فیس بک استعمال کرنے والوں کے لیے چھ تدابیر Worried sick about the NSA, or someone else, looking over your shoulder? Well, you can do things that will make it harder for someone to eavesdrop on you. Thats the good news. The bad news is that all these things require a fair amount of effort, some will cripple your use of the modern Internet, and none of them will stop a sufficiently determined electronic Peeping Tom. (1) Abandon the cloud IT professionals whove resisted moving to a public cloud have never liked the idea of putting their programs and data into someone elses hands. Now, as David S. Linthicum, senior vice-president of Cloud Technology Partners, recently wrote, Personally, I dont see much of a connection between the NSA and cloud computing, but those on the fence regarding cloud computing will cite this as another reason to kick the can further down the road. Thanks for nothing, NSA. True, the NSA probably isnt sitting in Amazon, Google, or Microsofts data-centers, but the NSA could be sitting at tier one ISPs watching your data go by on its way to the cloud. Regardless of what the NSA might or might not be doing, we already know the government can, and will, grab cloud servers. Just ask Kim Dotcom about the seizure of Megaupload cloud storage servers. Whether Dotcom was guilty of anything is still open to doubt, but all of Megauploads former customers data is still sitting in seized servers. Want to be sure your data is secure? Keep it on your own servers, datacenters, or private cloud and keep your traffic on the corporate intranet. A system administrator may still be able to walk out with your corporate secrets on a USB stick, but at least it wont be an outsider stealing your data. In addition, when youre thinking about the cloud, consider all those software as a service (SaaS) apps that you use everyday such as Office 365 and Gmail. Keep in mind that every time you use one of those convenient, free or inexpensive apps your work is potentially visible to the eyes of others. (2) Stop texting and using most instant messaging services When you text or instant message (IM) someone, you might think your message goes directly to the person youre writing to. It doesnt. Instead, typically, your first message goes to a server, where a copy is kept, and then is sent out to your buddy. Those stored texts can be used against you. Just ask former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, whose texting lead to his pleading guilty to felony charges back in 2008. You cant do a lot to make texting safer, but you can make IM safer. First, you must avoid using any public IM service such as AIM, Microsoft Messenger/Skype, or Google Talk. Instead run your own IM service with your own Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) server, such as Cisco United Presence. Keep in mind, though, that the second you send a message from your IM network to an external XMPP compatible IM network, such as Google Hangouts, your messages will end up being kept in a third-party server anyway. (3) Encrypt your e-mail There have been technologies such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) that you can use to encrypt your e-mail messages for ages. Theres just one little problem with them: Theyre a pain in the rump to use and the people you e-mail must always use them. As Peter Bright and Dan Goodin wrote recently, The long and the short of it is that e-mail isnt a very good system for secure communications. Youre wholly dependent on other people doing the right thing and sending you properly encrypted mail. Be that as it may, all of us still use e-mail for important communications every day of the year. (4) Hide your Web browsing Secure-socket layer (SSL) can be broken, but using SSL whenever possible is still a good idea. One way to do this is with the Electronic Frontier Foundations HTTPS Everywhere Web browser extension. Unfortunately, HTTPS Everywhere is only available for Firefox and Chrome. Thats fine as far as it goes, but its still easy to see which sites you visit and when. If you want to really disguise your tracks on the Web, you need to use Tor. Tor takes your Internet communications and bounces it around a distributed network of relays so a watcher cant see what sites youre visiting. It also keeps Web site owners from figuring out where youre browsing from. There are lots of way to put Tor to work, but the easiest is to use Tor Browser Bundle (TBB). There are TBB versions for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Practically speaking, Tor connections can be very, very slow. Your connection -- because it depends on the kindness of strangers for bandwidth and multiple relays -- will only be as fast as the slowest link. (5) Turn off all services you dont need If youre a system or network administrator, you already know you should never run or open your firewall to any service you dont need. But, have you looked at your tablet or smartphone lately? In your pocket at this very moment, your phone may very well be syncing your contacts, calendar, browser history, and messages with others -- and lets not even talk about GPS. Actually, lets do talk about GPS. Want to scare yourself silly? If you use Google location services for finding your way around or locating the nearest pub, check out your location history. Why, yes, you were in that bar two weeks ago werent you! Now, you can stop Google from recording your location; but with any location service from any vendor youre constantly sending out a Here I am message. So, if you want to really maintain your privacy, youre going to want to stop using all those apps that want your location. Thats easier said than done. Lots of apps want your location. There are groups, like the Android alternative firmware maker CyanogenMod, that are working on features such as Run in Incognito Mode, that will make it easier to lock down your smartphone privacy, but its never going to be easy to be private with the current generation of tablets and smartphones. (6) Quit social networks: All of them Facebook may be the worst of the social networks at hanging on to your data, but if youre sharing your personal information on a social network--any of them--then youre potentially sharing it with the world. Think about it. If youre blabbing to the world, or just your closest buddies, on Google+, Twitter, whatever, youre putting out lots of information about yourself that can be picked up by snoopers. --------- Real Privacy ---------- Lets say you do make yourself an Internet hermit; is that enough? No. No, its not. You may be able to conceal the contents of your messages, but thanks to the trio of big data, metadata, and traffic analysis, an expert with access to your Internet traffic can still work out what youre up to. In short, sure, if youre Anonymous, you can hide on the Internet. For the rest of us, though, especially if you want to get all the goodness that comes from SaaS, cloud storage, IM, GPS, social networks, etc., youre going to have to learn to live with the knowledge that if someone with expertise and access really wants to know what youre doing on the Internet, they can find out. If we really want to protect our privacy on the net what we need is more than better technology, we need fundamental changes in our laws and how we enforce the privacy laws we do have. Then, and only then, will we have a fighting chance of keeping our privacy on the Internet
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 04:38:20 +0000