91
votes
Accepted
Does Sci-Hub use malware and phishing to obtain researchers' login credentials?
The claim in the article that people who go to the Sci-Hub website are "very vulnerable to having their credentials stolen" is completely baseless, since Sci-Hub never asks for credentials ...
- 46.4k
87
votes
Accepted
Are Americans more likely to be killed by vending machines than terrorist refugees?
Yes those numbers appear to be correct.
The Cato instituted published "Terrorism and Immigration
A Risk Analysis" in September 2016. From that report:
NPR article on the chance of winning the ...
- 7,134
80
votes
Accepted
Does Melania Trump's security cost double the National Endowment for the Arts' budget?
His sources check out
The only piece that makes this questionably true is because it's not just for Melania, but the entirety of the Trump family.. See below for the NBC citation. @Chapmanchapman ...
- 30.8k
78
votes
Are Americans more likely to be killed by vending machines than terrorist refugees?
According to US Citizenship and Immigration Service webpage Refugees & Asylum, last updated in 2015:
Asylum status is a form of protection available to people who:
•Meet the definition of ...
- 108k
65
votes
Do four random common words make a stronger password than passwords like "Tr0ub4dor&3"?
It is true that you do not need numbers, special characters, etc for a strong password. If you instead increase the length of the password, the entropy will increase as well. See for example this ...
- 52k
65
votes
Were Facebook employees unable to enter their own building to fix router problems, during a recent (six hour) outage?
It took "extra time" to get onsite.
From Facebook's report about the outage:
...these facilities are designed with high levels of physical and system security in mind. They’re hard to get into, and ...
- 6,094
36
votes
Did US prohibit the export of the mere description of a cryptographic algorithm?
Part 121
The United States Munitions List Enumeration of Articles
Sec. 121.1 General. The United States Munitions List.
...
Category XIII--Auxiliary Military Equipment ...
(b) ...
- 108k
31
votes
Does Melania Trump's security cost double the National Endowment for the Arts' budget?
This claim is currently unproven.
According to a Snopes article written today, which rates this claim as unproven, Chapman cited the CNN article linked below as his source for the security cost and he ...
- 4,084
22
votes
Accepted
Have ATMs across the US "spat out money" in the second half of January 2018?
Brian Krebs (noted and respected infosec analyst and blogger) reported this on 27th Jan.
27
Jan 18
First ‘Jackpotting’ Attacks Hit U.S. ATMs
ATM “jackpotting” — a sophisticated crime in ...
- 3,053
20
votes
Accepted
Is there any evidence that laptops in airplanes might be used for terrorist attack?
Your title and body ask different questions, but in Somalia last year, a bomb disguised as a laptop was used to attack a plane: 'Sophisticated' laptop bomb on Somali plane got through X-ray machine
...
- 308
19
votes
Did US prohibit the export of the mere description of a cryptographic algorithm?
Actually, it looks like books with crypto algorithms were excluded from such exporting licensing requirements; in the Karn case:
The ODTC [Office of Defense Trade Controls] determined that
the ...
- 63.6k
14
votes
Do the "Presidential Alerts" give the government full access to all phone functionality?
The presidential alerts are part of a bigger system that also includes AMBER alerts and alerts for bad weather and "other threatening emergencies". These alerts are called Wireless Emergency Alerts (...
- 32.7k
14
votes
Were Facebook employees unable to enter their own building to fix router problems, during a recent (six hour) outage?
As Robb Watts' answer states, Facebook has acknowledged this was part of the problem, so we know the claim is true. ("...it took extra time to activate the secure access protocols needed to get ...
- 1,137
13
votes
Does Sci-Hub use malware and phishing to obtain researchers' login credentials?
Does Sci-Hub rely on stolen credentials from unwitting researchers? Yes, at least in part. This is confirmed by Alexandra Elbakyan herself, although she also claims that Sci-Hub isn't the one ...
- 1,021
13
votes
Did US prohibit the export of the mere description of a cryptographic algorithm?
Have a look at the case Bernstein v. United States
In the early 1990s, Daniel J. Bernstein created the Snuffle encryption system. He wanted to publish it in an international conference. However, ...
- 231
13
votes
Do four random common words make a stronger password than passwords like "Tr0ub4dor&3"?
There is no single right answer to how much entropy a password has: the result will depend on the assumptions the attacker will make about it, and these are unknown. More or less reasonable guesses ...
- 2,437
12
votes
Does aluminum foil safeguard your credit card from RFID attacks?
Yes.
Duo labs (security vendor) says on https://duo.com/decipher/labs-presents-whats-happening-with-rfid-blocking-gear
It turns out standards for testing these RFID-blocking devices actually ...
- 6,275
12
votes
Accepted
Did Sean Spicer tweet a password twice in two days?
The White House acknowledged that the tweets were made, calling them "pocket tweets."
As for their content, WaPo speculates that they're two-factor authentication codes which he sent back to the SMS ...
- 46.4k
11
votes
Was John Podesta's email password "password"?
(With analysis thanks to Oddthinking)
Assange seems to refer to this leaked email from Podesta's assistant Eryn Sapp to him, which contained an username and password for him to use. (This was not ...
- 46.4k
9
votes
Accepted
Did Seth Rich give Wikileaks the DNC leak emails?
This is answered in the question that @jwodder mentions. Snopes did an analysis of a closely related question. I think the answer is no and I'm confident Snopes would agree, based on their answer. ...
- 7,410
8
votes
Is there documented evidence that George Kennan opposed the establishment of NATO?
David Mayer's 1990 book George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy has the most detailed account on Kennan's view on that that I could find, albeit a lot of that is paraphrased (pp. 152-155):
...
- 63.6k
7
votes
Was John Podesta's email password "password"?
The current accepted answer has a number of errors, so I'm creating this answer. Thanks to comments by Avery and Oddthinking for some resources.
The source of this claim is apparently a Fox News ...
- 1,074
7
votes
Accepted
Has Telegram decrypted user messages and provided them to a gov agency?
As far as we know, the police did not go to Telegram and ask them for the data.
Vice (Germany) states - based on non-public papers by the LKA - that the police got the data directly from the phone ...
- 52k
7
votes
Is illegal immigration down since construction began on Trump's wall?
You know that Larry David gif when he made the "I can't make sense out of it" gesture?
This is the thing. The claim in linked article is unquoted. Yet on FoxNews you can, again without a quotation ...
- 2,765
6
votes
Do the "Presidential Alerts" give the government full access to all phone functionality?
This isn't a complete answer to your questions, but I'd like to point out that the government doesn't need access to the E911 chip to locate you. Traditionally mobile phone networks were switched ...
- 170
6
votes
Accepted
Was Steve Bannon's appointment to the National Security Council done by mistake?
Various news organizations are reporting about Trump not being fully briefed about the order, among them Fox News, The Independend, or the New York Mag.
The original source for the claim seems to be ...
- 52k
6
votes
Are Americans more likely to be killed by vending machines than terrorist refugees?
According to this analysis on CrossValidated.SE, we don't really know.
The first problem with this data is non-stationariness. These numbers hold only if the number of refugees and vending machines ...
- 2,437
5
votes
Did Seth Rich give Wikileaks the DNC leak emails?
tl,dr: No. Assange also hasn't said that he's the source.
Various news outlets report like Slate that Julian Assange suggested that Seth Rich gave the documents to Wikileaks. I will start with my ...
- 33.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Do many people write down their safe combination?
People write down passwords. We all "know" it or have done it, but since this is skeptics stackexchange, I looked for "evidence". I found a paper from 2011 where researchers watched the password ...
- 698
3
votes
Did Facebook allow Netflix, Spotify, and the Royal Bank of Canada to read users' private messages?
Facebook admits that four outside entities (Spotify, Netflix, Dropbox, and Royal Bank of Canada) had read/write/delete access to Facebook users' messages.
However, Facebook insists that:
No ...
- 108k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible