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Displaying items by tag: Privacy

Tuesday, 30 October 2012 06:17

Passwords: A Common Sense Introduction

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Ever have your e-mail account broken into, or your Facebook page vandalized because your 'friend' was able to guess your password? Even if you haven't, here are some basic tips to making your online accounts more secure and less vulnerable to intrusion from unwelcome guests.

Published in Editorials
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Although many think that the dangers of bills such as SOPA and PIPA are dead and gone they are not. In fact far from it and to make matters worse the ISPs are now getting in on the action and playing a role that they were never intended to. To add insult to injury these same ISPs are complaining about the government trying to control them by regulating how they can treat traffic on their networks. Yet we have word from one of our sources that Time Warner is conducting random scans for certain traffic profiles. These scans are looking for certain protocols, file sizes and file types. If they find something that gives a return… well things get a little uglier from there.

Published in News
Saturday, 20 October 2012 10:03

Arrrh! Abandon Ship! The Pirate Hunters are Coming!

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Internet subscribers to AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon have a nasty surprise ahead. Their freedoms online are about to be curbed. Torrent services and other means of downloading or accessing material questionably are being monitored via MarkMonitor. MarkMonitor is a company who has been contracted by the aforementioned Internet Service Providers and interested copy right holders. This conglomeration of big business is known as the Center for Copyright Information. MarkMontior is a firm whose sole purpose is to monitor and report on internet based activity which violates the legal interests of companies such as these.

Published in News
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Since the introduction of Apple’s iADs Apple has been pushing for more efficient ways to track user habits to attract advertising money. In fact during the introduction of iADs Steve Jobs noted that establishing rich ad content was one of the main reasons for moving to HTML5. The demo was mostly lost on the journalists that were present at the event (and those that watched the live streaming) as an ad service is not exactly a selling point to consumers. On top of that one of the methods that Apple used to help advertisers track user preferences for targeted ads, the Unique Device Identifier (UDID), was quickly abused by app developers as well as others to tie a person to a device for tracking and also to scavenge personal information (like contacts). It was a mess for iPhone owners and Apple alike.

Published in News
Monday, 15 October 2012 08:55

SurfEasy Network Outage Explained In More Detail

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Last week we reported on an outage that affected the SurfEasy network. The outage which happened on Monday October 8th lasted about an hour and prevented users from connecting to the service and also appeared to have left existing sessions exposed. SurfEasy has contacted us and given us more information about the outage and the steps they are taking to ensure that the issue does not happen again. For those of you that are not familiar with SurfEasy they are a private proxy network that is accessed through the use of a mobile browser (which is installed on a USB Key). This key has two partitions; a read only partition that contains the browser and a small writable partition for temporary files.  You can read more information about the SurfEasy Privacy key in our review of the product.

Published in News
Monday, 08 October 2012 13:28

Surfeasy private networks fall offline

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The Surfeasy private proxy network suffered an outage today starting around 10:00am and lasted for about an hour. There was no indication that there would be any maintenance or other issues with the network, but the service dropped offline leaving people with active sessions exposed and anyone that tried to connect unable to. Even attempting to connect to the Surfeasy home page resulted in a “This website is offline” error from the Cloudflare hosting service that Surfeasy uses.

Published in News
Monday, 24 September 2012 05:36

Facebook suspends facial recognition tool in Europe

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Looks like an even bigger impact on privacy from Facebook has been stopped, or at least delayed for now in Europe. The facial recognition tool has been suspended due to a recommendation by the Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland, Billy Hawkes, from the last year that Facebook should make some changes first. Even though Hawkes didn’t asked for the tool's total removal it is delayed until October 15 for now. He said that “Facebook is sending a clear signal of its wish to demonstrate its commitment to best practice in data protection compliance.”

Published in News
Saturday, 01 September 2012 10:17

Facebook Cracking Down On Fake Likes... For The Users

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Facebook is facing something of a crisis of identity. Back when the company was still privately held everything looked very solid for the social networking giant to build into a behemoth and then push into the public market raking in even more cash. The reality of the situation was not so bright and cheerful as multiple analysts have commented on. Simply put Facebook did not turn out to be a good initial development for multiple reasons. Still we have to give them credit, they are trying to turn things around and we may possibly see Facebook turn things around financially.

Published in News
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Digg is officially back online and already it is off to a bad start. The newly reinvented page has decided that instead of using their own login procedure they are going to require people to log in with Facebook. This is probably one of the worst things that Digg could have done. Almost anything would have been preferable to using Facebook for the login path. Digg’s excuse of doing this to limit spam is not going to fly with many people either as there are a number of methods to prevent spam and still allow people to setup their own accounts.

Published in News
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Google is not exactly looking good right now. It appears that despite being ordered to delete the data that they illegally captured from people in the UK through WiFi sniffers it put into its street view cars back in 2010. Google originally tried to claim that they did not collect any data. Then after it was proven they did that it was all due to a rouge programmer that did everything without authorization. This excuse did not hold up either when it was shown that people in management not only knew, but approved the collection.

Published in News
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