Yeah, its not unreasonable that you’d have a remote way to access the device to gather debug data with the customers consent. An SSH key in the firmware is a flexible way to do that, so long as there are good controls in place to ensure that it isn’t misused.

I think multiple people already have access to the databases that store the data the device sends. I don’t really care whether they get the data from the device itself or from the database.

Similarly, I think multiple people have the ability to make changes to the firmware build and the systems that distribute it. So those people already have the potential ability to gain access to the device.

One person or multiple people having unauthorised access are both unacceptable. I’m saying that the users have to trust the companies ability to prevent that occurring, and that therefore this particular technical detail is mostly irrelevant

I’m 90% sure it is not a single user. I just don’t see how that really affects the security of the product, given that the company that sells it can already do the things the author is saying can be done if you have this key.

To be clear, I wouldn’t buy this. I just don’t think the SSH key makes it any worse than it already was

A shared account doesn’t mean everyone who works there has access to it, or that those who do have access aren’t subject to some type of access control.

The article basically goes on to say that the existence of this key makes a huge difference to the security/privacy of the product. It argues that using it, someone could access data from the device, or use it to upload arbitrary code to the device for it to run. However, those are both things the user is already trusting the company with. They have to trust that the company has access controls/policies to prevent individual rogue employees doing the things described. It seems unreasonable to say that an SSH key being on the device demonstrates that those controls aren’t in place.

The email address attached to the public key, eng@eightsleep.com, to me suggests the private key is likely accessible to the entire engineering team.

This assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the authors argument that this is a big deal.

It’s not that you change the passwords for each website often, it’s that you use a different password for each site. That way if one site gets hacked and your password is leaked, it can’t be used to access your accounts on other sites.

It’s a quite entitled view to take that they should make an effort to pass the project on. It would be very hard to build sufficient trust in a new developer quickly, and passing it on without that trust would be undermining the trust that users of the projects have placed in this dev. If I were him, I wouldn’t be staking my reputation on finding someone to take over from me if there wasn’t already an obvious candidate.

The successful fundraiser you mention looks to have had a target of $12k USD (from: https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/divestos-is-unsustainable-needs-community-support-we-sent-250-and-you-can-help-too/6660, the original page has been taken down), and was as a alternative to them taking a full time job. I’d say its a reasonable bet that money was spent on living expenses, and IMO $12k a year is much less than this level of skilled work is worth. It’s certainly not enough money to make it unreasonable to shut down the project a year later, and I doubt anyone who donated feels shortchanged by it.

How exactly is it hashed? There aren’t that many possible phone numbers, so it might be viable to just try every valid number until you find one that matches

Blaming Spotify for this is like blaming the company that made your TV for showing you ads that are part of the broadcast. Unless Spotify makes the specific podcast you’re listening to, they’re just playing you the content someone else made, including the ads they included in that content.

It’s marked solved, but since OP didn’t post the solution:

-e uses basic regular expressions, where you need to escape the meta-characters ((|)) with a backslash. Alternatively, use extended regex with -E

$ echo a | grep -E "(a|b)"
a
$ echo a | grep -e "\(a\|b\)"
a
$ echo a | grep -e "(a|b)"
$ echo a | grep -E "\(a\|b\)"

Changing DNS isn’t the same thing as a VPN. Your traffic isn’t “tunneled” over DNS, it just changes which server your devices use to look up IP addresses. Your ISP can still see quite a lot, particularly if you’re using plain DNS rather than DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS.

DNS = Domain Name System. This is used to lookup an IP address (e.g. 123.234.54.32) from a domain name (e.g. lemmy.ml). A DNS query is one of the first things your computer does when you visit a site.

Plain DNS is unencrypted, which means that anyone with the ability to read your requests (e.g. your ISP) can see the names of sites that you’re visiting.

TLS = Transport Layer Security. This is a protocol that’s used to create an encrypted connection between your device and another one, in this case the DNS server. When this is used, the content of your DNS requests is hidden. Your ISP can still see that you’re talking to the DNS server, but not what you’re saying to it.

TLS also allows your device to cryptographically verify the identity of the DNS server. Without it, someone with the ability to modify your connection could change the responses from the DNS server. That would allow them to send you back the IP address of a server they control, rather than the real servers IP.