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Friend of mine, a smart journalist, had his iPad stolen. He couldn’t help that — the thief broke into his house. But his private, personal data wasn’t stolen, exactly. Donated, more like. He had no passcode set on the iPad. All his email, calendar, address book, and work documents were free for the taking. Oh, [...]
Unsettling developments, on several fronts:
We’ve seen cyberwar declared before, but the one playing out in Egypt is my own candidate for World Web War I. Hosni Mubarak fired the first shot, switching off the internet and mobile phones after crude attempts to block Twitter and Facebook fell apart. The web fought back in ways we haven’t seen before, and [...]
Updated 2:30 pm near bottom of post, to clarify recipient of a letter from Yahoo’s lawyers.
After writing my last post on the way McAfee took me for a ride – charging me for five years of license renewals after I uninstalled its software – I heard pretty quickly from Francie Coulter, McAfee’s Director of WW Consumer Public Relations. On the plus side, there was no bluster. She apologized and offered [...]
Here’s a little story about an inattentive customer and the price of inattention. I play the sucker. The company that takes me for a ride is a surprise casting choice: McAfee, a reputable security vendor. McAfee’s anti-virus software is an industry standard, even if reviewers have been saying since last year that Microsoft’s free alternative, [...]
One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can’t bring your laptop, or don’t want to. But working on somebody else’s machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails. Even if you keep your files on a portable drive, Windows [...]
“Social engineering,” the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology. We all know (right?) about the scam emails that inform you of a surprise inheritance or lottery win. Recently I came across a surprising variation: a scam that deliberately targets folks [...]
Man, I love Bruce Schneier. Here’s a pithy, pitch-perfect summary of your relationship with Facebook:
In an earlier post, I speculated that DropBox and TrueCrypt could be a killer combination — a painless way to keep confidential files encrypted while taking advantage of online backup and synchronization. I’ve been trying this out for a while now, and these two free tools work very well together. You’ll need an hour or [...]
The Wall Street Journal, which has been doing great work on Internet privacy, has a disturbing piece today on the way online data companies build “profiles” of your intimate life — even if you try to stop them by deleting browser cookies. The disclosures are not entirely new — Wired, for example, has done good [...]
