the Wall Street Journal reports, “because investigators couldn’t figure out how to read it.” That changed only recently, when a technically adept law-enforcement officer wrote custom software to decode the location data provided by T-Mobile, unlocking the trail that led to 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. in Northern Virginia. After Dan Bongino became FBI deputy director in March and ordered a review of the case he had once declared an “inside job,” agents reexamined old material, including the dormant T-Mobile data, per the Journal.
Source: Krebs on Security
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/12/most-parked-domains-now-serving-malicious-content/
Direct navigation — the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser — has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of “parked” domains — mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites — are now configured to redirect visitors to sites that foist scams and malware.
When Internet users try to visit expired domain names or accidentally navigate to a lookalike “typosquatting” domain, they are typically brought to a placeholder page at a domain parking company that tries to monetize the wayward traffic by displaying links to a number of third-party websites that have paid to have their links shown.
A decade ago, ending up at one of these parked domains came with a relatively small chance of being redirected to a malicious destination: In 2014, researchers found (PDF) that parked domains redirected users to malicious sites less than five percent of the time — regardless of whether the visitor clicked on any links at the parked page.
But in a series of experiments over the past few months, researchers at the security firm Infoblox say they discovered the situation is now reversed, and that malicious content is by far the norm now for parked websites.
“In large scale experiments, we found that over 90% of the time, visitors to a parked domain would be directed to illegal content, scams, scareware and anti-virus software subscriptions, or malware, as the ‘click’ was sold from the parking company to advertisers, who often resold that traffic to yet another party,” Infoblox researchers wrote in a paper published today.
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