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No Go-Ahead Stamp for Microsoft's Passport
Oct 20/04
Microsoft is recasting ambitions for its.Net Passport identification system, saying the service now will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single sign-on system for the Web at large, a spokesperson said.
| Two armed robbers were identified by police through the DNA they left on a shared cigarette moments before a raid, it has emerged. | ||
Controversial plans to collect DNA samples from every newborn baby in the UK are being discussed in Bristol.
Scientists decipher 21,000 genes
Ian Huntley's conviction for the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman was based partly on crucial mobile phone evidence - which nowadays is almost as useful to the police as fingerprints or DNA.
http://www.privacyinternational.org
RFID Chips Are Here
RFID chips are being embedded in everything from jeans to
paper money, and your privacy is at stake.
SA security technology will stun the world
Send your fingerprints to authenticate documents via cellular phones
[Johannesburg, 20 May 2004] - The dramatic increase in fraudulent, subversive and terrorist activities worldwide demands more revolutionary and sophisticated technological solutions every day. Never before has the world been under so much pressure to develop more comprehensive and innovative security measures.
The South African IT-in-security management group, DEX, has developed a concept which utilises off-the-shelf, existing technology in such a way that any person or document can be identified and data verified anywhere in the world and over any distance.
Biometric device caters for harsh conditions
This
Fall: Hand Scanners to lend hand in tracking students
Israeli
invention sees through walls
Important
uses for military, rescue operations
July 2/04 - An Israeli firm has developed a breakthrough technology that can see through walls, WND has learned.
Camero, a small company based in Herzliya, Israel, has developed a radar system that uses ultra-wideband technology to produce three-dimensional pictures of the space behind a wall from a distance of up to 20 meters. The pictures, which reportedly resemble those produced by ultrasound, are relatively high-resolution and are produced in real time.
The device has important military and rescue implications: It can be used by troops to get a visual on the inside of a room, providing such crucial information as the number and location of each individual and the kinds of weapons in any given room.
[When the VENDOR (& Multinationals) own your Computer Content]
BBC - Mar 18/05 - You can now buy "trusted computers", but can we really trust the PC vendors, asks technology analyst Bill Thompson."If you have recently bought an IBM ThinkVantage computer, a Dell Optiplex, or one of a whole range of laptops from Toshiba, HP/Compaq or Samsung then you may have got more for your money than you realised.
Inside your shiny new PC is an extra chip called the trusted platform module (TPM) that can be used for a range of hardware-based security features.
Eventually the TPM will be built into the main processor itself, and if the trusted computing group has its way then you will find one in every piece of hardware you own, from mobile phones to TV set top boxes to children's toys.
But for the moment it is a separate piece of hardware, providing enhanced security features to programs that know how to use them.
And as part of a well-designed network system, it can provide a lot more security than we enjoy today.
A big advantage of the TPM is that it is hardware-based.
Trust the way forward?
At the moment most of us rely on software to keep our information safe and secure.
Full support for the trusted computing specification will not be available from Microsoft until the next release of Windows, "Longhorn".
This will include what Microsoft, in a typical act of obscurantism, calls the "Next Generation Secure Computing Base", and it will give user-level programs access to the trusted computing hardware.
Because the trusted computing base is also used to make digital rights management (DRM) systems more secure, this will give content providers a lot more control over what we can do with music, movies and books that we have bought from them.
We have seen recently how allowing digital rights management services into our lives can lead to unwelcome consequences.
Users of Apple's iTunes used to be able to stream the music they had brought to up to five other iTunes users, a great way of letting your mates discover your music collection.
But the latest version of iTunes limits this capability, just as an earlier upgrade reduced the number of times you could burn a selected playlist of purchased songs to a CD.
Apple can do this because they wrote the software and they control the rights management.
Once it is embedded in trusted hardware it will be even harder for...
Electronic Privacy Information Center - Practical Privacy Tools
Microsoft XP Spying on You
Microsoft has programmed Windows XP to contact other computers and transfer information from the user's computer to the other computers:
a) If you have only three DVDs that your children watch sometimes on your home machine that is always connected to the Internet (through a broadband connection), you may not care that Microsoft knows when they watch them. If you seldom use the Windows XP help facility, you may not care that Microsoft is able to know the level of expertise of the people who use your computer.
However, if you are using Windows XP in a large corporation or a government, the fact that another organization believes that it can gather data from you may be completely unacceptable.
This article is support for your own investigation.
The Microsoft article tells how to disable the hidden downloading. However, the disabling is very time-consuming. Also, Microsoft has a history of using defect fixes and security fixes to change the operating system settings. This means that all the settings would need to be checked after every defect fix or security vulnerability fix.
Source: http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm
Article in Spanish http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft-es.htm
Zone Alarm - Firewall Protection - Free version at:
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp
Webroot Spysweeper (look for Try It - Spy Sweeper)
Popup Blocker (Panicware) (look for the Free Version)
Spybot Search & Destroy (better for older systems)
Please Note that we have no idea how long these links will stay up.
Please ensure that you retain the information you wish
XOFC: Truth for the Skeptical Mind