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 a full refund. On the minus …
security
Military Outlaws Blank CDs and Thumb Drives to Prevent Leaks
The Air Force recently issued an order prohibiting personnel from using “removable media on all systems, servers, and stand alone machines residing on SIPRNET,” according to a document obtained by Wired. The penalty for not complying with the order is a court-martial.
You may recall that SIPRNET is the same computer network from which …
Facebook Blocks Moms Due to Excessive Message Posting
It may sound unbelievable that a Facebook group for young mothers would have a near constant volley of messages careening through the popular social network’s series of interconnected tubes, but it’s true! Apparently they like to chat with one another on the order of “35 to 40 messages within a 1.5- to 2-hour period,” according to PC …
Facebook: You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product
Man, I love Bruce Schneier. Here’s a pithy, pitch-perfect summary of your relationship with Facebook:
Social networking websites are “deliberately killing privacy” in order to make a profit, according to renowned security author Bruce Schneier.
Speaking at the RSA Europe security conference in London on Tuesday, the BT Counterpane
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TaintDroid Tattles on Misbehaving Android Apps
Looks like TaintDroid just stole the Worst Recent Product Name award away from the Dell Streak. Once you get past the name, though, TaintDroid (that’s hard to type, even) may turn out to be a valuable app for Android owners.
It’s not quite available publicly yet, but the application will run in the background of an Android phone and
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Twitter Vulnerability Discovered by Australian Teenager
On the subject of the Twitter brouhaha from yesterday, apparently the vulnerability in the site’s code that led to all the pop-ups, worms, and general merriment enjoyed by spammers and hackers was discovered by a 17-year-old Australian named Pearce Delphin.
Apparently Delphin simply posted JavaScript code inside a tweet that caused a …
Twitter Has Been Hacked
You might want to stay off of Twitter.com for a while until this all gets sorted out, but apparently plenty of people (myself included) are finding that simply hovering the mouse cursor over links on Twitter’s site is causing random spam-like popups, retweets, and other bad stuff to happen.
“The Twitter
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Passwords: How To Stop Ignoring The Expert Advice
By now you’ve heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. There’s a good chance you ignore them. Let’s talk about why that is and what you can do about it.
To begin with, it really does matter. Easy to guess passwords (12345, pet’s name, kid’s name, birthdate, etc) really do expose you to snooping and identity …
Security Breach Exposed iPad 3G Owners’ E-mail Addresses
Gawker is reporting that a recent vulnerability on AT&T’s network exposed the e-mail addresses associated with what they believe to be 114,000 iPad 3G owners’ user accounts.
According to the article:
“The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers’ email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to
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Gmail Defaults To https
There’s surely some connection between Google flipping the switch on https access for everyone using Gmail as a default and the China debacle but they likely won’t admit it. Not that they need to but it became quite clear that Gmail accounts had been accessed via third parties yesterday when it was announced that Google might be …
