2600 Magazine_ The Hacker Quarterly - Digital Edition - Summer 2011 - 2600 Magazine [56]
c) I should have known better, but this was the first I’d heard of magazines I order from passing around my address (even though I’d had about six changes of address since ordering from them) and it bugged me.
Email Opt-Outs and Other
From “Privacy-Alerts”
support@ameridex.com
remove@aristotle.com
customerservice@peopledata.com
webmaster@switchboard.com
http://www.infousa.com/
http://www.zoominfo.com/
Conclusion
In the end, this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a full time job just trying to keep oneself out of today’s information databases. Even after being cleaned from all the systems listed here, there are still credit reporting agencies, governments, Facebook, Gmail, hardware MAC addresses, and entities that will not erase your data no matter how nicely you ask.
In today’s world, the only real privacy is not existing at all (or acting like you don’t) and that’s the best advice I can give to anyone who wants “real” privacy. Use Tor, OTR, encryption, and the countless decent plug-ins for Firefox to help make your identity less obvious. When filling out forms, if convenient, make a habit of transposing numbers/letters, so that in every database you are in your date of birth or name is just a little bit different. If you are doing something private, use one-way blind email, or even better no email. Boot your computer with a live CD operating system. Change your MAC address before logging onto any networks. Do anything and everything to stay private, not because it’s cool or because of paranoia, but because it’s our right as human beings. A right that we are losing minute by minute, a right that we will lose, if we don’t stand up for it.
No matter how invasive the world becomes, there is always a way to fight fire with water.
Links
http://barrett.chaosnet.org/foxext/ - some good Firefox privacy extensions
http://www.haltabuse.org/ - site about fighting online stalkers
http://www.privacyalerts.org/ - many links from here
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ - government secrecy project
http://store.2600.com/privisdeadge1.html - this article was inspired by Steve Rambam
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Transmissions
by Dragorn | 727 words
Real “Cyberwar”
The news has been yelling at us about “cyberwar” for what, a decade? The wars of the future will be fought with “computers” on “the Internet.” I think I saw an episode of SeaQuest with this in the early 90s, right when the show got really crappy and time-travely.
The idea that some poor suckers we’re carpet bombing will DDoS Amazon and keep me from ordering my sample of Uranium (seriously, go look it up) may be annoying, but isn’t particularly frightening. Anonymous didn’t manage to take Amazon out (though they did manage to make life highly annoying for a lot of other companies), and I’m fairly sure most of the countries we’ve decided not to share the playground with have less bandwidth available than the anonymous collective.
The typical tit-for-tat behavior of various hacker groups in feuding countries hacking the opponent’s website and leaving the usual defamation messages isn’t very interesting, either. There isn’t any significant damage (besides that of pride) usually.
For things to get really interesting, we need to start looking at infrastructure-level attacks. “But,” you cry, “No one would ever hook critical infrastructure up to the Internet. Surely, we know it’s vital to insulate networks!”
Unfortunately, we don’t learn. We’re built by the lowest bidder, the cheapest contractor, the boss’s nephew who needs a summer job. We love our Facebook, email, Twitter, Wikipedia, and office-time Bit Torrenting. It’s so damn inconvenient to have to walk from the control workstation running the power plant, electrical grid, factory floor, etc., and go to the external system. It’s such a pain not to