Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads.
Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.
Tag Archives: security
Upgrade or else!
WordPress 2.3.3 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained
How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking
This is the story of how the UK banking system could have collapsed in the early 1990s, but for the forbearance of a junior barrister who also happened to be an expert in computer law – and who discovered that at that time the computing department of one of the banks issuing ATM cards had “gone rogue”, cracking PINs and taking money from customers’ accounts with abandon.
The Register: How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking
Firefox and Sharepoint
Being a dedicated Firefox user, one of the few things that was still thwarting me was SharePoint. We use SharePoint internally for a ton of stuff, and it was a drag to have to fall back to that other browser. SharePoint pages look and work fine in Firefox, but I was having to reauthenticate on every single page, which really hindered my enjoyment of the experience.
I finally figured out how to get Firefox to do NTLM, which means I don’t have to deal with the authentication dialogs, thereby reducing my dependence on IE
Blocking Ads with a Hosts File
You can use a HOSTS file to block ads, banners, cookies, web bugs, and even most java scripts. This is accomplished by blocking the Server that supplies these little gems.
In many cases this can speed the loading of web pages by not having to wait for these ads, banners, hit counters, etc. to load. This also helps to protect your Privacy by blocking servers that track your viewing habits.