Fast Company: “…According to the IT security company Check Point Software Technologies, 16,004 Zoom-related domains were registered between late April and today. Con artists are impersonating Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, too. “For people who are in this business of doing phishing schemes, it becomes the scam du jour. What’s popular now? How can I capitalize on something that’s in people’s minds, that they use?” explains Edgar Dworsky, founder of the consumer education website Consume World. “The timeliness and popularity is something they look for.” The videoconferencing platform, after all, has seen its number of daily meeting participants zoom upward to 350 million. Even successfully conning 1% of Zoomers would be lucrative…Getting a message from the videoconferencing platform makes sense when so much of socializing and business happens there every day. That’s the open door for phishing scams….

Today, the security company and network Cloudfare announced a plan to stop your internet service provider from creeping on your web activity. Co-developed by engineers at Apple and Fastly, the Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH) standard works to decouple your IP address from your queries. ODoH is billed as an improvement to the domain name system (DNS)—the process in web browsing that’s roughly analogous to your looking up a name in the phone book and retrieving that person’s number. When you type “Google.com” into an address bar, DNS is what translates that into Google’s IP address (172.217.164.142.)By default, the DNS resolver is typically owned by your internet service provider, such as Comcast or Verizon or AT&T. The plan with ODoH is to insert one more step between the user and the DNS resolver. If you’re wondering why ODoH is “oblivious,” it’s because this additional step—a proxy—keeps the IP address of the user’s machine hidden from the resolver.We don’t really know to what extent service providers use query information, one known application is advertising. (AT&T, for example, says that it may collect information like your age and gender and combine that with your use of their services to deliver ads.) Thanks to a bill Trump signed into law, ISPs don’t need your permission to track and sell that data, either. Although several ISPs have vowed to provide an opt-out option, that’s usually buried under a mountain of jargon. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out some adtech companies admit that they collect data from unnamed telecoms. Perhaps that makes you uncomfortable, in which case, you’re one of the groups of people who might relish ODoH in the near future.