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Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
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WHATSAPP: RECENT VULNERABILITIES SPARK UPGRADE TO PREVENT FALSE INFORMATION

According to an article from thehackernews, Whatsapp, the commonly used mobile messaging app which allows users to use wifi to send messages, was found vulnerable to attack via the end-to-end encryption method that Whatsapp uses to encrypt messages. This hole could be used to spread what researchers are calling “fake news”. “Fake news” is any considered misinformation from any credible or noncredible source that at least pretends to be the news. To call something fake news, however, can often be biased as one person’s fake news is another person’s gullable truth. Either way, the idea is that the messages can be altered based on this vulnerability and even the sender can be changed. Regardless of what is considered to be misinformation here, Whatsapp’s own solution is to limit the amount of users a sender can forward a message to.

There is an old game where a group of children stand in a row and one child starts telling a secret and it gets passed down via word-of-mouth. This eventually leads to the last kid having no idea what the initial secret was about. Essentially, this is what Whatsapp is trying to limit. Whatsapp is owned by the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has been in the hot seat recently for various marketing and or privacy breaching tactics. It is important to note that despite being owned by Facebook, Whatsapp doesn’t make headline news very often. With the new update, the team behind the app hope to slow down the spread of viral topics and information, but this tactic will only go so far to ridding the app of fake news and what’s more, I really don’t see how this will reduce the vulnerabilities, just merely put a mask on a potentially serious problem. You can find more information in the articles below.



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