Big Brother is Watching

According to yahoo news, the Kindle, an eBook reader developed by Amazon, can circumvent China’s firewall and allow citizens access to the entire internet.

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are blocked by the Beijing authorities, can be accessed without interference by the Kindle’s Internet browsing function, the South China Morning Post reported Monday.

The device was smuggled into China after being shipped to an offshore location nearby. They are now being sold on Taobao, China’s answer to eBay, and are reportedly selling like hotcakes. Sales are being helped along by the Chinese blogging community, who recommend the device.

“And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt.”

For those wondering if it is too good to be true, you have a right to be skeptical. While the Kindle does allow unincumbered internet access, each user of the device has an account registered to them, so data collected on users can be traced back to them.

It won’t take long for China to demand the information under threats to ban the device, especially because other countries have started a precident.

“CrackBerry” addicts in the United Arab Emirates will have to feed their BlackBerry addiction in some other manner as the government has issued a ban on smartphones from Research in Motion beginning October 11. – “Blackberry Banned in UAE,” pocketnow.com

The government said they would lift the ban under a number of conditions, including gaining access to data originating in their country.

The question is, how long will it take China to catch on and follow suite?

Android has given way to an immense amount of applications that seem to be up for the taking by its Android users. There are over 300,000 applications available for download on the Android Market many of which are extremely free and some of which can be extremely harmful. Android operates with open market downloads which allows for virtually anyone to create an application. (more…)

Google Maps implemented their Street View program in May of 2007, however they have been quietly combing streets since taking photos since 2006. In that time, they have been doing a little more than just taking photos of our streets.

It’s no secret, in fact, in March of this year, Google spilled the beans in a tell it all apology letter, a shocking move. In the Letter, Google admitted that they had collected data, albeit unintentionally:

“But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.”

What had happened was that the software which was programmed to collect Network ID’s (SSID), and MAC IDs of network hardware off of non-encrypted networks, also ended up collecting a bunch of information that was being transfered over the network. They called this Data “Payload Data”. You can read the lengthy report on how and why the data was collected in a PDF put together by the firm which did the investigation, Stroz Friedberg.
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As we saw in the previous post “Googling Safely: Recon“, Google collects and holds a bunch of information on you. Considering the implications of this data can be frighting, they know what you read, they know what kind of music you listen to, and they know what videos you frequent on the web. They know who you are, even that naughty website you never go to.

There are several things you can do to combat this though, ways to use Google services some what anonymously, or at least, less publicly.
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Did you know that although Google is like the “Death Star” of public Data Mining, you have control over what they collect?

We did some research attempting to find out just how one could go about protecting themselves from google, and well, unless your on an intranet, you can’t completely. There are, however, things you can do. Google actually makes it quite simple for you to find out what they store on you, and that is a good place to start. Granted, they don’t tell you everything they store on you, IE Server Logs, ect, but its a good start.

So, where do you find all of this aggregated personal information? All you need to do is log into your account, and go to your account manager: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount

The next step is to go to your dashboard, you can do this by going to the following:
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There’s no guaranteed way to protect yourself online but by following these simple steps you’ll greatly increase the chances of your private files staying private.

1. Before you get on a hotspot make sure and check your sharing settings so that others using the hotspot can’t get to your files
2. Keep your software and browsers up-to date
3. Choose the safest encryption protocol: WEP was the earliest, then WPA was developed and most recently WPA2 has been released giving you the most security out of all three.
4. Have a Firewall set up which prevents unauthorized access to your PC/network and hides the internet-connected PC from public view
5. If you tend to forget passwords and save them on your desktop and browsers it would be best to use password manager software.  That way you can have one very strong password to then access all of your passwords.
6. Lastly you should use a VPN to keep all the transferred data private from others.  This is the most effective method to protect yourself but this service often costs money, even though it’s not usually too much.