Areas of our digital life that should be left open or kept closed
{ Category Archives }
Following several cases of data irresponsibility, namingly government officials “losing” unencrypted classified information, the British Ministry of Defence compiled a document outlining how to prevent confidential information from being leaked to the Internet.
Problem is, that very document has just been leaked to the Internet.
Bummer!
I’ve started using my Microsoft Hotmail Windows Live account again, and it didn’t take a hard look to find 2 reasons why it is vastly inferior to Google Mail:
Way to go Microsoft, Bing! must be a big threat to Google if you’ve put the same attention to detail in developing it.
Update: last week, Microsoft reported that thousands of Hotmail accounts were exposed over a phishing attack. I know better than to click on an email link to log into my account, so it seems that many of those exposed accounts were used to corrupt the Hotmail network, including my own account. I got about 20 spam mail allegedly sent by contacts, and 10 mail sending failure notices to contacts from my Hotmail list. I proceeded to change my password, and it now seems that the Hotmail spam filter is temporarily disabled, letting all the junk mail reach my inbox. I’m sure this is prompting a lot of long time Hotmail users to move to a more serious provider like gMail or Yahoo.
Update: Turns out my vacation reply has somehow been activated, featured the same text I’ve seen on and on, and was set to reply to every incoming mail (which according to Microsoft makes me more vulnerable):
Dear friend,
how were you going? I would like to introduce you an really good space,there are mainly run various kinds of famous electornic products, it’s true charm pioneer.Now the company is under promotion, all of the products are sold nearly as the same as their cost.
Charmpioneer renders the best service to customers, and provides you with original products which are very cheap, but good-quality.
It is really a good opportunity for taking action, let’s go,just do it, and you will fall in love with it.The web address: (www.)brcian.com
Update: Now I noticed that my contact list has completely dissapeared whenever I connect with an IM client.
I have written about the United States National Security Agency contributing to information security (with its release of the SHA cryptographic hash functions) and a set of modifications that can be applied to Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux and BSD.
Now, the United States Defense Information Systems Agency (a division of the Department of Defense), has started running seminars on migrating to open-source software. That’s a pretty strong endorsement for open-source.
Read more on Cnet.com.
One of the facts that made me decide to get an android phone was the availability of KeePass, an open-source encrypted database software that allows to securely keep all critical password and numbers at hand.
Brian Pellin is the volunteer software developer who singlehandedly compiled and maintains KeePassDroid, the android version of KeePass. Being an industrial designer, and having a long experience in graphic design, I contacted Brian on July 12th 2009 to offer some assistance. He replied within 24 hours and I got back to him with an android-specific launcher icon for KeePassDroid, and a few suggestions for fine-tuning the user interface.
What do you know? Three days later Brian was already publishing an upgrade to the software, featuring the GLP’ed launcher icon and the interface tweaks. Now where else do you find software that implements user feedback so fast? Two thumbs up for Brian Pellin and Open Source!
Ubuntu already featured by default security enhancements developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, but version 9.04 of the Linux distribution now brings seamless file encryption for added protection of critical data. When activated, the option automatically mounts the encrypted home folder without asking for a password, and the user can browse and work with files at normal speed. Should the encrypted folder need to be recovered, there is a hash passphrase.
This new feature could prove useful should the computer gets stolen: in case critical data was not already encrypted through Keepass or Truecrypt, the thief won’t be able to read anything from the home folder. File encryption is not virtually unbreakable, so for added security one should combine all those different layers of security.
This should be something mandatory for all government laptops, which are particularly at risk.
