He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings "loaner" devices, which he erases before he leaves the US and wipes clean the minute he returns . In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi , never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery , for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, "Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop." -
Travel precautions in the age of digital espionage.
posted by Artw
on Feb 13, 2012 -
125 comments
10 years ago yesterday, The
ILOVEYOU or LOVELETTER computer worm successfully attacked tens of millions of Windows computers in 2000 when it was sent as an attachment to an email message with the text "ILOVEYOU" in the subject line.
Mefi Was There that day when Onel De Guzman released a virus that he had proposed creating as part of his undergraduate thesis.
The BBC Looks Back. The key part of the virus was not any technical trick but the wording of the subject line - ILOVEYOU - and its attachment LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.
posted by Blake
on May 5, 2010 -
28 comments
Your Old Crap Website -
This blog is to celebrate the time when web design wasn’t limited by web standards and convention, and when the office geek was given full reign to set up the website on his own since the bosses probably couldn’t see the point in having one.
posted by Artw
on Apr 24, 2010 -
45 comments
Cybersyn (or Synco, in Spanish) was computer network constructed in 1970 by an English/Chilean team headed by cyberneticist
Stafford Beer (his
papers). Cybersyn was an electronic nervous system for the Chilean economy, linking together mines, factories and so on, to better manage production and give workers a clear idea of what was in demand and where. The network was destroyed by the army after the 1973 coup. Later that year Stafford Beer drew upon the lessons of Cybersyn to write
Fanfare for Effective Freedom, a eulogy for Allende and Cybersyn, and
Designing Freedom, a series of six lectures he gave for CBC, outlining his ideas. Besides the first link in this post, the best place to start is
this Guardian article from 2003. If you want to go more in-depth, read Eden Medina's
Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. And if nothing else, just take a look at the amazing
Cybersyn control room.
posted by Kattullus
on Mar 21, 2010 -
32 comments
Beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned. -
Glenn Greenwald.
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Apr 7, 2009 -
102 comments
Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism. "My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Oct 26, 2008 -
67 comments
Google rolls out
Mail Goggles, designed to prevent drunk or otherwise impaired emailing by forcing you to answer basic math questions. And no, it's not April 1st.
posted by mattholomew
on Oct 7, 2008 -
67 comments
Before RSS and personalized aggregators such as
Personalized Google and
NetVibes, there was
CRAYON, a service that allowed you to "CReAte Your Own Newspaper" by providing a page with links to chosen sources. [mi]
posted by divabat
on Mar 28, 2007 -
11 comments
NSA,FISA, and Privacy It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web.
If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here:
But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine .
And by now we all know that
Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available,
then here is a workaround
posted by Postroad
on Jan 20, 2006 -
16 comments
Interesting "New Yorker" article about online extortion via DDoS attacks. Call me naive and underinformed, but I had little understanding of how this works.
"In the most common scenario, the bots surreptitiously connect hundreds, or thousands, of zombies to a channel in a chat room. The process is called “herding,” and a herd of zombies is called a botnet."
posted by dersins
on Oct 7, 2005 -
34 comments
Ain't this grand? Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.
posted by sunexplodes
on Jun 15, 2004 -
43 comments
Google To Start Selling Banner Adverts From the that-didn't-take-too-long-department, Google's ad sales VP Tim Armstrong says Google will now start selling graphical banner adverts. One concession to their old mores is that, for now, the banner adverts will only appear on affiliated websites running their
AdSense referral program (as does MeFi), and there is an opt-out. However...
"We have no plans to show images on Google.com", said Mr. Armstrong
"but we are not opposed to it".
posted by meehawl
on May 12, 2004 -
27 comments
A new MS Internet Explorer vulnerability is discovered. Most digerati already know about the spammer and lamer trick to publish URLs that look like legitimate hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people's PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to "resetting" their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com.
Today's new IE vulnerability is significantly worse. By including an 0x01 character after the @ symbol in the fake URL, IE can be tricked in to not displaying the rest of the URL at all. Don't expect a patch right way, the guy who found the hole
released it to BugTraq on the same day he notified Microsoft.
(via Simon Willison)
posted by dejah420
on Dec 9, 2003 -
29 comments
Skype, a new P2P Telephony service from the people who created KaZaA.
[more inside]
posted by davehat
on Sep 23, 2003 -
16 comments
Happy 20th Anniversary, Internet! We ought not to let pass unnoticed the... 20th anniversary of the Internet. The most logical date of origin of the Internet is January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP.
Where were you two decades ago on this date? And does anyone actually have a "I Survived the TCP/IP Transition" t-shirt?
Also being
discussed on /.
posted by tenseone
on Jan 1, 2003 -
35 comments
The US government recently released a draft of the
National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, essentially it advocates ensuring security through consensus, with vendors, government agencies and consumers taking responsibility for the tools they use. That's not enough for Marcus Ranman who in the
TISC newsletter advocates passing legislation
mandating consumers and ISPs to install firewalls and anti-viral software. At what point does an individuals (corporate or consumer) chosen level of computer security become a concern for the federal government?
posted by cedar
on Oct 17, 2002 -
7 comments
Information gods amongst mortals is the first in a series of three blog entries (so far, anyway) by
Brad Wardell on the topic of the growing knowledge gap between the net-savvy and the non-wired.
I found the link in a newsletter from
WinCustomize today. They plugged all three:
- Information gods amongst mortals
- The
Information Gods respond
- Information
Gods Srike Back
He explores the theory that those who are net savvy are quickly leaping ahead of the non-wired among us: "You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic."
posted by tbc
on Sep 27, 2002 -
12 comments
Is self-regulation a legitimate approach to protecting copyright on the internet? This question is being debated at
Spiked online which has commissioned responses from a variety of sources and also welcomes comments from readers.
posted by anathema
on Sep 23, 2002 -
5 comments
Bait and Switch? (Quicktime Movie) - One of the Mac Faithful at
fury.com makes a funny (but true) statement about the new
.Mac service charge that Apple recently announced. How far can Apple push their core consumer market with this type of thing? In a
News.com report, Apple predicts losing up to
90% of their existing .Mac users. That's some public relations plan. They are indeed thinking differently.
posted by Argyle
on Jul 26, 2002 -
27 comments
First JPEG virus discovered... "The W32/Perrun virus, as it is now being called, extracts data from JPEG files and then injects picture files with infected digital images. A fair warning to those individuals who are fond of sending multimedia files to friends and families." Is everyone's porn stash threatened now?
posted by darian
on Jun 14, 2002 -
28 comments
Etherlinx, plans to offer high-speed wireless access to the Internet at inexpensive prices. (NYT) Without venture capital backing, in a garage just six blocks from the garage where Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak launched Apple Computer 26 years ago, Mr. Holt is making his clever and inexpensive radio repeater by modifying inexpensive Wi-Fi cards, the circuitry that sends and receives the signals. Their ambitious target: the cable and phone companies that currently hold a near-monopoly on high-speed access for the "last mile" between the Internet and the home.
posted by semmi
on Jun 10, 2002 -
2 comments
Globe of Blogs lists weblogs by location (
Portugal, anyone?), title, authors's name, sex, age or birthday (why?). Problem is, the list is scanty at best. Sign yourself up.
posted by rodii
on Mar 17, 2002 -
22 comments
