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?

My Friend Fred and the 2nd Internet Revolution

My friend Fred is a small, blue frog. He may be an acquaintance of yours as well. But if he is not, let me introduce him to you. You'll be happy to know him.

As I said, Fred is a small, blue frog. Contrary to most frogs, he doesn't eat flies. His particular choice of feed is spam. Yep, he is a spameater, and man, does he gobble them up!

You may have guessed already that Fred is a cyberfrog, and right you are. He is a small program that you can download for free from www.bluesecurity.com or www.downloads.com. What he does is as easy as it is brilliant. When your spam is reported in one of any number of ways, the guys at Blue Security determines both who it is from and who it is for. That is, who is sending you the unsolicited email (the spammer), and what company he is pushing products for (the spamvertizer). They then politely tell him to stop digging this particular hole, at the very least with regard to all the Blue Community members. He can do so by downloading an encrypted file that contains the email adresses of all the members, and cleaning his list against this.

If he does not comply with this request, Fred jumps into action. For every spam received by a Blue Community member, he sends one opt-out request to the spammer and/or the spamvertizer. As it is one for one, tit for tat, it is a very measured response, well within legal boundaries. However, for the spammer/spamvertizer who may foolishly have sent of millions of spams, the result can be an avalanche of requests that will be difficult to handle, potentially costly (the domain can easily get closed down, at least temporarily), and very unpopular with the culprit's ISP.

This has been so effective that several of the world's largest spammers (and many smaller ones) have taken Blue Community members off their spam lists. For many members, this has meant
a marked decrease in the number of spams received, sometimes from a flood to a trickle. And as multi-domain, multi-account users we can vouch for its effectiveness.

This, of course, has not gone down well with the leeches that make a living from spamming. As there is no chance they'll ever sell anything to a Blue Community member, the sane thing would be to comply and clean their lists. But some are not sane (big surprise), and have mounted various attacks. One is a spam claiming to have "cracked" the encrypted database (easily demonstrated to be untrue) and threathening to flood members with 10 or 20 times more spam (has not happened). Another is a huge distributed denial of service attack on the Blue Security servers that has overloaded them, so that we are now into the second day with the Web site down and my friend Fred disconnected.

The first Internet revolution was going from the old USENET discussion groups to this wonderful new thing called the World Wide Web. The second is this: Claiming our email back from the spammers. We've grown so used to the nuisance of spam that we'be long taken it for granted. Well, as it turns out, that was premature. There really is a solution, and lo and behold, it comes in the form of a small blue frog sitting in the bottom right of your computer screen.

The Blue Security and Blue Community web site will be up shortly, if it is not already when you are reading this. Be sure to sign up (as I said, it's free) both to rid yourself of the spam you receive today, and to avoid new adresses or whole domains in getting spammed.

On the BeCyberSafe web site, we'll teach you the best and easiest way to work with Fred. But the most important thing is that you do!