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.
Kenneth Van Wyk wrote an article for itmanagement.earthweb.com in which he tried to assess the level of vulnerability of Google android and Apple Inc. iPhone OS.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict Google’s Android mobile phone platform is going to prove itself to be more secure than Apple’s iPhone in the long run.
Go to the article.
PC World posted a very useful article about tips on protecting your privacy on Facebook.
Avoid Facebook Disasters
Ignoring Facebook’s privacy options–some of them fairly new and not well known–can trip up the social-networking site’s users in a number of ways. Here are some that everyone who has a Facebook account should be aware of.
Read the full article here.
