Back at the beginning of April, I killed about a thousand spambot accounts on this blog and added some new defenses against them. Those defenses helped quite a bit; I was still getting about ten attempts a week, but any spambot that gave an invalid e-mail address got blocked, as was any that gave a [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Security (Digital And Otherwise) category.
“US spy drone hijacked with GPS spoof hack, report says”
Ever since I heard the report about the captured US spy-drone earlier this week, I wondered how it could possibly have happened. Well, my curiosity was satisfied today: it was reputedly caught by sending it false GPS signals — a vulnerability that military officials have apparently been aware of since at least 2003, and one [...]
“Think you can outsmart Internet scammers?”
These are pretty good, and if you can catch them all, you’re probably pretty safe on the ‘net. For now, anyway. I was surprised to note that they didn’t include any URLs with look-alike Unicode characters though. That’s practically impossible for end-users to detect, so they’d probably get howls of protest if they did, but [...]
“The DHS Partners with Major League Soccer to Promote Fear”
As reported here. Why? Simple enough: fear shuts off the brain. It’s easier to control people who are afraid, something that dictators, politicians, and televangelists know very well.
“As the Internet evolves, is there a place for spam?”
Apparently not: In the late 1990s Robert Soloway made $20,000 a day as a spammer. He drove fancy cars. He wore Armani clothes. He was, by all accounts, one of the most successful spammers on the planet. But if he were starting out today, he’d find some other line of work. In 2011, spamming just [...]
“Dumb users vs Dumb design”
The great computer security debate: what is the biggest problem in computer security, the software or the users? It’s important because the answer determines what we do to try to fix it. Two experts (and a mass of ZDNet readers) weigh in on the subject. My opinion (and a pretty strong one) is that both [...]
“Tumblr users fight SOPA with 87,834 calls to Congress”
It wasn’t just Tumblr users, either. Demand Progress delivered over seven hundred thousand e-mails as well, including mine. Sorry, music and movie industries. The people won’t stand for such draconian and heavy-handed attempts at censorship to protect your outdated business models. You’re going to have to do what every industry eventually does: adapt or die. [...]
“Detecting Psychopaths by their Speech Patterns”
This is a little worrisome. As Schneier says at the bottom, “I worry about people being judged by these criteria. Psychopaths make up about 1% of the population, so even a small false-positive rate can be a significant problem.” On a complete tangent, the statistic that 1% of the population counts as psychopathic is disturbing. [...]
“Underground call-centre for identity theft uncovered by security researchers”
It’s getting ever more dangerous out there. No one can afford to ignore the modern world of fraud and theft anymore — educate yourselves and anyone else who will listen, because those who would steal your money are getting better at it all the time.
“Frozen armadillo as weapon”
Watch out, those armadillos can be tough customers. (For those not in the know, there’s an inside joke here for a good portion of those who read this blog, as well as the obvious humor.)