Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

Updated: 05 May 2025 • 427 episodes
podcast.firewallsdontstopdragons.com

A Podcast on Computer Security & Privacy for Non-Techies

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05 May 2025 • EN

Disable Your MAID

As we learned last week from Zach Edwards, our smartphones have a globally unique mobile ad ID, or MAID, that is automatically associated with everything we do on our phones... unless we take explicit steps to turn this off. Today I'll tell you how this works and why you should disable this insidious form of tracking.

66 min
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01:06:23
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Data brokers are out of control. While we think of them gathering data in order to target us with ads, they can actually use the targeted ad system (real-time bidding) to collect vast quantities of personal information. It's a very shady business and the primary players are trying hard to obfuscate what they're doing.

74 min
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01:14:22
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21 Apr 2025 • EN

Travel Insecurity

Going through border security today - even just returning to your own country - is not at simple and stress-free as it should be. The likelihood of our digital devices being searched by a border agent has increased in recent years and political sensitivities today can be high. Our devices have access to a ridiculous am

65 min
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01:05:30
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14 Apr 2025 • EN

Life on the Blue Team

It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, even with cybersecurity. But defending a business, of any size, against cyber threats today is hard. Like, really hard. Defenders have to succeed every single time; attackers only need to succeed once. And then your company makes the headlines. Today we'll delve into the wo

65 min
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07 Apr 2025 • EN

Differential Privacy

When we collect a lot of personal data, say via the US Census, the goal is to glean important aggregate information and statistics, while somehow preserving the anonymity and privacy of the individual respondents. There's a rigorous mathematical process for doing this - that's actually not that hard to understand - cal

72 min
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01:12:05
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31 Mar 2025 • EN

Microscoping Our Apps

We've been installing apps on our smartphones for almost two decades now. The iPhone and Android app stores kicked off in 2008 and we still, to this day, have no real way to know what's in them. It turns out that most apps are an amalgamation of software libraries and development kits from various third party vendors,

70 min
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