Ever since shortly after the Wordwide Web was invented, Windows users have had to deal with countless vulnerabilities in their operating systems’ swiss cheese-like security.
In fact, my disgust at that endless stream of Windows security vulnerabilities was one of the main reasons why I finally switched to Linux and stopped using Windows on my home computers almost 6 years ago.
I’m fortunate. Many millions of people around the world [more...]
Several weeks ago, in one of the Linux support forums that I frequent, someone started a thread to complain about the continuing problem of spam postings in the forums.
One member expressed the opinion that we should allow some of the spammers’ messages to remain, because he believed that they had made the effort to read our forums before they had spammed us.
What convinced him that the spammers were [more...]
Despite the nearly always negative connotations that are propagated by popular media, the term “hacker” can be used to describe people who do positive, as well as negative, things with technology.
In fact, for all of our protection, it’s becoming more and more important for friendly governments to train groups of “white hat” hackers, to protect us from an ever-increasing number of (often-unfriendly-government-trained) [more...]
Regular readers of this Journal know that I’m a staunch privacy advocate.
So I’ve never used Facebook, Google+, or any of the other social networking sites to whom profits are more important than their users’ privacy.
In fact, I hope that the current, insecure, exploitative iterations of “social networking” will, over time, take their rightful places [more...]
Recently, Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg (CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister) spouted her self-serving opinion about Internet anonymity.
Said Zuckerberg, “I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”
Here’s [more...]
Regular readers of this Journal know how I feel about the title of this post.
Want to be able to access your confidential documents from anywhere in the world? Just save them online at ABCD.com, and they’ll be there waiting for you, no matter where you are.
Of course, we can’t guarantee that we won’t lose your documents; or accidentally lock you out of — or even delete — your account; or that [more...]
Many years ago, Web pages were static.
Words and images.
And hyperlinks.
Simple displays of information.
Then someone thought, [more...]
If you’re a U.S. citizen, do you know what your rights are, with regard to your computer equipment being seized by law enforcement agents?
Not that there’s much chance that law enforcement would want to seize it — I’m betting that this site’s readers aren’t doing anything that would warrant such a seizure.
But, speaking of warrants, it wouldn’t hurt to [more...]