The European Parliament adopted today by 378 votes in favour, 197 against and 30 abstentions a directive on data retention in first reading. This means that every traffic and location data generated by sms, telephony and internet but not the content of the information communicated will be saved for a period of six months up to two years.

This directive is seriously flawed for several reasons. First, the communication companies will have to pay for everything, especially storage devices, retention and transmission of data. We all know that there will be no other option than to raise prices and let the customers pay the bill.

continue reading "EU Data Retention Law"

A friend of mine moved to a new house and had to change his internet provider as well. The room with the computer and the one with the phone line were not close to each other and he decided to buy a wireless lan router and use it to connect to the internet.

We had to do a scan of the surroundings of course and found lots of unsecured wireless lan networks. I don´t know why people keep these unsecured, maybe its laziness, maybe they simply don´t know the risks involved. Its like leaving your doors open when you leave your house. Lots of things can happen..

continue reading "How to Secure your Wireless Network"

A Phishing page emulates a well known trusted website and tries to capture (phish) your login data for the original website. Most phishing incidences start with mass emailing potential victims. The mail looks like an exact copy of a mail send by the original site with the only difference that a url is provided that is most of the time slightly different from that of the original site.

Once there the site again seems like an exact copy of the original site. They probably offer lots of links that are the same but the login page always does not log you into the original site but collects your user data. Sometimes you receive an error message telling you that your login data was incorrect. At the same time you are redirected to the real homepage and everything will be working as usual.

continue reading "Amazon Phishing page"

Only a few days ago I wrote a first small article about true crypt and recommended it. Back then I bought a usb 2.0 hard drive with 300 GB capacity and encrypted its entire partition with true crypt. This was done to test the programs functionality but also to see if it would slow down my main computer (athlon 64 3000+, 1 gb ram).

To my great suprise it did not slow down the pc and I decided to expand the encryption to cover all my hard drives. Let me tell you why and how i did this and why you should also be considering this.

continue reading "Securing your Pc with True Crypt"

Pc Magazine wrote a article with such a long title that I had to cut it to make it fit, the article “Maximum Security: 94 Essential Tips for Staying Safe” has some useful tips for everyone that wants to have a secure as possible computer. They divided the article into several categories, system, networking and wireless, e-mail, Web surfing, malware, and mobile.

Most of the tips can be classified as core tips, everyone should use them to make his system more secure. I know its a lot to read and pc magazine has the nasty habit to divide the article on lots of pages, probably to increase page impressions. If you are interested head over to pc magazine and read the article.

continue reading "94 Essential Tips for Staying Safe"