Archive for the 'Internet Security / Privacy' Category
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Google strives to acquire user data. All those services - Gmail, Earth, Maps, … you name ‘em - are geared to harvest personal behavioral information to “better serve ads to the customers”. G doesn’t even hide its intentions and directly states them in ToS (Terms of Service) pages.
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Posted in Internet Security / Privacy, Mobile / Telecoms, On the Web | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
Похоже, преждевременным был крик об аварии.
Буквально через несколько часов после того, как я самостоятельно восстановил свой старый InboxAlias, повалил непереставая СПАМ. Alias был обычным трёхбуквенным словом и попал под словарную атаку спамеров.
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Posted in Internet Security / Privacy, Mobile / Telecoms, по-русски | Comment on this »
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Внимание!
База данных пользовательских ячеек услуг “024″ и “025″ оператора сотовой связи Голден Телеком в Украине обнулилась. (Обнаружено сегодня, когда это произошло - не знаю, некоторое время не обращал внимания на эту услугу)
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Posted in Internet Security / Privacy, Mobile / Telecoms, Tips & tricks, по-русски | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
Когда-то на каком-то форуме вычитал трюк: как узнать фамилию владельца контрактного мобильного номера UMC. Метод простой, действенный и универсальный (подтверждено на Голден Телеком).
Ну а возможности, открывающиеся у злоумышленника после выяснения персональных данных контракта, очевидны.
Например, сотрудники Киевстар GSM, рады сообщить первому встречному, позвонившему с любого телефона по номеру 044-466-0-466 практически всё о конкретном контрактном подключении, если только позвонивший назовёт фамилию абонента (или - что ещё проще - название фирмы, на которую зарегистрирован номер).
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Monday, September 17th, 2007
Плагиат - одна из штуковин, которыми про-блоггеры пугают начинающих веб-журналистов.
Признаться, было неприятно, попав на страничку, увидеть в самом верху, в качестве основной темы, мой собственный текст (пост о телефонном коде Украины), воспроизведённый точь-в-точь.
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Posted in Internet Security / Privacy, On the Web, по-русски | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 16th, 2007
You’ve probably already noticed how the default WordPress passwords (those generated during install for the admin user) are too short. So you did change yours right after the installation, didn’t you?
Now bad news.
As the system security is always only as good as its weakest link, your well chosen long WordPress password (or was it passphrase?) is no better than the default one.
Apparently it only takes guessing a 32-bit key and an email address for the user in question - secret components of the reset link for WP - to reset a WordPress password into another 32-bit key, the length of the passwords generated by WordPress.
Of course 32 bits isn’t too bad, that’ll take 136 years to try by brute-force all the key space assuming 1 second per try (which is not unreasonable in the web realm). But anyway wouldn’t it be just a little bit more soothing to have all those keys/passwords say 64 bit long?
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Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
A word of caution to those moving their blogs from one installation to another: if you’ve got some posts in your blog “secured” with a password for reading - they may be no longer secure after importing into a new WordPress.
Protected Posts DO NOT preserve their protection on WordPress export/import.
The password field becomes cleared on such entries somehow (not included in export - special XML, WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR - in the first place?).
Beware of Google indexing your protected posts while you tinker about re-closing them down.
Posted in Internet Security / Privacy, Tips & tricks, boring | Comment on this »
Friday, September 7th, 2007
В Google Earth обнаружен “недокументированный секрет” - симулятор полётов - Google Earth Flight Simulator.
Взлёт производится с аэродрома в Катманду и дальше можно лететь куда угодно (при наличии соответствующих пилотских навыков, разумеется).
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Posted in Biking & other fun, Internet Security / Privacy, On the Web, Tips & tricks, по-русски | 4 Comments »
Saturday, July 28th, 2007
Ever wanted to know the complete list of plugins your fellow competitor blogger uses to make their website so appealing?
Often times it’s easy: just browse to
http://an instance of a wordpress.blog/wp-content/plugins/
…And if you believe that’s a dirty trick (it is basically akin to walkin through the unlocked door uninvited) - make sure to send a notice to the blog owner to secure their intellectual property (a fine selection of plugins out of tens of thousands available in the wild is a hard brain labour after all).
To protect the plugin listing they may simply issue the command at the shell prompt:
echo "Options -Indexes" >> a.wordpress.blog-document_root/.htaccess
Posted in Internet Security / Privacy, Tips & tricks, boring | Comment on this »
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
Странички http://www.kyivstar.net/_sms.html больше не существует, вместо неё появилась замена - http://www.kyivstar.net/_sms_new.html
С этим обновлением пропала возможность автоматизированной (машинной) рассылки SMS на все украинские мобильные сети GSM через www-шлюз Киевстар (СМС с номером отправителя “777“)
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Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
A planned feature announced by Google - “personalized search” (also here) is surely to go along the Google’s party line with invading people’s privacy. In the article we even see how they adapt to the modern public trend of suspecting Google in all the evils by mentioning how they “value” privacy, how users will be able to opt-in and such. Nothing really new in this news.
On the other hand, Google is no doubt to help myriads of those with ADD by this new service.
Indeed, if you, like me, do like the variety of the generic SERP’s with lots of [slightly] unexpected results you can easily be distracted from the main topic you are researching. And since the majority of folks on the web who suffer from ADD would find this feature curative to them, Google is to celebrate another success on the way to it’s Grand Goal.
PS
Also notable here is the subtle evidence of enormous Internet growth. Some 10 years ago you might feel lucky having only a handful of results returned to many of usual searches, now to most searches, even elaborated ones, you often get millions of results - so the search engines now really have got the material to work with.
Posted in Internet Security / Privacy, On the Web, Tips & tricks | Comment on this »
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
EnterEX 2007 seems to prove to be not only the total failure (in terms of mass last-minute revoked participations) after 2006’s peak exhibition performance, but also a host of choice for the world-class scammers.
[Russian] Выставка Информационные технологии для бизнеса EnterEX 2007 показала себя не только, как грандиозный провал после успеха 2006 года, но и как пристанище для мошенников мирового класса.
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Posted in Business, Internet Security / Privacy, Mobile / Telecoms, On the Web | 7 Comments »