#library security

According to the library, hackers demanded $35,000 in the electronic currency Bitcoin -- but the library refuses to pay. Instead, it'll wipe the entire computer system and reset it, which could take days or weeks.

PARIS: In April 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, two men arrived at the library of the University of Tartu, in Estonia’s second-largest city. They told the librarians they were Ukrainians fleeing war and asked to consult 19th-century first editions of works by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, and Nikolai Gogol. Speaking Russian, they said they were an uncle and nephew…

To make sure the library staff and the public are safe, the Westland Library Board has been asked to consider hiring a security guard for the William P. Faust Public Library

Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text.

I am not joking; Adobe is not only logging what users are doing, they’re also sending those logs to their servers in such a way that anyone running one of the servers in between can listen in and know everything,

But wait, there’s more.

Adobe isn’t just tracking what users are doing in DE4; this app was also scanning my computer, gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on my hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers.

In. Plain. Text.

And just to be clear, this includes not just ebooks I opened in DE4, but also ebooks I store in calibre and every Epub ebook I happen to have sitting on my hard disk.

Source: Nate Hoffelder - The Digital Reader

This is great! And by great I mean terrible in so many ways it fills me with glee.

Adobe is tracking everything you read all the time, even stuff you don't open with Adobe DE4 (in comments, people say DE3 and earlier don't have this "feature")

This is totally separate from their need to connect to a server for DRM purposes, which is bad enough.

Adobe is sending it to its server in plain text, meaning anybody sitting around with Wireshark running on a library open network could pick up everything everybody in the room is reading

A book nerd blogger broke this news, not libraries or a librarian, even though we spend a lot of time and money on ebook platforms that require the use of Digital Editions

There is already somebody in the comments complaining that their library makes them use DE, so isn't this the library's fault too?

So what is the internet, really? It is not magic, although it tries hard to look like it. We don’t talk about the physical aspect of the internet often until something breaks, but understanding how the network works is key to understanding all the very many ways it is possible to lose your privacy on the internet.

Remember when I said library computers were gross?  The US Secret Service is investigating shared hotel computers for keyloggers.  The method used by the hackers in this case was far more complicated than it would take to do the same thing to library computers.