Sometimes, there is no privacy in Finland

19/04/2005 03:26 | Categories: General, Privacy | 0 Comments 

Last weekend I found out that if you send a message like this:

VERO NAME SURNAME CITY

To number 16400 (Zed's service number I think), you can get anybody's tax information from year 2003. Or in other words, your own private tax information is available to anyone knowing your name, city and willing to spend a bit over a Euro for the SMS. No wonder talking about salaries here in Finland is considered a taboo topic... anybody's salary information is only one SMS away! Considering how concerned people here are about privacy, I am surprised that this service even exists :P

I am not too happy about this. I need to find out whether I can remove my information from this service. I would have hoped that this was an "opt-in" service instead of an "opt-out" one.

PS: Yes, I've already used to find out the salaries of some of my colleagues... ;)



Privacy

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Privacy | 0 Comments 

Two quite scary articles: Government agency exposes day-care data, where data about hundreds of children was posted in the net carelessly and Online search engines lift cover of privacy where this time, it's careless users who are leaving private data in web servers which will be "spidered" with Google. Obviously, that data can be found: info about GoogleDorks and the GoogleDork in person.


F*cking spam!

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Privacy | 0 Comments 

Today I checked the referer logs of this page and I found that there was a link from John Kerry's Blog. Basically, a referer means that somebody arrived to this page via some other page. This is carried out by the browser, since it sends the originating page as part of the request to the web server to retrieve the new page. But it is also a form of spam to "inject" false referers that will show up when browsing the statistics. I wasn't expecting anything like this from the persons running the page of a candidate for president of the United States (I doubt he's got anything to do with it) The blog page looks like the official one but I'm not sure, and the whole thing could've done by somebody completely unrelated to campaign, but it still doesn't really surprise me now that they're going to spam the mailboxes of their voters :P


Exploiting Internet Explorer

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Privacy | 0 Comments 

If I were you I would be very careful when using Internet Explorer to browse the net. Even better, I would ditch it complately and go for a standards-compliant, fast and reliable browser such as Mozilla Firefox. Enough said :)



Spyware removal software, installing more spyware?

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Privacy | 0 Comments 

That the Internet is a jungle, we all knew that... But how about this now? Spyware cures may cause more harm than good.

Apparently there was a piece of software called SpyBan which advertised as a tool to remove unwanted spyware software from one's computer. Instead, what it was really doing was removing the competitor's spyware software and installing its own... I can't believe that. I mean, couldn't that be made illegal? Isn't my computer my own private property? If somebody installed a hidden camera in my place without my consent and monitored what I do at every moment, wouldn't be that considered illegal? If so, why are all these companies that monitor people's browser usage left untouched, without punishment?

Two comments: if all software was open, this wouldn't happen. And second, I might not have as many games as PC-Windows users have (both before in Linux and now in OS X) but the feeling of security that I have is priceless (well, perhaps not in the case of OS X :)) Linux is more than ever a serious alternative to Windows and if I would really consider it for things like web browsing, email and text processing. It does all that (and more!) in a even better way.