LinkedIn’s Epic Security And Privacy Fail

LinkedIn released a new version of their iOS app a few days ago that includes a feature named Intro. It’s an interesting feature, integrating LinkedIn data to your emails. But the way they’re doing it is a spectacular fail. When you enable it, they add a profile to your iOS system that proxies all of your email through their servers. Yeah, they send your mail to them, scan it, modify it, then send it back. They claim it’s encrypted for privacy, but really, that’s a really lame claim since they’ve got to decrypt it in order to scan and inject their content in to it. Do we really need to go over all the ways that this is a seriously bad idea? I’ll leave it up to the reader (all two or three of you, based on traffic stats) to decide whether or not you want a third party to have access to all of your electronic correspondence. It’s not like the NSA couldn’t put hooks in LinkedIn’s servers or anything.

I’ve deleted the app and won’t install it again. I’ve also checked my settings to make sure there are no additional profiles installed. If you want to see if it’s got its hooks installed, go to Settings->General->Profiles. If there are any LinkedIn profiles, delete them.

Here is a link to their official uninstall instructions.

Moving Everything To A New Server

Everything should be running now. I upgraded the hardware that this, and the rest of my domains are hosted on. More RAM, faster CPU cores, and faster disk. Moving was pretty painless, though I’m still finding a few small behind the scenes things that have no impact on the Internet visible services. Next up is moving domains to another registrar and getting IPv6 enabled here…

First Painting Class

For our anniversary, Heather gave me some art books and some painting supplies. I’ve been reading them and experimenting with mixing and blending on some paper, but decided to step it up a little. Michael’s does beginners painting classes in the evening, so I signed up for the floral class. What few supplies I didn’t have were purchased in advance, and I was ready to go. The class was very enjoyable, and I learned quite a bit about basic techniques. I also discovered that some of the paints that I had weren’t that good. The reds and yellows just didn’t want to play nice when blending. I shouldn’t have gotten brown out of a 2:1 ratio of ultramarine blue and cadmium red light. Using the instructor’s better quality red and my blue produced the desired color, so it’s definitely my red. I had a few other issues like that, all with the lighter or more transparent colors that were fixed by using some of the instructor’s paints. The end result looks pretty good, though I can see that I’ve got a lot of work to do on my technique, as well as some upgrades on paints and brushes. I’ll definitely be taking a few more classes because this is a heck of a lot of fun!