Tech
How to Set Up and Use a Burner Phone
When you are done with the burner phone, make sure that you get rid of it in a thoughtful way as well. “At the end of the intended use, consider steps to eliminate information, remove SIM cards and/or memory cards, making sure not to leave a potential vulnerability after you,” says Access Now’s Al-Maskati.
Using an Alternative Phone
Depending on your risk model, it may not be appropriate or even the most practical to use a true burner phone. Instead, you may want to consider using an altphone to separate elements of your digital life.
“There is a lot of confusion, because ‘burner phone’ is a generic term,” says Matt Mitchell, CEO of the risk mitigation firm Safety Sync Group. “I usually try to group tactics and advice based on goals. It begins with why a normal phone isn’t good for privacy and then a dial on how private you’re trying to get. The privacy goals are the dial—from safer hygiene, to more secure operating systems, to straight-up locked-down phones.”
For many people, an altphone or “lighter” burner phone is likely to be a smartphone that allows a wide range of communications and access to privacy-enhancing tools such as encrypted messaging apps like Signal, VPNs, online tracker blockers, and more. This way you can tune your personal privacy dial to keep certain web browsing, software use, media consumption, or communication more private and anonymous than it would be on your normal devices.
“What are you trying to protect? If you’re just trying to obscure your phone number from somebody, you can do that in a much lighter way” than using a heavily anonymized device, the ACLU’s Williams says. “But if you’re really trying to go off grid, you have to do all this other stuff.
An altphone may be a smartphone that you separate as much as possible from your identity, perhaps a phone that you only use for attending protests. Or it could be an old phone you repurpose and use for things like traveling. How you set the privacy dial depends on the use case.
“A repurposed phone can be used for an extended period of time,” Cyberlixir’s Vo says. “A repurposed phone already has your traces, even with factory reset. There might be a sales receipt, CCTV log, or someone taking a picture of you talking on the phone. So they are useful for compartmentalizing activities. Work versus personal phone is the most obvious example. Or one for international travel.” Reused devices also retain certain identifiers such as IMEI numbers over time.
Using a smartphone as a second device does have its own considerations. When it comes to mainstream devices, “smartphones do a terrible job at protecting people’s privacy and securing their communications,” says Access Now’s Al-Maskati. “If people obtain a smartphone to use as a burner, it’s best to reset to factory settings, never connect any real accounts (AppleID, Google, social media), and do not sync any other information, as well as disabling unnecessary location and other services.”
You should only use your altphone for its intended purpose—if it’s a phone you want to take to protests, for example, it shouldn’t be used for texting friends or online shopping. As with a true burner phone, you should avoid using it in the same location that you use other devices—in other words, avoid connecting to the same Wi-Fi networks. Don’t turn your altphone on alongside your day-to-day devices and, relatedly, don’t carry them all together unless your altphone is in a Faraday bag. Only provide contact information for the altphone to those who need it.
Whether you’re using a burner phone or an altphone, though, the bottom line is that there are no guarantees or perfect solutions. And if there is absolutely no room for error, go analogue and don’t bring or involve a phone in whatever you’re doing.
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Fueled by unusually warm waters, Hurricane Melissa this week turned into one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Now a new rapid attribution study suggests human-induced climate change made the deadly tropical cyclone four times more likely.
Hurricane Melissa collided with Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island before tearing through nearby Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which reached Category 5, reserved for the hurricanes with the most powerful winds, has killed at least 40 people across the Caribbean so far. Now weakened to a Category 2, it continues its path toward Bermuda, where landfall is likely on Thursday night, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Early reports of the damage are cataclysmic, particularly in hardest-hit western Jamaica. Winds reaching speeds of 185 miles per hour and torrential rain flattened entire neighborhoods, decimated large swaths of agricultural lands and forced more than 25,000 people—locals and tourists alike—to seek cover in shelters or hotel ballrooms. According to the new attribution study from Imperial College London, climate change ramped up Melissa’s wind speeds by 7 percent, which increased damages by 12 percent.
Losses could add up to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
The findings echo similar reports released earlier this week on how global warming contributed to the likelihood and severity of Hurricane Melissa. Each of the analyses add to a growing body of research showing how ocean warming from climate change is fueling the conditions necessary for stronger tropical storms.
Hurricane Melissa is “kind of a textbook example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes respond to a warming climate,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the recent analyses. “We know that the warming ocean temperatures [are] being driven almost exclusively by increasing greenhouse gases.”
The storm has disrupted every aspect of life in this part of the Caribbean.
“There’s been massive dislocation of services. We have people living in shelters across the country,” Dennis Zulu, United Nations resident coordinator in Jamaica, said in a press conference on Wednesday. “What we are seeing in preliminary assessments is a country that’s been devastated to levels never seen before.”
The Climate Connection
For the rapid attribution study, researchers at Imperial College used the peer-reviewed Imperial College Storm Model, known as IRIS, which has created a database of millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks that can help fill in gaps on how storms operate in the real world.
The model essentially runs simulations on the likelihood of a given storm’s wind speed—often the most damaging factor—in a pre-industrial climate versus the current climate. Applying IRIS to Hurricane Melissa is how the researchers determined that human-induced warming supercharged the cyclone’s wind speed by 7 percent.
Tech
Gear News of the Week: Withings Launches Its Pee Scanner, and Samsung Shows Off a Trifold Phone
A few weeks ago, bathroom and plumbing company Kohler debuted the Dekoda, a health and wellness sensor that lives on your toilet bowl and records signs of your gut health and hydration. Now, Withings has launched the U-Scan. First shown at CES in 2023, the U-Scan also sits inside the toilet bowl. A thermal sensor detects when a fresh, er, sample is being deposited. The U-Scan takes a small sample and analyzes it on-site with miniature biochemical sensors inside an interchangeable cartridge.
There are two separate U-Scans. U-Scan Nutrio analyzes your diet, checking for biomarkers like bio-acidity, hydration status, and ketone levels, which shows that you’ve started burning body fat instead of sugar. U-Scan Calci also checks for calcium, which is a sign that you might have kidney stones. Results are then transmitted via Wi-Fi to the Withings app.
The cartridges are replaceable, and the sensor comes with a docking station to clean and recharge the sensor. Purchasing the U-Scan comes with a complimentary subscription to Withings+, the company’s upgraded app, which also includes a free consultation with a nutritionist.
The U-Scan packages start at $380, which comes with one U-Scan, either Nutrio or Calci, one cartridge, and two to four scans weekly (each cartridge lasts about 2.5 months). For more intensive monitoring, the Intensive package includes two cartridges for five to seven weekly measurements. Replacement cartridges are $100 for one cartridge or $180 for two, and Withings sends you the cartridge automatically depending on which package you select. The U-Scan is now available at Withings.com. We’ll be testing it soon. —Adrienne So
Samsung Brings Its Browser to Windows, and Teases a Trifold Phone
Samsung has long offered its own browser on its smartphones—Samsung Internet—but now the app is finally available on another platform: Windows. Considering Samsung makes Windows laptops and Android phones, this move allows folks who use the company’s browser to share their browsing history and bookmarks between phone and laptop, and if you have saved passwords with Samsung Pass, you can use it to autofill passwords on websites.
The company is taking this opportunity to bring some Galaxy AI features over as well, including Browsing Assist, which lets you instantly summarize webpages or translate them to another language. Samsung says its browser also blocks third-party web trackers, and there’s a Privacy Dashboard that lets you see what has been blocked.
Samsung Internet for PC is only available as a beta right now, but anyone in the US or South Korea on Windows 11 or Windows 10 (version 1809 and above) can download it now.
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Climate Change Made Hurricane Melissa 4 Times More Likely, Study Suggests
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