Our Suspicious Minds...

...are sometimes not suspicious enough, as it turns out. Knowing what we know and doing what we do, we are generally not surprised even by the most elaborate cyberscams. Like the identity theft perpetrated on several million veterans in the US a little while ago. Lesson learned (for some poor sucker): Use encryption and a decent passphase when dealing with sensitive data.

Ah, but this story is from the news today. Apparently, there is a brisk trade in used hard disks from Western countries to Eastern Europe and Africa - or in this case the UK and Nigeria. And while the disks themselves may of course be stolen, this is generally not the case. Lifting them from any scrapped PC will do nicely. What is the value of a 5 year old computer, anyway?

The real issue, of course, is not the disk, but the information it contains. Bank accounts, credit card numbers, passwords, emails, personal letters, internet searches and any sort of compromising material; it all has value. Huge value, used unscrupously. Which it will be; that is the whole point of this growing international trade.

You should know this already, but in case you do not: Merely deleting information does not remove it from your hard disk, it just makes the space it occupies available for later use. Emails, letters, pictures and any other kind of files can easily be recovered. Sometimes that can be a nuisance, but more often than you care to think it can ruin you. Literally.

Never ever dispose of (scrap, sell or lend) your computer without securely deleting your hard disk first. If you don't now how, let an expert tell you (we are right here). Too cheap even for a next-to-free solution? Use a sledgehammer (provided you can locate the hard disk; smashing the cabinet doesn't do much good except maybe get you committed to mental observation). Run over it with your gasguzzling oversize SUV, finally putting it to some useful work. Set fire to it. Blow it up. Just don't let your PC leave your home or office with your data on the hard disk. Don't do it!

Meantime, you got to hand it to those humans. Their resourcefulness, inventiveness, persistence...even when just coming up with new ways of stealing from their fellow kind. It is quite impressive.

Sucks like a Hoover

If you are looking for the truly ridiculous, look no further than Austin, Texas. And no, before you ask, we are not going to waste time Bush-bashing right now. 7 million other blogs are already doing that, and rightly so.

Our topic of the day is Ms Tamara Hoover, high school art teacher first and reasonably hot chick second. Her topless art photos on MySpace.com has come to the attention of the school board, who have put her on a leave awaiting her final dismissal.

Some key words here: art class teacher - artistic photos - topless. Not nude, certainly not porn. Turns out only about 10% of the pictures of her are of this variety in any case; the rest are fully clothed. But judge for yourself: This search will take you to 600+ photos of her. Some good, some bad, some interesting, but we'd be hard pressed to find something even mildly arousing. It is apparent though that she is in a relationship with the female photograper, so maybe discrimination of gays is the real issue here. Not that that speaks any better of the school board.

We suppose there are countries where such photos would have implications for someone's job or social standing. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria comes to mind...

The reason for mentioning this sad example of misguided morals and anal retentiveness in the BeCyberSafe blog is simply to remind you all that what you put on the net stays on the net for all time and for anyone to see. Ah, and also to offer an ounce of support for freedom in the world. Even in Texas.

Somebody's Watching Me

I always feel like
Somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy

No wonder. But the question is rather: Who is watching you? You are being tracked on the Internet, unless you take decisive steps not to make it so. Privacy isn't something that can be taken for granted. You have to guard it, maintain it, fight for it.

Why should you? Well for one, because it is your right, and rights should not be relinquished for no good reason and without giving it a thought. When you go on the Internet, no one has told you that everything you send, receive or do will be monitored. If someone did, you'd think twice not only about hooking up, but about the whole proposition altogether. Similarly, if your phone company told you that someone might listen in on any of your calls, you'd probably choose another service - assuming one was available.

I always feel like
Somebody's watching me
Tell me is it just a dream?

Hardly. As fact will have it, if you are in the US, chances are the government already has been monitoring your emails and calls since shortly after 9/11. I know, it sounds insane, which is why people have a hard time grasping the extent of this scandal even after it has been reported by credible media such as the New York Times and Washington Post, reluctantly confirmed by the government (by refusing to deny, of course), and even as the leading telecom companies are facing billion dollar lawsuits from civil liberty groups for their role in aiding the authorities in their illegal activities.

Unfortunately, Americans are not alone in being monitored. Those interacting with them suffer the same, and indeed this was initially assumed to be the purpose of the NSA program now being uncovered (or unravelled, if you will). The EU is also on the verge of introducing laws that will compel phone companies and ISPs to a) store much more data on their customer's activities (including who contacted who when and for how long), and b) to keep these records much longer. And incredibly, the UK is preparing to introduce a law that will make it a crime not to reveal passwords to the authorities when asked to do so, in effect saying that you are no longer allowed to keep anything private, online or off.

Again, why should we care? Because this reverses the burden of proof. Instead of the authorities having to prove someone guilty, that someone - which may very well be you - has to prove himself innocent. That's a bad principle to start with, never mind a violation of basic human rights, but truly horrendous when coupled with the huge imbalance in resources between the government and any individual.

I'm just an average man
With an average life
I work from nine to five
Hey, hell, I pay the price
All I want is to be left alone
In my average home
But why do I always feel
Like I'm in the twilight zone

(Lyrics by Rockwell, inspiration by Bush)

China's Spying PCs

In a move almost to silly to ridicule, the US State Department has decided to make sure that none of the 16.000 PCs they purchased from Lenovo last year will be hooked up to their secure network. This comes as a result of the initiative of congress representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican, who fears that China may have fitted the computers with spying software or hardware.

Mr Wolf apparently knows about as much about computers as we do about fungus. No, that's an exaggeration. Make that half as much.

Quite apart from 1) the PCs being routinely tested both by the State Department and outside specialists, and 2) doing such a thing would be like signing a death warrant for Lenovo, consider this: The Lenovo PCs are made by American and Mexican workers at plants in Mexico and North Carolina, in exactly the same fashion that they were produced before the Chinese bought a 27% share of the stocks in this subsidiary of a company you may have heard of before. It's called IBM.

The Frog that Croaked

Fred's dead, baby. Fred's dead.

Just as Zed in Pulp Fiction, he went down and out fighting. But in the end, the spammers got the better of him through overwhelming attacks and threats, and Blue Security abandoned their fight against spam, killed our friend Fred and went offline.

So is all lost?

Definitely not. For the first time, someone came up with an idea that not only filtered out spam, but actually made spammers stop spamming. There was a simple great idea at work here: Making a database of email recipients that absolutely detest spam, encrypting it, and forcing spammers to wash their email lists against this database through a measured and legal response, by sending opt-out requests in reply to the spam received, one for one.

What was learned? Primarily that more resources are needed to win the fight. A small startup company is unlikely to be able to cope with the intense attacks of spammers scared witless. At the very least they need to be better prepared. Alternatively, the load must shared among the users in a peer-to-peer fashion, giving the spammers tens or hundreds of thousands (eventually millions) of servers to attack instead of just one.

People who hate spam with every fibre of their beings are working on this at this very moment. But the idea is there for anyone to grab, including the powerful IT giants in dire need of good PR. It's a golden opportunity for a bold move that will make Internet history rather than just another buck. Do you read, Mr Ellison? Mr Gates?