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Critical Steps When Your Email Is Breached

Filed under: October 12, 2009

These are extra steps everyone should take at least once a year, or during situations where an account may be compromised:

[Read the full article] over at http://information-security-resources.com


Justifying Mass Surveillance: A Fallacious Myth

Filed under: March 04, 2009

“Regardless of whatever safeguards may have been implemented to safeguard your personal information, it’s a question of when — not if — said data will end up being corrupted or lost.”

From infopackets


Passwords Are Not Broken, but How We Choose them Sure Is

Filed under: February 20, 2009

Bruce Schneier has posted some interesting thoughts (well, everything he posts is interesting, but this is especially so to me) about passwords and their role.

“[...]As computers have become faster, the guessers have got better, sometimes being able to test hundreds of thousands of passwords per second.[...]“

“[...]My advice is to take a sentence and turn it into a password. Something like “This little piggy went to market” might become “tlpWENT2m”. That nine-character password won’t be in anyone’s dictionary. Of course, don’t use this one, because I’ve written about it. Choose your own sentence – something personal.[...]“

Bruce Schneier from an article published in The Guardian.

Read the full article on Bruces blog


Watchdog Group Slams Google on Privacy

Filed under: June 11, 2007

From washingtonpost.com (via slashdot)

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”


Read the full article at washingtonpost.com

Read the report by Privacy International


Vista, XP Users Equally At Peril To Viruses, Exploits

Filed under: June 01, 2007

From CRN Test Center: (via Slashdot)

“After a week of extensive testing, the CRN Test Center found that users of Windows Vista and Windows XP are equally at risk to viruses and exploits and that overall Vista brings only marginal security advantages over XP.”

Read the full article at CRN Test Center


Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too

Filed under: May 31, 2007

From ars technica:

“…songs sold without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.”


Read the full article at ars technica


Four ways to hide information inside image and sound objects

Filed under: May 22, 2007

From Linux.com:

Ever find yourself with too many passwords to remember and no idea where to keep them so that only you can find the password list? Creating a password.txt file in your root directory is out of the question, as is a password-protected OpenOffice.org file. A piece of paper hidden somewhere is not a good idea, because after you forget where did you put it, someone else will find it and abuse it. Instead of these approaches, consider using steganography, a method for hiding sensitive information inside some other object, typically a JPEG picture or a sound file.


Read the full article at Linux.com


Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to “forget”

Filed under: May 10, 2007

From ars technica (via slashdot):

“If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves,” he writes in the paper. “Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly.”

Read the full article at ars technica


BBC Trustees agree to let BBC infect Britain with DRM

Filed under: May 08, 2007

From Cory Doctorow @ boingboing:

“The Trustees heard that 90 percent of the respondents didn’t want DRM and especially didn’t want Microsoft DRM. But rather than giving the BBC orders to deliver its free-to-air video in free-to-net formats, they gave it permission to sell out the license-fee payers who are required by law to support the BBC.”


Read the full story at boingboing


OpenOffice.org Password Cracker is what you make of it

Filed under: May 01, 2007

From linux.com:

“What do you do if you forget the password to your OpenOffice.org files? The simplest solution is to download OOo Password Cracker, a macro for opening protected documents in any OpenOffice.org application. Using a brute force dictionary attack, OOo Password Cracker provides a slow but reliable method of document recovery. However, the macro requires some preparation if you want to use it effectively.”

Read the full article at Linux.com