THE FBI IS SPYING ON YOU — BUT THEN AGAIN SO IS EVERYONE ELSE.
By: Martin Muroria
Tags: Blockchain, Social Media, ICO

“I wonder what the FBI agent watching me through my laptop camera thinks about me whenever I cry over a TV show” “I was about to accept a friend request from my high school bully and my tab closed… Gerald, the FBI agent spying on me, is looking out” “Guys, I just sneezed in front of my laptop’s webcam and I kid you not… the FBI Agent said “Bless You”. If that isn’t goals, idk what is”. ‘The FBI are watching me’ jokes are everywhere but is someone really watching you through your webcam? According to documents from

Wikileaks, {WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organisation that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media provided

by anonymous sources} called Spyfiles, there’s a huge surveillance community founded after 9/11 that ‘watches over’ the entire internet.

The spy industry sells software, some of these software’s include trojans

that government agencies can use to take over your phone. They basically

track everything that happens on your Phone, follow your movements,

accompany you to every place you visit, record your text and voice conversations and can even capture video and audio in every room your

phone placed.

As you can imagine technology like this is very useful to security

organizations, companies like FBI, the CIA can use this phone tracking

software’s to target drone strikes in Iraq or Syria, quickly foil terror plots

and even track criminals. Industry experts say their tools are necessary

because terrorists and criminals are communicating online and hiding

behind encrypted technologies

One of the most sophisticated spying software packages named the

FinFisher program, created by a British company identified as Gamma

International is updated into your phone through a ‘fake’ iTunes update.

The company says the spyware is legal and is not being abused but

there’s evidence showing a few regressive regimes such as those in Egypt

and Libya are using the technology to spy on their own citizens with the

sole purpose of quashing peaceful political dissent or even prevent useful

information of the happenings in the society from spreading.

Another famous spyware program called Bundestrojaner nicknamed

‘police favourite’ a legal surveillance program has also been used by

police forces and lower-level authorities for more than a decade. In

Germany, Switzerland and Austria this class of surveillance malware used

against criminal targets became known as ‘Bundestrojaner’ or ‘state

Trojans.

Others spyware programs include: Duqu and Davinci.

This article by WallStreet journal has a catalogue of every spyware

program and it’s scary — http://graphics.wsj.com/surveillance-catalog/

In fact, the hacking subject has become so big that entire governments

are feuding with each other, U.S is feuding with China, Russia and North

Korea. Even the Syrian conflict was fueled by misuse of the internet by

unscrupulous parties.

Companies are feeling the heat too.

Remember that time in 2012 when a house intelligence committee

warned members of the security risks associated with forming close ties

with china and its government. It didn’t take long before smartphone

makers Huawei and ZTE were barred from selling their products to the

U.S government.

FBI director Chris Wray weighed in saying and I quote “We’re deeply

concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is

beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain

positions of power inside our telecommunications networks”

Five years later, nothing’s changed, After heads of FBI, CIA and the NSA

warned American citizens against using products like the Mate 10 and

even services by Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE.

Huawei shot back, accusing the government of sabotaging its business

within the U.S. market. A Huawei spokesman wrote a statement saying “If

Huawei is trusted by governments and customers in over 170 countries

worldwide why not the U.S. Huawei poses no greater cybersecurity risk

than every other ICT vendors on the market.”

Head of Huawei’s consumer business, Richard Yu was visibly agitated at

CES 2018, saying “American phone buyers can’t have the best and widest

choice of device if Huawei products — those of the world’s third-biggest

phone vendor — weren’t on offer. “Everybody knows that in the US

market that over 90 percent of smartphones are sold by carrier channels,” he said. “It’s a big loss for us, and for carriers, but the bigger loss is for consumers, because consumers don’t have the best choice.” He also said Huawei faced plenty of doubters in its native China too, being an almost total newcomer to consumer devices six years ago. “We win the trust of the Chinese carriers, we win the trust of the emerging markets…and we win the trust of the global carriers, all the European and Japanese carriers,” he said. “We are serving over 70 million people worldwide.

We’ve proven our quality, we’ve proven our privacy and security

protection.”

That unscripted rant came after an AT&T deal that would have allowed

AT&T sell the Chinese company’s flagship phones through its carrier’s US

stores fell through last second, seemingly because of political pressure

from US lawmakers who saw Huawei as a security threat.This was a huge blow for Huawei because over 90% of U.S. phone purchases still go through carriers. Hm, I guess I’d be mad too.Spyware softwares are scary. But what about the apps on our phones?Personally, I don’t really mind the FBI spying on me after all the most illegal thing I do is use third party apps to download YouTube videos.

But picture this:

Let’s say you heard Range Rover are launching a new luxury model at the

2018 Motor Show. You head over to Google and search “Range Rover” just

to see details about the car, you check it out and even put it on your

dream board. You close the tab and head over to Instagram and suddenly

right there you see it. A range rover ad.

Now if you’re still living under a rock, you’ll think “Wow what’s happening,

did Instagram read my mind or something?”.

But No. You’re activities are being tracked and it’s called a tracking pixel –

WHAT IS A TRACKING PIXEL?

A tracking pixel is a HTML code snippet provided by a company that tracks

user behaviour on a website. For example, if an ecommerce company wishes

to pay affiliates based on how many items people purchased on their site,

they would need some way to correlate the purchases on their site with the

ads that were viewed or clicked on the affiliate site. There are many different

use cases. The code snippet is placed on the page that is delivered to the end -

user’s browser. This is important since the point of the tracking pixel is to pick

up the end-user’s identification (cookie) not to just transmit the fact that

someone purchased something. The code writes out an <img> tag that is

generally from a third-party domain, like ad.doubleclick.net. The browser sees

the <img> tag and makes a request from the user’s browser to the server,

along with parameters such as the number of items purchased or other data

to identify the user’s action. On the img request the browser passes the user’s

domain-specific cookie id just as it would with any HTTP request. The server

then responds with a transparent 1x1 GIF image, which should not be visible

to the end user.

Pixels are common across most advertising platforms. They’re used to drop a

cookie that will track visitors on your website, so you can advertise to them

later. Facebook used to have a custom audience pixel for retargeting website

visitors, and conversion pixels for tracking website conversions such as sales.

Now I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sit right with me, plus i can’t

cough $70,000 to buy a Range Rover Velar.

All social media companies, have a peak of stagnant growth, this is the

point where the number of new users to the platform starts to slow down

and for some platforms even starts to decline.

During this time, most companies need to start defining their business

model and focus on profitability else they die slowly.

I remember one time where browsing Facebook was literally an ad fest.

Ads were everywhere. I’d sign up for some and ignore most.

What do social media companies do with all our data?Facebook is every advertiser’s go to platform, especially is they need quick results. This is because of its audience segmentation features.

Advertisers can easy target the exact customer they want to sell to.

Whether it’s based on likes or location. Facebook has got you covered.

For example, If you’re Apple accessories manufacturer you can easily

filter out android users and only target iPhone users. Or a pizza company

can easily refine its audience to target only meat eaters and exclude

vegetarians.

While great for marketers, there are many disadvantages with this model,

especially for users like you and me.

1. I personally don’t like my information getting bided on by advertisers,

2. If you’re making +$90 Billion dollars (for Google) and +$10 Billion

dollars (for Facebook) in ad revenue. It only makes sense that I should get

a cut.

3. It’s hard for me to believe my data is private if all I see are ads

following me around.

Luckily there is solution that’s secure and trustworthy- Blockchain

Wikipedia, defines Blockchain as a continuously growing list of records called

blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Each block contains

a cryptographic just as the previous block, a timestamp and transaction data. A blockchain is designed to be resistant to modification of its data. It is thus basically an open distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.

Blockchain is managed by a peer to peer network collectively adhering to a

protocol for validating new blocks. Once recorded the data in any given block

cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent

blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority.

While Cryptocurrency — Is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of

exchange. Cryptocurrency uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to

control the creation of additional units and to verify the transfer of assets.

Cryptocurrency employs a decentralized control as opposed to the norm

centralized banking systems. The decentralized control of each cryptocurrency works through a blockchain.

Sphere.

Sphere was built on the idea that privacy, company transparency, and

data security should be the fundamental building blocks of every social

platform.

The founders believe that the billions of dollars social media and

advertising companies make technically doesn’t belong to them. Because

the date belongs to its users then the revenue belongs to its users too.

Sphere has built a decentralized social network completely based on the

transparency and reliability of blockchain to solve this problem. Basically,

you control all the data on the platform, what people see etc and you also

get compensated for each transaction that takes place. The company has

come up with its own unique cryptocurrency called the Social Activity

Tokens (short for SAT) which users can use for transactions on the

platform.

Scroll to the bottom — to find out how you can score some tokens for

yourself.

Join Sphere and let’s take back the internet.

IMPORTANT DETAILS ON THE UPCOMING SPHERE ICO.

SAT CROWDSALE.

Name of token: Social Activity Token. Symbol: SAT. Token Standard: ERC20

Standard. Decimals: 8. Role of Token: Utility Token. Use for purchase

goods and services on social media platform. Total supply: 1,000,000,000

SAT. Available tokens for sale: 650,000,000 (65% of supply). Emission: All

unsold and unallocated tokens will be destroyed, and additional release

of tokens will not be possible. Period of Sale: 12 February 2018 UTC

21:00 to 9 April 2018 UTC 21:00. Cost of 1 SAT: $0.14. Soft cap/Minimum

Goal: $1.5 million — soft cap goal reached. Hard cap/Maximum Goal: $40

million. Accepted currencies: Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Fiat.

The last ICO starts on March 26, 2018 at 21:00 UTC and ends on April 9,

2018 at 20:59 UTC.

Useful links –

Website — https://sphere.social/

Company Whitepaper — https://sphere.social/wpcontent/uploads/2017/12/Sphere_Whitepaper_v1.7.4.pdf