Author: Ben Moore

Facebook Tracking – Part 2

Go read this first. Now go try this. Login to Facebook. You can even try my sandbox technique if you like. Logout. Leave that alone and go away for a while. Wait until you should have gotten some kind of Facebook notification. Now go back to the tab where you were logged out. You just thought you were logged out.…

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Facebook Tracking

I realize there’s lots of noise on the Internet about Facebook tracking you but I just wanted to show you what it really looks like. I’ve posted before about how I try to sandbox Facebook. I’m not naive enough to think that’s bulletproof but at least I’m trying. Similarly, I NEVER click on a link in…

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VPNs

Recently one of my co-workers sent me this article (archive.is). He asked: What do you think of his assessment that VPNs are worthless and you are better off with HTTP Anywhere, etc? That’s not going to be a quick answer. Just before a promotion for a commercial VPN service, the author says: VPN services don’t make you…

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Friends Don’t Let Friends

Microsoft Azure has had another round of problems. Microsoft Office 365 users in Europe unable to access mailboxes for a full day Microsoft cloud services see global authentication outage Microsoft threw Level 3 under the bus on the second outage. On the Azure status page, Microsoft indicated that the source of the problem is with Level 3, an US-based…

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Anti-Virus Comparison

I’m a regular listener to TWiT’s Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson. On a recent podcast Steve mentioned AV-Comparatives‘ anti-virus testing. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you also know I’m a fan of Windows Defender. AV-Comparatives’ September 2018 test (PDF) showed that Windows Defender was in the very top performers. Steve’s assessment was: Given that Microsoft is one of the 6…

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Microsoft, Get Your Act Together

tl;dr What should you do? First, I’m moderately aggressive in applying updates across a variety of systems and I’ve not had any problems. Second, look at Woody Leonard’s post on ComputerWorld. There’s some hyperbole there but overall not bad advice. So here’s the background… Microsoft has had a bad month with Windows 10. They’ve had problems with Display Audio issues (jpeg), file deletions (archive.is), HP…

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GDPR Cookies

You know what GDPR is, right? Great, then we can keep going. One of the most visible results of GDPR is all the cookie notifications you’ve been seeing. Here‘s what’s behind all that. One of the most tangible requirements of the GDPR is in the definition of what constitutes a proper cookie consent, meaning, that the consent has…

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It’s Not Our Fault

I follow the Internet Storm Center‘s diary. Recently one of the entries related a situation with a personal NAS (Network Attached Storage) with terabytes of data. It was configured with RAID5. The NAS vendor offered a cloud backup service that he used. He had a detailed backup plan consisting of: a daily backup to a…

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Innovation – Wikipedia’s Take

A 2013 survey of literature on innovation found over 40 definitions. In an industrial survey of how the software industry defined innovation, the following definition given by Crossan and Apaydin was considered to be the most complete, which builds on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) manual’s definition:[9] Innovation is: production or adoption,…

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