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Posts Tagged ‘Privacy’

DNSSEC gains traction – Q&A about why you should care

Swedish hosting provider Binero has announced that it has DNSSEC-signed all of its customers’ .se domains. This brings the total amount of signed .se domains to more than 100,000 from the previous total of 5,000.

“Nearly one in ten Swedish domains are now validated against attacks with manipulated dns-information, like phishing,” Binero’s press release said.

It’s hard to find any worldwide numbers to compare to but ICANN reported yesterday that 88 TLDs (Top-Level Domains) are DNSSEC signed.

But what is DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) and why should you care whether your domains are signed with it or not?

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Security in 2011 by the numbers

As 2011 draws to a close we wanted to take a look at computer and information security in the twelve months that have passed.

What will probably stick in most people’s minds is the Sony PlayStation Network and Qriocity hack, which resulted in an outage lasting 23 days. In other developments, hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec took to social media to further their causes, and mobile malware got more attention than ever before.

All in all, there’s no doubt that 2011 was a very busy year for IT security professionals.

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Is the Web heading toward redirect hell?

Loading...Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it.

We’re talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web.

And it has a price.

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FacebookIs Facebook taking the first steps towards making itself an internet-wide payment platform?

You may know that the company is working on something it calls Facebook Credits (it’s in beta). You can buy Facebook Credits with a credit card or Paypal, and then use these credits as a currency when buying virtual items from applications on the Facebook platform (Facebook apps). A number of apps already use it.

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How Google collects data about you and the Internet

We are watching youGoogle has, perhaps more than any other company, realized that information is power. Information about the Internet, information about innumerable trends, and information about its users, YOU.

So how much does Google know about you and your online habits? It’s only when you sit down and actually start listing all of the various Google services you use on a regular basis that you begin to realize how much information you’re handing over to Google.

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Yesterday, a new anti-piracy law went live in Sweden. The result was an immediate 30% drop in Sweden’s Internet traffic.

The combined traffic passing through Sweden’s Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That’s a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place.

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Is the Internet rapidly becoming less of a safe, free and open place for our ideas, opinions and communication? One could convincingly argue that it is.

Here is what the situation looks like today, with some countries attempting to control the Internet and many monitoring everything on it. We also discuss what you can (and should?) do about it.

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