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Cisco to buy network-monitoring firm SamKnows for better last-mile visibility
- mikecoles 3y agoCisco has been moving from their position of a networking powerhouse to that of a surveillance cog.
- 0x0000000 3y agoYeah, synthetic monitoring is totally surveillance.
- tptacek 3y agoTo be fair: RUM is a pretty shady market. (I don't know anything about this particular company.)
- viraptor 3y agoRUM, as in getting samples of timing for the resources requested from your site? What's shady about that? (Or is there some other RUM concept?)
- firebirdn99 3y agoAnother thing, is that viral video recently, where AI was able to give an explanation of the dream, the person said the sonar in Wifi routers can be transformed into showing positions of humans in buildings. Not that recent, actually found an article from Jan this year - https://boingboing.net/2023/01/19/new-study-shows-how-to-use-wifi-signals-like-sonar-to-spy-on-people.html https://boingboing.net/2023/01/19/new-study-shows-how-to-use... Something we should keep in mind.
- igetspam 3y agoWhat do you mean, they clearly spell out how little they collect, in their privacy policy: > The amount of personally identifiable information stored by SamKnows is limited to; name, email, and address. All metadata and personally identifiable information is both encrypted at rest and in transit on SamKnows servers. It is never stored or transmitted to or from the test agent See? Nothing to worry about, just your name, email and address. Very little that could actually pinpoint who you are or where you are. Ref: https://samknows.com/blog/testing-principles https://samknows.com/blog/testing-principles
- oddeyed 3y agoThat is only for people who volunteer to receive our custom hardware and we need the name and address to ship them the unit. For most units we have no name, address or any PII whatsoever.
- igetspam 3y agoThank you for the clarification. The descriptions I'm seeing imply that your telemetry code is embedded in network enabled devices. It's good to know that this data collection only applies to your whitebox.
- oddeyed 3y agoI can understand your concern. Thankfully we have no way of accessing any PII from within an embedded context - all the agent knows is its own MAC/IP addresses etc.
- tptacek 3y agoThat ship sailed a long time ago, didn't it?
- oddeyed 3y agoSamKnows is not surveillance, we generate synthetic traffic for our tests from our test agents. We do monitor byte counters for the WAN interface to tell if someone else is using the connection before we run our tests, but otherwise we can't see any ongoing traffic.
- Doctor_Fegg 3y agoCongratulations to HN user samcrawford, the founder.
- ggm 3y agoThey should buy RIPE Atlas!
- oddeyed 3y agoI work at SamKnows, AMA (I know nothing)
- igetspam 3y agoWhat firewall rules can I put in place to block whatever telemetry my devices are shipping to you?
- iso1631 3y agoPresumably don't enable that feature or don't install the software?
- oddeyed 3y agoMost likely deployment scenario is that the ISP has installed it in their home router, it's not running in their own device.
- oddeyed 3y agoBlock TCP connections on port 80 and 443 to dcs-global.samknows.com
- igetspam 3y agoThank you. I appreciate the response. My ISP can do what they want with their equipment but I prefer anything inside my firewall to not phone home.
- bbno4 3y agoCisco has been slowly moving move into cyber security it seems
- marcus0x62 3y agoSlowly? They started buying security companies in the late 90s. They bought Sourcefire back in 2013. They’ve been at this a while now.
- trollied 3y agoOh, cool. I used to use the site to check DSL availability at exchanges. Looks like they’ve expanded massively since then!