Daily Bits

Internet

Private Browsing Not So Private After All?

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How often do you use the private browsing capabilities of your chosen Internet browser? For one reason or another, I am sure that the average person will find this capability useful. While I am not going to prod as to why you would need to go incognito while browsing, you ought to know that there is supposed to be a flaw in the whole private browsing model.

Researchers from Stanford University and Carnegie-Mellon University have recently studied the private browsing model being used by major Internet browsers, and they say that it is not that foolproof; at least not as foolproof as we would like to believe. They released their findings in a paper titled An Analysis of Private Browsing Modes in Modern Browsers.

Their conclusions?

We analyzed private browsing modes in modern browsers and discussed their success at achieving the desired security goals. Our manual review and automated testing tool pointed out several weaknesses in existing implementations. The most severe violations enable a local attacker to completely defeat the benefits of private mode. In addition, we performed the first measurement study of private browsing usage in different browsers and on different sites. Finally, we examined the difficult issues of keeping browser extensions and plug-ins from undoing the goals of private browsing.

The next time you face the need to go incognito while browsing, make sure you take these things into consideration. Your best bet is to use your private computer and regularly take steps to ensure your security.

YouAndMeArePure: New Dating Site for Virgins

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In this day and age, many consider the subject of virginity to be outdated or preposterous. It is thus refreshing to hear about the new web site called YouAndMeArePure, which is dedicated to those who have managed to abstain from sex before marriage (whether by choice or due to circumstances, I have no idea). All sorts of dating web sites can be found online these days, why not one for virgins? (Check out the one for Apple geeks.) I know many of you are probably chuckling or shaking your heads in disbelief, but hey, each to his own!

So who came up with this idea? Husband and wife team Jose and Lety Colin decided to create the dating web site as they themselves met and got married when they were still, well, virgins. They believe that this plays an important role in their bonding as a couple, and they also believe that there are other people out there who hold the same belief.

If you think about it, they might not have such a big audience. Based on the press release of the web site, “current statistics show that about 30 percent of Americans say they have had one or no sex partners since turning 18.” Whether or not that is true, that’s not such a large figure.

Oh, the couple is not stopping at targeting the V-market (yeah, I made that up). They have a sister web site dubbed YouAndIAbstain.com, for people who are – well, you know what it’s about.

If this is your kind of thing, then check the web sites out. You never know what you will find. Then again, we know just how people can say/write anything online. Take the same precautions as you would on any other dating web site! 😉

Adios, Google Wave! Is Buzz Next?

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All things come to an end, even the good ones; or maybe, most especially the good ones. For the longest time now, Google seems to have had a golden touch. It has reached such great heights, but even such a big entity makes wrong judgment calls every now and then. With Google Wave, it seems like one of those things.

Yesterday, an announcement on The Official Google Blog finally put an end to speculation about Google Wave. Launched around a year ago in June 2009, Google Wave generated tons of interest and excitement – not so different with many other Google products. The interest did not prove to be enough, though, and even the most hardcore fan has to say goodbye.

Here’s a snippet of the announcement:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

There’s good news at least – fans will have till the end of the year to use the site. Users will also have the tools to extract all the content they’ve put in there.

Now I am wondering…will Google Buzz suffer the same fate?

The CIA and Google Team Up to Predict the Future

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Remember the movie Minority Report? Yeah, that was a pretty cool movie, but we all know that it’s “just” science fiction. There is no way that it can happen in real life, right?

Think again. It seems that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States and Google are planning on creating something that will make the possibility of predicting events as reality. There’s this company called Recorded Future, and this is what they do (from their web site):

1. Scour the Web
We continually scan thousands of news publications, blogs, niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more.

2. Extract, rank, and organize
We extract information from text including entities, events, and the time that these events occur. We also measure momentum for each item in our index, as well as sentiment.

3. Make it accessible and useful
You can explore the past, present and predicted future of almost anything. Powerful visualization tools allow you to quickly see temporal patterns, or link networks of related information.

In short, the company monitors the information that can be found online – as much of it as they possibly can – using what they call a temporal analytics engine.

How is this different from what Google and other search engines do now? The key is in the linking of information. What the temporal analytics engine does is to find patterns and relationships amongst documents, web sites, files, etc. Related names, entities, and events will be connected via the engine, and people can analyze the data and connections to somehow piece that past together or even predict the future.

Naturally, the project – and the entities involved – has drawn various reactions. There are those that are quite excited about the possibilities, and there are those who are afraid of the potential dangers this kind of technology brings.

Personally, I think that the dangers are definitely there, but that we really can’t stop the CIA from engaging in this kind of activity.  We do need control and transparency, and we can only hope that it will be so. You?

WoW Players Target of New Phishing Scam

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World of Warcraft players, beware! You are now the target of a group (or groups) of cyber criminals. The scam’s premise is nothing new – the cyber criminals send e-mails to WoW gamers, asking them to verify their Battle.net account. In order to do so, the gamer has to enter his password. Of course, the web site to which the gamer is directed to is a fake one, and once the details are inputted – poor gamer!

Discovered and made public by F-Secure, a Finnish antivirus vendor, the scam is only one of the tactics that various cyber criminals are using. Another on going thing is someone sends you a chat message on WoW. This is in relation to the new Cataclysm beta. Spam Fighter shares the details:

Tom Kelchner, Security Researcher at Sunbelt, states that his friend Douglas got one message in a chat session from a person who employed the handle “BlizzalCOL” during the WoW game. He told him about the availability of the beta so the Cataclysm on the World of Warcraft map could expand, as reported by Sunbeltblog on July 13, 2010.

Kelchner further wrote that the message spread via an URL that took to Cataclysmtest.net looking like the login page of WoW.

He added that to determine the destination of the Cataclysmtest.net, he fed an unreal username and password to the site. Surprisingly, they were accepted, implying that the site was possibly stealing login information. Hence, it was a phishing site.

With WoW accounts being in high demand – especially those who have well-established characters – these developments are not surprising at all, are they? Needless to say, WoW players ought to be even more careful about using their login details.

Stay Safe On XP SP 2 After July 13

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If you haven’t already heard, tomorrow is quite an important day for Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 users. After tomorrow, Microsoft will no longer be providing automatic security updates for this version of their operating system. More information about this in my post last month.

If you’re really concerned about this issue, the easiest fix is to ditch XP, right? But it is totally understandable if you do not want to do that just yet. More so, there are ways by which you can continue to enjoy a relative degree of security while continuing to use XP SP2. Here are some tips.

Stick to XP, but upgrade to XP SP3. This version will continue to receive automatic updates till August of 2014 – that’s a long way off. You can either download and install SP3 using Windows Update, download a disc image (for use in more than one machine), or buy the installation CD (only $3.99).

If you really want to continue using XP2, here’s a simple fix that can increase your security: stop using Internet Explorer, if you haven’t already. I know very few people who continue to use this Internet browser for so many practical reasons. If I were you, I’d go with Chrome of Firefox (which has a new beta, by the way).

Here’s a no brainer – make sure your anti-virus software is up-to-date and reliable. This is assuming that you already have one installed. Even the free ones are pretty good, and they usually prompt you for updates anyway.