CORRECTION: After testing on multiple machines, I’m not so sure this is true. If you can confirm or deny, please leave a comment.
Want to use Google search, but don’t want to leave a “cookie” trail for them to aggregate? DuckDuckGo can help.
Prefix a search with !g to forward the search to Google. DDG anonymizes the search for you. Even if you’re not paranoid, this is a good way to get less-biased results from Google.
Half of all Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies are infected with DNSChanger malware according to a Verge article.
I sure feel more secure that so much money is spent on busting straight-A students for a gram of pot rather than on protecting federal infrastructure.
After my wife lost her first gen iPhone, I moved all of the sensitive data out of our Address Book entries1 and into 1Password. 1Password has built in support for identities which can be used as an address book. I prefer to keep mine as secure notes. The Address Book.app is not a secure application. 1Password is rock solid, syncs between devices and is as secure as any software you can buy.
An interesting article from Waxy.org about linking accounts to Gmail. I'm pretty sure this is the way Google wants us to use their services. It benefits their business if they become the hub for all data. I'm not sure it's as dire as this article puts it, but I'm happy to be out of Google services.
Thanks to @viticci on Twitter for re-tweeting the mypermissions.org site. The service is really just a bunch of links to the permissions pages of the common web services. It's still a good reminder to go back and revoke permissions if they are not needed.
Here's what my Dropbox permissions looked like, and I curate the list regularly: 1
Yeah, I test A LOT of iOS writing apps. ↩
Another app that uploads address books to servers unencrypted. I just don't get people thinking this is the price of using social apps.
That's like thinking that FedEx might open my mail and make a photocopy and store it in an unlocked file cabinet in their waiting room because I chose to use their service. "That's just the price of being social. It makes it easier for us to send you packages later.
As I've said before, my goal is to get as far off of Google services as possible or reasonable. This past weekend, I migrated my primary mail off of Google. Here's how I did it.
Mail Forwarding Many people and services still use my GMail addresses. I have many. So I set each account to forward my to my new mail server. Google makes this easy. Just setup the forwarding account.
Yes, the Dropbox security story is still lingering. Patrick Rhone posted an updated article about the FTC complaint recently filed against them for deceptive language in their privacy terms. Read it for yourself, but Patrick argues that all data is at risk so be cautious and accept it.
I don’t like the tone of the piece[1] but his advice is sound. Whenever I store sensitive data on Dropbox, I encrypt it myself before it is uploaded.
CBS Boston
Totally saw this coming. QR codes are awful.
I’ll be taking advantage of some vacation time over the holidays to do a clean sweep of my secure credentials. I’m a 1Password user, so it’s pretty easy. However, it’s still time consuming. The first step for me is to make a list of the accounts to update. I keep a text list of the services I frequent but there are still a lot that gather dust. For example I have an Amazon S3 account that I almost never need to login to.
