Category: Computer Tech
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Invasion of the (AI) privacy snatchers
AI is busy undergoing its teenage growth spurt. One that is struggling with the concept of privacy and how to accommodate it, while simultaneously ingesting information to learn. Unfortunately that ingestion of data is tripping over all sorts of barriers and trampling on said privacy. Just recently we had LinkedIn automatically enabling the AI ingestion…
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The double-edged sword of ECH
Definition: ECH: Encrypted Client Hello Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is a successor to ESNI and masks the Server Name Indication (SNI) that is used to negotiate a TLS handshake. This means that whenever a user visits a website that has ECH enabled, no one except for the user, and the website owner can determine which…
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Explaining SSL Certificates
SSL Certificates might seem a bit of a minefield but they’re actually fairly straightforward. In this blogpost, I’ll explain the different types of certificates and where you would/should use for what purpose. Understanding PKI Certificates The certificates I’m discussing here are PKI (public key infrastructure) certificates where one will have a private certificate for the…
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LinkedIn and the AI scam (again)
Linked decided yesterday (18th Sep 2024) that it will automatically switch on scraping of all its users’ data for AI training purposes. The setting options come with an explanation saying that this feature gives “LinkedIn and its affiliates” permission to “use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn to train generative AI models…
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The crowd strikes back, and other cool stories
I thought I’d give you some vague thoughts on this past Friday’s Crowdstrike (CS) debacle and the topic of security products in general. To say that CS screwed up this past week is putting it mildly. An estimated 9M endpoints were affected by CS’ borked update that was delivered to its Falcon product early Friday…
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Big Tech Abuse – Meta & Google
Facebook has been at the forefront of social media user and privacy abuse for years. Being caught out in the Cambridge Analytica scandal was not an isolated event. Newly unsealed court documents from a private antitrust lawsuit detail abuses of trust that are cynical and unethical at the very minimum. The following screenshot of a…
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AI and the truth
We are possibly at one of the greatest inflection points in human history. Strong words, but hear me out … In recent years, it’s become trendy to push one’s own truth in the absence of fact. This trend is known as wokeism, and has been and is being pushed in many social areas such as…
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FortiGate SSL VPN security
Most firewall engineers using FortiGate will implement the SSL VPN function using the standard method as indicated in the documentation. Fortinet do provide additional information on securing SSL VPN but there’s even more you can do. I’ll go through a number of essential tasks to cover when implementing SSL VPN and some options to improve…
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Google Chrome and privacy – opposing forces?
Audio transcription The Google Chrome browser was first released in Sep 2008 as an alternative to rival browsers, to “address perceived shortcomings in those browsers and to support complex web applications”. Google also wanted a browser that could better integrate with its own web services and technologies. That last statement speaks to the heart of…
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Plex Discover: a lesson in privacy
Audio Transcript It’s a common refrain: my data isn’t important so I don’t need to protect it, I’m unimportant so my information doesn’t matter … There’s recently been some horror stories of overly ‘ambitious’ policing of internet-related activities. Like the father who sent pictures of his son with a developing issue to their doctor for…
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PKI, processes and security
Audio transcript PKI, or Public Key Infrastructure, is the general term used for establishing and managing public key encryption, one of the most common forms of internet encryption. It is baked into every web browser (and many other applications) in use today to secure traffic across the public internet, but organizations can also deploy it…
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SSL/TLS Certificate lifetime redux
I wrote an article in 2020 about SSL/TLS Certificate lifetimes, the upshot of which was that the certificate/browser industry had just moved to 1yr (398 days to be precise) certificate expiries. I noted the following: There have been a number of attempts over the years to reduce the lifetime of certificates as they apply to…
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IT Security for the Small Business
Structured IT Security is generally seen as the domain of the medium to large enterprise as it can be an expensive exercise to implement properly, and requires hard-to-find skills. However, there are a lot of areas a small business can tackle to improve their security status considerably without breaking the bank. I’ll simplify this process…
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GPC / Global Privacy Control
Do Not Track It’s quite amazing to think that DNT or Do Not Track was first proposed back in 2009 – 13 years ago. This was a first-stab method at the issue of website privacy and the horrendous marketing machine that is the internet. DNT was designed to allow users to opt-out of website tracking,…
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Social Media security
Keeping yourself secure on the internet remains a very important component of our daily lives seeing as internet access is so ingrained in day-to-day activities. Think ride sharing, online banking, retail shopping, email and so on. Social media specifically remains a prime attack vector for malicious activities impacting on many internet users’ security. Yet the…