Recently in Security Category

Ghostery shows who is tracking you the most

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The people behind Ghostery have put together a list of the 100 most common tracking elements that their plugin picks up.

It's not only interesting to see all of the means of tracking out there at the moment, it's also interesting to see who occupies the top two spots. I know that they say that that they are trustworthy, but some aren't so sure, while others can't be bothered.

FBI recklessly trashes a data center

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The FBI seems to have a few tools working for them. I know that many people might not be surprised by this, I would like to think that the agency generally employs competent people.  However, it seems as if they just created a giant mess by creating a ton of collateral damage by confiscating a large number of machines, which created problems for a number of notable sites (instapaper, pinboard). 

Apparently, the FBI mistakenly thought that "one enclosure is = to one server."   Well now, isn't that just a hoot. 

Is Dropbox trying to be as secure as Wordpress?

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Ok, my Wordpress bashing might be a little knee-jerk, but they did just have to force-reset all wordpress.org users' passwords this week.


Anyway, it appears that Dropbox is becoming the latest service that I'd be hesitant to use for even casual purposes after they just hosed their own authentication system for four hours earlier this week.  This might even be worse than the Wordpress stumble, since they can't even blame a malicious, outside entity.  Dropbox's latest problems, combined with their questionable deduplication practices that have raised security and privacy concerns, make me glad that I've never signed up for an account.  And don't get me started on their attempt to bully an open source project with a DMCA Takedown notice.

Are photocopiers evil?

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canon-copier-copy-3.pngCBS News recently aired a story Copy Machines, a Security Risk?, which reveals that a large number of photocopiers are resold and that they contain hard disks that have sucked in and stored images of the copies made by its former owner.

It's actually a pretty scary story for anyone that has copied anything that they might not want the world to know about. I wonder how many people recently have copied this year's tax return? Or perhaps your tax preparer made a copy on a machine that has been resold?  Just think about all of things that might be stored on copiers at your local Kinkos.

Steve Gibson, author of the venerable hard disk scanning and recovery application SpinRite, discusses this revelation along with other security-related news in a recent episode of Security Now.

While much of this risk, sadly, is outside of our control, this might be a good time to download Eraser or Darik's Boot And Nuke.

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