Posts Tagged ‘scenario’

My 5 cents on our quickly worsening online privacy and anonymity – Facebook your account is temporary locked

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

I needed to use another computer (IPad 2)to add one guy as a future business contact. I was suprised by a message which you see in the screenshot.
Facebook privacy breach again facebook your account is temporary locked
Facebook your account is temporary locked

obviously Facebook are becoming more and more impudent, so now apart from tracking all my activity in facebook and having the copyright rights over all my pictures uploaded, they now want to bind me to use their shitty service only from a single computer.

“We don’t recognize the device you’re using.” is scary to me personally and it shows a very bad direction, we have taken.
Now its supposed that any normal member of society is using his personal personal computer equipment (notebook, desktop, mobile tablet etc.), where the direction is that unification of devices is happening with development of handheld devices, so suddenly, we might soon be forced to only use only one personal device for all kind of activities phone calls, entertainment, checking online … etc. you name it
Then imagine, we might little by little be forced by mass adoption to only use this devices for all kind of communication.
Let me explain a bit thoroughflly what I mean. With the invention of the radio, people part of modern society has little by little started adopting the TVs as a device to retrieve information from various types from a centralized sources.

A time came, where everybody in the developed countries were using the radio, then came the TV and the television as a mass media, people who previously used the radio has comparatively quickly migrated to TVs and little by little, the radios use from the masses died.
Then came the more advanced kind of technologies the computers, first they were used by only choosen “elite” people who were beneficial to live in the developed society where first mainframe computers were invented, the technology was advanced and when the personal computers went out, the decrease of computer price allowed practically almost everyone from the developing or the development world to buy and start using it.
The increased use of computers and the emerge of Internet in the end of ’80s has suddenly shifted the mass use of TV to computer use.
People were crazy about computers, now most of the young and mid aged people from developed societies has almost completely abandoned the TV as a mean to get informed as the computer is doing the same. The emerge of pagers and mobile phones little by little and the development of the mobile phones has lead many people who actively was using a PC to switch to use of mobile or handheld devices and therefore forget compeltely about old desktop computers. These days even laptops use is getting threatened by tables like IPAD or Samsung’s Android tabloid. The trend therefore is that people who actively use their computers switch to tabloids and mobile phones in the next 10 years at worst.
It’s more and more rarely now that people use a random computer device to access the internet or in there daily lives this creates a very severe possible short-coming future issue as its possible we reach the time that most services available online might only be accessible via only certain devices which has “a hardware” (hard or unchangeble way to identify us).
This might sound a bit like a scenario for a sci-fi movie but unfortunately I see it as one very possible scenario.
If the idea of online provided resources and services social networks like twitter,facebook, xing etc. is originally to provide easy access to piece of information from anywhere in the world they shouldn’t definitely try to restrict us on how we use their services (especially if this is not illegal or in contradtion in country’s law.

Facebook is watching you the big brother facebook funny caricature

I really feel my privacy violated by facebook and I’ll probably delete my account there or always access it via a proxy further, I don’t like the idea that facebook is able to detect based on my IP change from country to country, the cookie shit it stores int he browser and browser and OS version of my computer what exactly is my computer and that I’m the only one to use this computer. What would it be if I was in a poorer country where the computer is used by many people, or I have borrowed my sister to travel abroad and use my notebook to access the internet and surrounding daily services she uses.
She might for example used the desktop at home and when travelling outside with my notebook access facebook, its a perfectly possible scenario. I don’t like the idea that I’m currently associated with a single computer really this is too much.The idea of linking my credentials for a shitty website like facebook to my personality is something I really don’t think is right.
If the Cloud Computing and online services should continue, there at least should be a government law to enforce, monopolists in online services to encrypt the user data in order to prevent, some facebook sysadmin or programmer or even the facebook Management board or CEO to have immediate access to privat information one puts in.

Same goes also for google, yahoo msn etc. Having an email account at any of the services and searching online reveals a lot of sensitive personal data, i’m quite sure that google/msn’s information stored for all the mail user accounts using the search engine services contains very sensitive information about a person’s personal private life and likings.
I’m quite sure google and the most of the big elephant companies are spying on their users and do create a thorough personal records for their users.
Scroogle instead of Google, improving browser security to secure, browser leaked personal identity data, Anonymizing ICQ and MSN to route traffic via tor , anonymizing Skype to hide your IP with Tor , Install torbutton to route Firefox browser traffic via Tor or use a combination of all to try to increase the level of anonimity online.
Also with the mass production and deloment of GPS integrated with most modern mobile phones, notebooks, cars etc. its pretty easy for one to be found nomatter where he is.
Its getting almost impossible for us to keep privacy and anoimty. While looking in the future and the latest technology development it appears situation will be getting worser.
Maybe the only way in future times for a man to be free will be completely abandon technology, as every piece of technology nowdays is doing some kind of tracking and leaking information about its user.
The increase of public security on airports, bus stations e.g. in airplanes, buses stregthens general society security, however it does this on account of decrease of personal privacy and makes us humans more and more dependent on “the system”.

All this induces a serious threat especially with the increase of unification of local countries and country adhering societies as a direct cause of globalization.
The globalization also leads to unification and merging of laws in countries around the world. The result from all this is also absollute necesity of internationalion of banking and financing system which is currently happening in front of our eyes.
They say it’s security measure but is it reall, just imagine if Gail, Yahoo or any otherBut let’s be optimistic, maybe I’m over-exaggerating, maybe things will go for good in short future and the “Doom scenario” will not happen 😉

Speed up your DNS resolve if your Internet Service Provider DNS servers fail or resolve slowly / Privacy concerns of public DNS services use

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

In my experience with many network Internet Service Providers by so far I’ve encountered a lot of DNS oddities and therefore surfing (web) and mail slowness.

It’s sometimes very irritating especially in cases, when I use my internet over Wireless public or university wireless networks.
In principle many of the Wireless routers which distribute the internet especially in organizations are badly configured and the slowness with DNS resolvings is an absolute classic.
If you haven’t encountered that slowness in opening web pages when connected from your University’s canteen, whether it’s fill with people for the lunch break, then I should say you’re really lucky!

My personal experience with this bad configured devices DNS services has been quite negative and every now and then I use to set and use public DNS servers like OpenDNS and Google DNS

Very often when I connect to a wireless network with my notebook running Debian Linux and the internet is too slow in opening pages I automatically set the Google or OpenDNS servers as a default DNS IP resolving servers.

1. DNS IP addresses of Google Public DNS are:

8.8.8.7
and
8.8.8.8

2. OpenDNS Public DNS servers has the IP addresses of:

208.67.222.222
208.67.222.220

I do set up and use the upper public DNS services addresses via the commands:

3. Set and use Google Public DNS services on my Linux debian:~# cp -rpf /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf.orig
debian:~# echo "nameserver 8.8.8.7n nameserver 8.8.8.8 n" > /etc/resolv.conf;

I first create backu pof my resolv.conf under the name resolv.conf.orig just to make sure I can revert back to my old DNSes if I need them at some point.

If you prefer to use the OpenDNS services for some let’s say privacy reasons, you do it in the same manner as in the above commands, you only change the IP addresses. 4. Configure and use the OpenDNS public DNS services

debian:~# cp -rpf /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf.orig
debian:~# echo "nameserver 208.67.222.222n nameserver 208.67.222.220 n" > /etc/resolv.conf;

Of course using Public DNS services has it’s disadvantages over the domain resolving speed up advantage.
One major issue is that Public DNS services are running on a top of a cloud and if you have red my previous article Cloud Computing a possible threat to users privacy and system administrator employment you might be agaist the idea of using a services which are powered by cloud.

The other primary concern is related to your SECURITY and a PRIVACY by using Public DNS networks, you risk that your Public DNS provider might use some DNS spoof techniques to mislead you and resolve you common domain names which usually resolve to let’s say 1.1.1.1 to let’s say 1.5.5.10

Even though this kind of practices on a side of a public DNS provider is not a likely scenario the possible implications of Public DNS providers using DNS forgery to fool you about domain names locations is a very serious issue.

As public DNS providers does contain again the good old philosophy of cloud computing embedded in themselves and they strive to become some kind of a standard which people might vote to adopt and use, the future implications of a wide adoption of Public DNS servers might be a terrible thing on internet users privacy!!!

Just think about a future scenario where we users of the Internet are forced to use a number of public DNS servers in order to use the Internet!
Usually a very huge companies are possessing the Public DNS services and do pay for the tech equipment required for building up the cluster clouds which provide the DNS services and therefore, if in the short future public DNS becomes a fashion and (God forbid!) a standard which shifts up the regular ISP DNS servers to resolve domains to IPs then it will be terrible.

The corporations which does own the Public DNS service/s might have a direct control over filtering and censoling information posted on any website on the internet.
Even worser if the world decides to adopt public DNS services somewhere in the future this means that large corporations owning the open dns cluster or clusters will be able to check each and every resolving made by any user on the net.
If you think closely such an information possessed by a company is not the best thing we want.

So let me close up this article, I’m not a fan and an evangelist who preaches the use of Public DNS services. Right on Contrary I do honestly hate the idea behind public DNS.
Nevertheless apart from my personal opinion I’m a practical person and using the public DNS servers every now and then when this will accelerate my access to the internet is still an option I do enjoy.

Maybe it’s time for a free software project (a tor like), which will provide users with an OpenDNS alternative which will run on hobbyist computers around the globe (just like with tor).

What’s rather funny is that the loud name OpenDNS is a big lie in reality OpenDNS is not opened it’s a company owned closed source service 😉