All the excitement in the computer business lately has been about the free upgrade to Windows 10 that Microsoft has offered to owners of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 computers. Free is good. We all love to get free stuff, and getting free stuff from Microsoft, well, it’s really special.
But let’s take a look at the operating system that has always been free, Linux, in its many flavors and distributions. Currently the ...
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There are really two stories here. The first is about how your Gmail account should become smarter about what you consider to be SPAM, as well as what you consider to be desirable email. We are talking about a system actually learning your personal individual preferences over time. For instance, I get a lot of email newsletters and marketing emails in my Inbox, ...
According to security experts polled in a recent Google Study, the two best ways to stay safe online are to keep your operating system and applications patched by running updates when prompted, and by using a password management tool, such as LastPass. 32% of security professionals said that running updates was the most important and effective security practice.
Unfortunately, ...
Continue Reading →This spring I bought a new Kia Forte that came with a whole lot of electronic goodies including Bluetooth synchronization, voice command, and driver programmable features galore. And evidently, the potential to be hacked.
This is old news now, but security researchers were able to hack a Jeep Cherokee through the on-board Internet connectivity feature called “UConnect.”
Continue Reading →“They were able to change the temperature of the air conditioning, turn on the windshield wipers and blast the wiper fluid to blur the ...
Last week we talked about the impossibility of keeping secrets over the long term, the liberation of secret information by groups or individuals who just wanted the secrets exposed. A close cousin, conceptually, is privacy. At this point, there is no privacy anymore, not really.
Time was when your life was largely unknown, and privacy was an easy thing to have. But this is ...
Continue Reading →Hacker movies are one of my favorite genres, and have been for a long time. Go figure. One of my favorites from the “olden days” is the 1992 movie “Sneakers.” In this movie Robert Redford and his merry band of cybersecurity testers are tasked with the recovery of a mysterious “black box” which basically can solve for any type of encryption that was in use at that time. At one point in the movie the blind hacker discovers ...
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EMV or “chip and PIN” cards have a much higher level of security built right into the card, and have been in common use in Europe for over a decade. For some reason (too expensive to implement? Really?) the United States has continued to use the horribly insecure magnetic stripe credit card, which is why exploits like the Target Christmas card breach are even possible.
On October 1st, the United States will FINALLY join ...
Continue Reading →On Monday we looked at the origins of TOR, and on Wednesday we looked at how TOR works. Today we tackle some of the vulnerabilities that have been discovered about TOR.
So just how did the FBI beat the anonymity of TOR? The story is a complicated one, and has not been fully revealed by the FBI. Although in the case ...
Continue Reading →This is the second of a three-part series of articles about TOR. On Monday we took a look at the surprising origins of the TOR network. Today we will be taking a look at how TOR works.
To use TOR, a person just needs to go to The TOR Project , and download an install the TOR web browser. Then it makes sense to read the TOR warning document. The rules include:
TOR or The Onion Router is one of the greatest anonymizer services available on the Internet, and allows anyone to use the Internet without revealing their source IP address, and through that, their location. Yet as recently as last November, when the FBI took down the Silk Road server and arrested its operator , and Interpol followed up with the seizure of 400 Dark Web marketplace sites and the arrest of ...