thoughtsignals

A Swedish computer security researcher has discovered that users of the TOR Internet service (which makes your Internet traffic more or less anonymous) apparently thought it also encrypted their computer traffic and made it secure — which it doesn’t.

Wired News reports:

A little over a week ago, Swedish computer security consultant Dan Egerstad posted the user names and passwords for 100 e-mail accounts used by the victims, but didn’t say how he obtained them. He revealed Friday that he intercepted the information by hosting five Tor exit nodes placed in different locations on the internet as a research project.

Egerstad was able to get email accounts and passwords and read emails sent by the worthies at the Iranian embassy, among other groups. Even though Egerstad is in Sweden and there were no U.S. government agencies whose Internet traffic he intercepted, the Web host that hosts his blog apparently got a take-down notice from some unnamed U.S. law enforcement agency. I wonder if Egerstad has revealed a U.S. intelligence gathering mechanism.

There’s another lesson in this, of course: This computer security stuff shouldn’t be taken lightly, and there’s a big dangerous world out there. Use good passwords. And use ‘https’ when you’re doing anything online that involves passwords or email you want to keep confidential.

Mediapost writer Karl Greenberg has put a stake in the heart of a buzz campaign for a riding lawnmower. Maybe.

“I torpedoed a buzz campaign. I feel really awful about it. Especially since it’s a good campaign.

…

You see, my story — the one I wrote about the fictional grass and the fictional blogs about the grass — shows up on the very top of the list of results you get when you type in … the name of that fictional grass. “

Well, actually his story isn’t appearing at the top of the search results for Google any more. This morning it’s No. 4; No. 3 is another blog post about the incident, and the top two are links to sites that are actually part of the campaign.

You can see the search results here.

One of the niftiest features of my MacBook Pro is the tiny little camera built in above the screen. As it turns out, there’s all sorts of cool stuff I could do with it and iChat, the Apple IM program:

… you may find yourself in front of a beautiful geekosphere, and you may find yourself on some beautiful bandwidth, but you may ask yourself: where is my useful device? Is this my beautiful iSight? How did I get here? My God! What have I done?

The folks over at O’Reilly have some ideas.
(Actually, I’m just linking to this because I’m insanely jealous that I didn’t come up with that riff off of the Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime first.)

Popular Science has a how-to on creating cool-looking witches’ cauldrons and other gruesome gadgets for Halloween. Worth visiting just to see the video demonstration.

Link.