You have no privacy online and there is nothing you can do about it
September 2nd, 2010
Privacy online no longer exists and there is nothing at all you can do about it. In fact, everything you can try to do about it will just make it worse. While everyone and the media and their dog have all been screaming and shouting about privacy on Facebook, privacy and Google Street View and privacy on Blackberries and iPhones, the real battle has been going on very quietly in the background. The battle is now over, the war is over, the bad guys won and you have lost your privacy. All of it. And you never even noticed. Everything you do online is trackable. Everything, and it is happening now.
This post just summarizes what is going on. For the full details, listen to the Security Now podcast on “Side Channel Privacy Leaking” by Internet security expert Steve Gibson.
Your computer’s fingerprint is as unique as yours
This is made possible by what is called “computer fingerprinting” or “browser fingerprinting”. The idea is very simple: Your browser and computer have a large number of characteristics that web pages need to know to be able to display the pages properly, and other characteristics that they don’t really need to know but that your computer shares anyway. Put all this information together, combine it with your computer’s clock time, your IP address range and a few other little items that are all freely available and it is generally possible to identify you with over 99% accuracy. None of these things can be switched off, any more than you can switch off your own fingerprints, height or eye color. Any changes you make to “protect” yourself will actually make it even easier to identify you, because it will make your computer even more easily identifiable.
Windows 7: Microsoft gets it right
January 25th, 2009
I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 for ever a week now and I have to say that this time Microsoft really got it right. It’s everything that Vista should have been and it’s probably the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. The only downside is Internet Explorer 8, which is worse than ever. Hopefully the errors are bugs, if not life is going to get a lot harder for web designers, yet again.
With Apple working so hard to piss off their users (matte screen on 17″ only and costs more, no more firewire on the Macbook, only one firewire port on the 15″, non-removable battery on the 17″) Windows 7 is a welcome breath of fresh air. If Apple don’t clean up their act I may be switching back to Windows machines again real soon.
Apple’s grey screen of death
July 23rd, 2007
Blue or grey – it’s still a screen of death!
Yesterday I had my first grey screen of death on my Mac Pro. It was probably caused by Parallels running in Coherence mode, with all the XP windows as discrete windows on the OSX desktop. At least, that’s my guess — it seems that it happened so fast that no logs were stored, I’m unable to find any of the panic logfiles that my searches suggest you should look for.
Interestingly, the same searches would seem to indicate that grey screens of death (normally referred to as kernel panics, apparently) occur just about as frequently on the Mac as they do on Windows machines, and for the same reasons: Read the rest of this entry »
Vista’s “fake” virtual registry
December 11th, 2006
Windows Vista protects itself against illegal Registry writes with a “fake” virtual registry, to which the illegal writes can be made without doing any damage to the real registry. The company I work for produces a little free utility that writes some Registry values to solve some problems with certain file types on network drives. In the process of testing this utility for Vista we have discovered some interesting facts about the way this virtual Registry works. We’re not yet 100% sure about all the ramifications, but it looks as though this is going to have far-reaching consequences for many existing programs. Many will seem to work at first but will then fail, many will have to be rewritten.
Nick Bradbury on software firewalls
December 6th, 2006
Nick Bradbury just put a great post on his blog titled Why do firewalls have to be such a PITA? Right, software firewalls are generally a serious pain, and so are “security suites”.
Vaio SZ: The world’s worst laptop keyboard
December 3rd, 2006
Alongside all their travails with the Playstation 3, the audio CD rootkit disaster and the fact that a Korean manufacturer (Samsung) is in the process of taking over their former position as Asia’s leading innovative tech company, Sony now has the dubious distinction of being the manufacturer of a series of high-end laptops with the world’s worst keyboard.
The dangers of getting friends to switch
December 3rd, 2006
Like many geeks I tend to be treated as the universal computer guru resource and free support line and repair shop by many of my friends, at any time of the day or night. Liked many others in my position, I’m always trying to find ways to reduce my FFSO in an effort to get a life back. The Mac’s easy-to-use operating system and programs once seemed to be the ideal solution.
The real reasons for switching to Apple
November 12th, 2006
Even though I work in the Windows software industry, I’m still planning to switch all my hardware from PC to Mac as soon as possible. I know that there are a lot of “practical” reasons to switch, but if I really look at my own motives those aren’t really the reasons. The real reasons are more emotional than practical.
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