Category Archives: Security

Spyware

The US House of Reps has passed an anti-spyware bill, which appears to ban a lot of insidious activities such as hijacking browsers. Congress still needs to pass it.

It sounds like a positive move, though I wonder how much of the spy (eg user tracking etc) part of these things will still be legal, hidden away in the small-print of user licence agreements, happily accepted by Mr/Ms Average User merrily clicking on “Yes” when installing Kazaa or whatever.

It doesn’t necessarily help those of us elsewhere in the world, but as is generally the case a lot of the evil bastard companies doing this kind of crap are US-based, and hopefully other governments would look at introducing similar laws.

A few snippets

Clinging to IE, but wishing there were more security zones, so you can tighten the thumbscrews to varying degrees where appropriate? Add a fifth security zone to IE. (via Greg)

Once upon a time to display JPEGs in DOS, you had to run an obscure JPEG Viewer program, and on my ancient rattling 286, it took a good few seconds to look at the file and actually show it on the (16 colour) VGA screen. Nowadays JPEG display is built into practically everything. Which makes Microsoft’s JPEG display vulnerability doubly-scary. Affected software: just about everything they sell. (Microsoft thanks those who work with them to protect customers, by putting their e-mail address on their web page so they can be bombarded with spam.)

Looking for a freebie FTP client for Windows, but sick of CoreFTP’s vagaries, WSFTP’s oldness (is it even Y2K compliant?), and IE/Explorer’s astounding lack of functionality? FileZilla rocks.

Gads

When I look at this site, in the Google Ad I consistently get public service announcements, or more commonly, an advert for a Word to HTML conversion tool.

When I looked at this site at Tony’s place, it came up with ads for AFL memorabilia on eBay.

Interesting, very interesting. Tony’s a big AFL fan, and I can only speculate that Google is doing some tracking of sites visited.

Other ad operators such as DoubleClick got flack when they originally started doing that, serving tracker cookies with their ads, building up usage patterns. I don’t recall hearing about Google doing the same thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised. After all there’s thousands upon thousands of sites using Google AdSense now, plus they could track your Google searches (it’s known that they do use a user cookie to keep your preferences). Might be time to trawl through Google’s T&Cs again.

PS. Okay, I just got an AFL ad. Maybe they’re not tracking?