I was sitting in my office at the Guymon Daily Herald one day and I received a phone call from an obviously irate citizen.“I just want you to know I’m going to sue you and your newspaper,” said the person on the other end of the call.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve been threatened with a law suit and so the statement didn’t really scare me.
On social engineering, rootkits and Easter eggs
Infosec blog When I explain what I do to Spanish friends and neighbours in my faltering Castilian, people often ask me about malicious hackers. It’s very often hard to explain that the viruses they receive in their email are most likely random attacks. A PC is, after all, very personal so it’s easy to symphatise with people who take cyber-attacks personally themselves.
With questions swirling about the safety and privacy of its teenage user base, MySpace.com has tapped Microsoft executive Hemanshu Nigam to be its first chief security officer.
Nigam, who currently serves as director of consumer security outreach and child safe computing at Microsoft, will join MySpace.com on May 1 to oversee safety, education, privacy and law enforcement affairs.
I get burned up when I see public surveillance cameras referred to with the term “Big Brother” as in this news story.
Referring to cameras such as those described in the article in this way trivializes actual totalitarianism. I don’t buy every factual claim in the story, but it’s clear that such cameras can do a lot of good, and they violate nobody’s rights.
Anonymizer has gone live with a service that aims to circumvent Chinese censorship restrictions.
The online identity protection firm has released software (initially available at xifuchun.com, an English language site) designed specifically for Chinese citizens, that offers a way around the web filters put in place by Beijing.
More needs to be done to convince the British public that their personal details are adequately protected online.
A YouGov survey of 2,000 UK punters found that two in three (65 per cent) were uncomfortable with the idea of allowing organisations to share personal details in order to offer federated services. For consumers, federated services would offer the convenience of carrying out online transactions with different sales and service organisations after logging in only once to a trusted entity, for example their bank.
Sometimes, the most mundane events can lead to unexpected insights.
That’s what happened last weekend when I stopped my car for a red light.
My daughter had flown in from California a few days before the start of a business conference in Princeton so she and I could spend some time together.
