Practical Technology

With the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Congress, at the request of big media, is still considering trying to censor the global Internet in the name of preventing media piracy The major Internet companies, who don’t like the idea of being forced to monitor customers’ traffic and block Web sites suspected or accused of copyright [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve never trusted Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) on my Wi-Fi access points (AP) and routers. I’ve always thought that anything that was that easy to set up had to be easy to hack. It turns out my gut was right. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has confirmed that security researcher Stefan Viehböck has [...]

[Read more →]

People have privacy delusions about the Internet. They seem to think that just because they don’t sign their real name to a site that no one can see what they’ve been doing on it. Oh dear. So dumb, so wrong. The latest example of what you do on the Internet is no where near as [...]

[Read more →]

Carrier IQ, the mobile phone network analysis company at the heart of the smartphone spyware scandal, isn’t talking to me, but it is talking to AllThingsD. To them, Andrew Coward, Carrier IQ’s VP of marketing, explained that “The software receives a huge amount of information from the operating system. But just because it receives it [...]

[Read more →]

Isn’t it wonderful? It turns out that a spyware rootkit from a company called Carrier IQ is on hundreds of millions of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Only Windows Phone-powered smartphones seems to have avoiding this program that reports on almost everything you do with your phone. In the case of iPhones, it appears [...]

[Read more →]