Security

Online Privacy and MSN live Messenger

Each time we sign up for online services (e-mails, online messaging, social networks, etc) we are required to click on “agree” button to accept the terms and conditions of the service which part of it is about online privacy.

How many of us ever read these statements, I don’t think I ever read them even once. But do online service providers really protect our privacy online? What promoted me to write this article is a recent incident I had with Microsoft online messenger; I have been using this service for years to communicate with relatives and friends.

On their last update to the service to “live messenger” they have added many new features and tons of information about you that could be shared and seen by others, not only that, anyone who could see your profile online can invite you to join their network and I found myself added to the network of some “party girl who is looking for fun online” and each time I chat with a friend or relative, they can see that girl on my network under a message that displays on their messenger window.

Now, for the unsuspected users, if your profile is set to public view in live messenger, the whole world can see some of your online activities and even to see who is in your live messenger contact list, I found that very disturbing and a total privacy invasion.

There are many options under live messenger where you can chose who to share your online activities with, but for many users, there are not even aware where to go to find these options, they are not even aware that some or most of their information that they used to setup live messenger is already public on the web.

Privacy and On-line applications

I got excited about using Google Apps but I changed my mind about using them as soon as I visited Google Apps website. I suddenly thought about the privacy issues and how secure my files would be the moment they leave my hard drive.

But than I thought about e-mail accounts, bank accounts, driver licenses data files, medical files, etc; all this information is stored somewhere in the cyber space. We hear a lot about cyber crimes and unauthorized online data access, but aren’t cyber crimes just like any other conventional crimes. Bank s and house robberies are daily occurrence, but we still deposit our monies in banks and live in our houses.

On-line applications will soon become a part of the modern office setup, what drives business is cost cutting and using on-line applications will drive costs down for many businesses.

I am still not sure when I will start to use on-line applications.

The world’s worst Spam Haven countries

If you, like many savvy Internet users today, depend heavily on your e-mails as a mean of communications, you must check your blocked e-mail or spam e-mail folders frequently. What a PAIN.

Every single day, I have to check my bulk e-mail folder few times, I have to do this because almost every few days I find important e-mails found its way to the bulk e-mail folder.

I have been thinking, why we can’t just stop the spammers? It’s a very simple question to ask you may think but its not that simple. Countries and ISPs are not working hard enough to stop this practice.

I found some interesting facts about spam and spammers by visiting Spamhaus website at www.spamhaus.org. The Spamhaus Project is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations, to provide dependable real-time anti-spam protection for Internet networks, to work with Law Enforcement Agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.

Visit their web site to find some really interesting facts about spam and spammers.

For the first time, a cyber criminal punished harshly in Saudi Arabia

According to the Saudi newspapers, Al-watan (reported on Sunday Dec21-2008), the Saudi court system delivered its first verdict on a cyber crime. The court sentenced a young Saudi man to jail term of a year and nine months, 200 lashes and fine of 50 thousands Saudi Riyals for hacking into a young lady e-mail files and stealing her personal photos and threatening to publish her photos.

Morro from Microsoft

One more security suite in the market from a big vendor. As a consultant from small businesses, I have to deal with fire walls and security suite for small networks. Live One Care was Microsoft solution for home PCs and small network security needs.

As a PC user and professional consultant, I am against using any popular security suite that comes bundled with new PCs or are widely used by consumers. From the average user point of view, security suites such as (Norton and McAfee) are difficult to setup and configure; I was always against installing these solutions in my clients’ computers. I still remember how difficult is (for the average user) to setup wireless network access permission in Norton firewall.

I have installed Live One Care few times, but I don’t really have any experience using it. Market data indicating that only 2% of the professional are using Live care as their security solution; Microsoft remedy was to release Morro, which is supposed to be a better solution.

My advice to software vendors, just come up with something that is easy to install and configure, a firewall that doesn’t ask the user to supply too much technical data.

Currently, I am using Zone-Alarm, which as much easier to setup and configure than the other popular security suites in the market.

Information, what the world know about you?

Have you ever tried to Google your name and see what results would you get? Few months ago, I got a call from a law enforcement agency away from the city I live in, he said he got my contact information from my resumed I have posted to some website, but he got it by doing Google search.

Another day, a friend of mine asked me to give him my social security number and he will show me what kind of information he can pull about me from the internet, that really scared me.

So, have you ever Googled yourself and see what the world knows about you?

Will Windows Vista put an end to Microsoft dominance of Operating systems?

If we look back at the early days of windows based operating systems we can see the huge enhancement Microsoft made to the Desk top operating systems, from DOS to windows 3.1 to win95 to win2000 and finally Win XP.

For many users, win XP was (end still) the best operating system Microsoft ever written, with SP1 and SP2, Microsoft fixed major bugs in the system and the users community was content with winXP.

Only when everything seemed to be working great with winXP, Microsoft released windows Vista, I personally, and I am sure as millions of users, was not ready to let go of winXP and start the journey to learn new operating system with its all new features.

Recently, I had to replace my company’s computer systems with new systems, I wanted to get new systems with XP, but the vendor told me they only can provide us systems with windows Visa. I was not very happy to migrate to Vista yet.

The transition from windows XP to windows vista is not as smooth as it should be, for the average user windows XP is more user friendly than windows Vista. One feature of windows Vista that I particularly find hard to understand for the average user is the Network and file sharing properties in windows Vista.
In its attempt to make windows Vista more secure, Microsoft made setting up network and resource sharing in windows Vista a bit hard to configure, there are many security features the user have to configure.

From a historical point of view, I can tell that Microsoft reached its full potential with windows XP, there was no need to release a new operating system at the time when windows XP was performing real well with the users.