link
Find out what information you are giving out.
http://privacy.net/analyze/
Friday, November 16, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Firefox Add-Ons for security and privacy
noscript, adblock plus, trackmenot.
There is a browser safer than Firefox. It is Firefox, with NoScript! Doesn't allow bad sites to run JavaScript
Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.
Trackmenot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines.Maybe noscript and adblock are good enough and trackmenot is not so essential.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
A short incomplete personal account of IITB LAN ~ circa 1999 to 2004
My friend Jignesh (jigamo/gujju/jigwana/jangoora) made me install linux on a brand new computer in my hostel room. For 6 months it ran on Red Hat 9 - with a very bad mouse (that made us learn keyboard shortcuts), XFree86 xwindows that crashed innumerable times (prompting us to find a new fix each time) - but we had the ultimate satisfaction of at least having some idea of what is actually going on in the system and the great pleasure of running a moderately popular ftp movie server in the golden days of the IITB LAN just before Bizarre Bazaar came up.
Red Hat had a /etc/init.d/ directory that listed all the daemons and you could start and stop these daemons e.g. /etc/init.d/sshd stop would stop the ssh daemon - so that if your friends(?) are logging in your comp via ssh from somewhere (e.g. dept comp room) and playing songs to give you pain, you could just shut down the sshd so they won't be able to login. or say if you have a ftp server and you have not set the max number of users or the max allowed download speed and say you are running a vsftp daemon, /etc/init.d/vsftpd stop would stop all the freeloaders who were eating your precious resources. But because we never set a max download speed, my room's ftp server 10.9.2.6 was very popular. This we could clearly see by looking at the /var/log/vsftpd.log file that listed which file was downloaded from which IP at what time. This was our own way of spying on our 'customers' hehe.
Then there was this wonderful thing called nmap - you give it a range of IP addresses to scan and it would find what ports are open where. Of course we movie maniacs were only interested in ftp ports and would spend hours ftp server hunting and greedily download any new movie we got. Before the days of Bizarre Bazaar, there were only a few really good servers belonging to people who knew how to tunnel through the institute proxy firewall. These gods would download great movies (e.g. Amores Perros) and provide them to us lesser mortals.
Even before that, there was this really great place called ftp://ahir.ee.iitb.ac.in that had all the songs in the world - entire albums and very rare mp3s and good old tilak.ee that had ebooks too. But ahir was legendary. This was much before everything - but not before the days when you told your friend - "Yaar mere liye email account khol de".
Let me here pay homage to the great servers that once made up the LAN in the days of the old netmon proxy 144.16.108.236:80 (does anyone remember?). These noble servers run no more but we cherish their fond memories and remember their selfless sacrifices. Alas, no longer can we type ncftp 10.7.11.1, cd movies1, lcd /home/movies, mget -R * (This was one of the bad servers with a miserly speed of 100KBPS and took a few hours to download any movie; whereas our server used to give even upto 10 or 11 MBPS). What would I not give to download even a small mp3 file from you today... Kaash!
Cry the beloved LAN!
Red Hat had a /etc/init.d/ directory that listed all the daemons and you could start and stop these daemons e.g. /etc/init.d/sshd stop would stop the ssh daemon - so that if your friends(?) are logging in your comp via ssh from somewhere (e.g. dept comp room) and playing songs to give you pain, you could just shut down the sshd so they won't be able to login. or say if you have a ftp server and you have not set the max number of users or the max allowed download speed and say you are running a vsftp daemon, /etc/init.d/vsftpd stop would stop all the freeloaders who were eating your precious resources. But because we never set a max download speed, my room's ftp server 10.9.2.6 was very popular. This we could clearly see by looking at the /var/log/vsftpd.log file that listed which file was downloaded from which IP at what time. This was our own way of spying on our 'customers' hehe.
Then there was this wonderful thing called nmap - you give it a range of IP addresses to scan and it would find what ports are open where. Of course we movie maniacs were only interested in ftp ports and would spend hours ftp server hunting and greedily download any new movie we got. Before the days of Bizarre Bazaar, there were only a few really good servers belonging to people who knew how to tunnel through the institute proxy firewall. These gods would download great movies (e.g. Amores Perros) and provide them to us lesser mortals.
Even before that, there was this really great place called ftp://ahir.ee.iitb.ac.in that had all the songs in the world - entire albums and very rare mp3s and good old tilak.ee that had ebooks too. But ahir was legendary. This was much before everything - but not before the days when you told your friend - "Yaar mere liye email account khol de".
Let me here pay homage to the great servers that once made up the LAN in the days of the old netmon proxy 144.16.108.236:80 (does anyone remember?). These noble servers run no more but we cherish their fond memories and remember their selfless sacrifices. Alas, no longer can we type ncftp 10.7.11.1, cd movies1, lcd /home/movies, mget -R * (This was one of the bad servers with a miserly speed of 100KBPS and took a few hours to download any movie; whereas our server used to give even upto 10 or 11 MBPS). What would I not give to download even a small mp3 file from you today... Kaash!
Cry the beloved LAN!
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Do you want them to analyse your online habits?
Using sitemeter, statcounter, google analytics is turning us into mini Big Brothers. Their popularity (you get to spy on your readers for free) is seriously changing the way we interact online. There might arise a loss of natural spontaneity and forthrightness with the knowledge of being watched. And web analytics is affecting us not just as people reading each other's blogs but in larger political and economic ways.
For example, we are allowing e-commerce companies to define the reason why the internet exists - not for the free flow of ideas and information but solely for selling their stuff. We are letting them set the agenda for the internet - when it should be us billions of individuals who should be doing it. Web analytics tells our web habits to companies like google - you can see how your blog is being accessed but google must be getting data about all blogs - their free google analytics only helps make their AdWords/AdSense more profitable. Why should we trust anyone wih our private information? Even the company whose motto is "Do no evil" has been doing a lot of shady things and compromising individuals to governments.
Wikipedia article on Web Analytics
This is a shocking short flash movie about how the harmless-looking social networking site facebook is actually collecting information about its users for the US government.
Careful: The FB-eye may be watching - Reading the wrong thing in public can get you in trouble.
Some very good links via Vishwas in the comments
Web analytics is just one of the ways we can be spied on. A way to protect at least our email privacy, as they suggest in the above links, would be encrypting all emails.
Public key cryptography seems to be the easiest and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) a convenient implementation of this encryption/decryption technique.
This site says:
Cryptography is an exciting field!
It's time for crypto-illiterates like me to learn PGP.
Yes! Ubuntu has PGP, it is called pgpgpg:
sudo apt-get install pgpgpg
A very easy to read article 'PGP User's Guide, Volume I: Essential Topics' from Unversity of Hanover, Germany. 'PGP User's Guide, Volume II: Special Topics'
For example, we are allowing e-commerce companies to define the reason why the internet exists - not for the free flow of ideas and information but solely for selling their stuff. We are letting them set the agenda for the internet - when it should be us billions of individuals who should be doing it. Web analytics tells our web habits to companies like google - you can see how your blog is being accessed but google must be getting data about all blogs - their free google analytics only helps make their AdWords/AdSense more profitable. Why should we trust anyone wih our private information? Even the company whose motto is "Do no evil" has been doing a lot of shady things and compromising individuals to governments.
Wikipedia article on Web Analytics
This is a shocking short flash movie about how the harmless-looking social networking site facebook is actually collecting information about its users for the US government.
Careful: The FB-eye may be watching - Reading the wrong thing in public can get you in trouble.
Some very good links via Vishwas in the comments
Web analytics is just one of the ways we can be spied on. A way to protect at least our email privacy, as they suggest in the above links, would be encrypting all emails.
Public key cryptography seems to be the easiest and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) a convenient implementation of this encryption/decryption technique.
This site says:
PGP is such an effective encryption tool that the U.S. government actually brought a lawsuit against Zimmerman for putting it in the public domain and hence making it available to enemies of the U.S. After a public outcry, the U.S. lawsuit was dropped, but it is still illegal to use PGP in many other countries.
It's time for crypto-illiterates like me to learn PGP.
Yes! Ubuntu has PGP, it is called pgpgpg:
sudo apt-get install pgpgpg
A very easy to read article 'PGP User's Guide, Volume I: Essential Topics' from Unversity of Hanover, Germany. 'PGP User's Guide, Volume II: Special Topics'
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