Updated: 2012-10-25 19:16:21
Choice, an Australian privacy group, has released a paper on how to avoid geo-blocking and price discrimination against Australians. Their research has shown that prices, especially on IT purchases, are significantly higher for Australians than Americans, even before considering shipping costs. Using a VPN based privacy service like Anonymizer Universal allows Australians (or anyone else) [...]
Updated: 2012-10-25 15:20:34
Yesterday, this story on Wired was making the rounds: How a Google Headhunter’s E-mail Unraveled a Massive Net Security Hole. Sure, the title is probably hyperbole, but it is an interesting story. At a high level, mathematician Zach Harris noticed that emails from Google – and from several other prominent domains including eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, [...]
Updated: 2012-10-23 20:35:38
The Trusted Computing Group has released a draft version of the new Trusted Platform Module specification for public review and comment: TPM 2.0. Five years+ in development, the spec contains a lot of new material to allow for hash and algorithm agility and enhanced authorization support. (Details of what is included in this new version [...]
Updated: 2012-10-16 00:51:10
Welcome to Anonymizer’s inaugural episode of The Privacy Podcast. Each month, we’ll be posting a new episode focusing on security, privacy, and tips to protect you online. Today, I talk about non-technical ways your online accounts can be compromised, focusing on email address and password reuse, security questions, and using credit card numbers as security [...]
Updated: 2012-09-27 19:05:28
The Washington Post has a good article on social engineering attacks. It is a good treatment of the topic. Short answer, humans are the weak link, and can be defeated with extremely high probability. The take away from this whole thing is that we need to be building security systems that don’t rely on humans [...]
Updated: 2012-09-19 18:19:15
Despite all the work on dual factor authentication and other new security methodologies, in general our passwords are the keys to the kingdom. In many cases, such at ATMs, we are limited to 4 digit numeric PINs. This post to DataGenetics does a good job of analyzing how bad we are at picking PINs and [...]
Updated: 2012-09-11 19:21:05
The New Scientist has an article on the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. It started out as a project to replace the old fingerprint database, but will now include biometrics, DNA, voice prints, and facial recognition. The idea is to database all the mugshots so people can be quickly identified after arrest, or possibly [...]
Updated: 2012-09-11 15:04:27
NBC News is reporting that the iOS UDIDs leaked last week were actually stolen from Blue Toad publishing company. Comparing the leaked data with Blue Toad’s data showed 98% correlation which makes them almost certainly the source. They checked the leaked data against their own after receiving a tip from an outside researcher who had [...]
Updated: 2012-09-06 16:39:19
In the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is “The Dictator’s Practical Guide to Internet Power Retention, Global Edition”. Under the pretext of being a guide on how to crack down on Internet dissent for dictators, it does a nice job of analyzing how the Internet is used by dissidents, and the techniques used [...]
Updated: 2012-09-05 17:10:53
YouTube’s anti piracy filters automatically blocked the authorized video of First Lady Michelle Obama’s convention speech as infringing. Evidently the algorithm automatically looks for content that matches content from their commercial partners. Since all the networks were re-broadcasting the convention speech, it got flagged. This is not the first time this has happened. Wired article [...]
