This is the quick guide for those who do not want to learn a lot of information just so they can use their computers with security and stability.
Use your head. If you want a list of behaviors and practical tips read the Secure Surfing Best Practices, including using the safer web browser and email programs, Firefox and Thunderbird.
Change your DNS to OpenDNS — it’s free and set-it-and forget it protection. You do not even have to register an account, just set your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
Recently we have received numerous communications challenging the warning in our Privacy & Identity Overview (among other places) that Google scans and indexes private email sent from or to any GMail email address.
The claim is not an idle paranoia, but merely a reporting of Google’s own public statements.
"Like most email services, Gmail uses software to scan emails for viruses and to filter out spam. Google uses this same kind of software to scan for keywords in users’ emails which we can then use to match ads. When a user opens an
Just one day after the misleading story run by CTV, CBC News Network covered the chatroulette dot com site in its morning news cycle.
The expert brought forward by CBC did not leave the impression that parents are helpless, but advised them to use “content filtering or monitoring software.”
This is the appropriate advice. Where it falls short is that for the majority of parents “content filtering” means either nothing or “NetNanny,”
The Canadian television broadcaster CTV, recently ran a story about how helpless parents are in dealing with sites such as chatroulette dot com. In its national news broadcast, imitating many global media, CTV put on an expert who suggested that parents have little or no control, as even products such as NetNanny may not exclude chatroulette and in any event are not difficult for kids to circumvent.
This culture of helplessness is not only destructive, it is simply wrong.
The Secure Surfing Organization publicly recommends the use of Anonymizer, primarily for ease of use and the strength of service that comes with a paid subscription.
This example, which Tor acknowledges requires at minimum users upgrade to a new version of software and the creation of new identity keys for the attacked servers, illustrates one of the challenges with relying too much on volunteer systems for your protection.
People have largely accepted that privacy is difficult to protect on the internet, if it they believe it is possible at all. Tips and tools on this site can go a long way to making privacy on the internet much easier than is commonly thought, but far too few people are either aware or care enough to bother acting in their own defense.
Even if privacy on the net is commonly gone, it increasingly looks like nothing is sacred, nothing too extreme, nothing a reach too far to be safe from assaults on privacy.
Recently we wrote about the testimony of senior cable company executives who casually admitted to plans to track television user habits in their own homes.
During November hearings by the Canadian Radio television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC, equiv to U.S. FCC), the CEO of Rogers revealed in an offhand side comment that the company has plans to uniquely identify the activities of television viewers in the future.
The CRTC is holding hearings, primarily concerning the massive content piracy being perpetrated by the country’s largest broadcast delivery undertakings including cable and satellite companies. The breathtaking hypocrisy of these corporate pirates is evident in the testimony of the various pirates during the hearings.
Their argument is this:
Yes, the over the air broadcasters have purchased exclusive rights to exhibit a television series in their market.
They then take that exclusive right and, by broadcasting it free to any consumer with rabbit ears, renounce their ownership rights in exclusive exhibition. according to the major corporations the moment the broadcaster exercises the rights for which they have dearly paid, they lose those very rights.
On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT), Project Honey Pot achieved a milestone: receiving its 1 billionth spam message. The billionth message was an United States Internal Revenue Service phishing scam sent to an email address that had been harvested more than two years ago. More than just a single spam email, the billionth message represents the collective work of you and tens of thousands of other web and email administrators like you in more than 170 countries around the world. Together we have built Project Honey Pot into the largest community tracking online fraud and abuse.
To celebrate this milestone, we sifted through five years of data to learn more about spam and the spammers who send it. Read the rest of 1 Billion Spam Caught
Don’t mistake this discussion as related to “man in the middle” attacks.
Middle man protection describes having a middle man act as your agent in some kind of transaction.
In effect when you subscribe to Anonymizer or Tor you are making use of a middle man for your internet connection. Their anonymous servers sit between you and the web so only their IP address can be identified. Your IP address is not disclosed, with the end server receiving the middle man’s IP address instead.
Similarly, the most effective tool in privacy protection is using a middle man for purchases.
This involves having a third party, such as the Secure Surfing Organization, actually purchase a product or service you Read the rest of Middle Man Protection
Note that the virtual identity is not the same as proactive identity protection which involves carefully seeding and securing your real name on the web.
A virtual identity creates a widespread presence for you that contains intentional structural miscues to disrupt data profilers and identity thieves.
Why does it matter?
If you understand how profiling works, it is based not only on what you post to one account, like Facebook, but on potentially thousands of connections made about you as you use your computer and engage in internet activity. By linking together your Friend chats on Facebook with the articles you read on the web, the forums you join, email messages you send and the purchases you make, profilers can not only identify you personally, but prepare a complete and complex package of data about the things that motivate you, what kind of person you are, your score as Read the rest of Virtual Identities
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