The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘safety’

Twitter has just announced that it is launching a new anti-phishing feature that allows Twitter’s Trust and Safety team to monitor all links submitted through the service for potentially malicious attacks. Part of the new feature will involve the use of Twitter’s link shortener twt.tl, which may now start popping up in some of your emails and direct messages.

At this point, it’s not really clear which links are being converted to Twitter’s twt.tl shortened links. We just ran a test at the TC office with two different links: one for an article on GigaOm, and another for a bit.ly link that pointed to a page on Google Buzz. The links I received on my Twitter client were both unchanged, but both were converted to twt.tl links in our Email notifications (obviously neither of them had malicious content).

From the Twitter blog:

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.

Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications.

Image via ToastyKen

At what point do you stop trying to track and prosecute cyber-criminals ? Obviously, you can’t let criminals run around willy-nilly, but when you look at the resources involved in bringing those guys to justice—and are you really nabbing the right guys in the first place?—it’s worth at least talking about. Is fighting cyber-crime about as futile as fighting the war on drugs?

More here: 
Should we even bother going after cyber-criminals?

It finally happened. A Muslim woman in Manchester refused to submit to a full-body airport body scanner and was thus barred from boarding her flight.

Continued here:
A first? Muslim woman refuses to submit to airport body scan, not allowed to board flight

Another international airport has adopted those full-body scanners that have proven to be so controversial . Paris’ Charles de Gaulle has installed the machine on a three-month trial basis. Concerned about being bombarded with millimeter waves

Read the rest here: 
The madness continues: Paris airport installs full-body scanning machines

Straight out of China comes “The Machismo!” – billed as “the world’s hottest cigarette lighter mobile phone.” Does that mean there’s more than one? Like, are there other, lesser, not-as-hot cell phones with built-in cigarette lighters? Nothing would surprise me after seeing this.

Here is the original:
Cell phone has built in cigarette lighter. In other news, I have officially seen it all.

Early this morning, Twitter began alerting certain users to reset their passwords because of a possible phishing attack. They later elaborated on it a bit but it still wasn’t clear exactly what was going on. Now they’ve felt the need to fully go into exactly what went down — and it’s fairly interesting.

On their Twitter Status blog (interesting that it’s not the main Twitter blog), Del Harvey, Twitter’s Director of “Trust and Safety” has a post detailing the attack. Apparently, Twitter figured out that some torrent sites have been being created for a number of years by some individual who then sells them to others looking to get into the business. The problem is that this person seems to have included a backdoor into these sites so that they could access them later when the site became popular. And because people often use the same login and password across the web, a bunch of Twitter accounts were then comprimised with this data.

To make matters worse, it seems that there were also other exploits on these sites that allowed other hackers to gain access to data. Harvey doesn’t name any of the torrent sites involved (and says they likely won’t even be able to figure out all of them), but notes that if you’re a torrent site user, you should probably change your Twitter password immediately.

Harvey titles his post, “reason 4,132 for changing your password” — but really it should be, “reason 4,132 for not using the same login/password on all sites.” Here’s the main nugget:

The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or a variant) on multiple sites.  Through our discussions with affected users, we’ve discovered a high correlation between folks who have used third party forums and download sites and folks who were on our list of possibly affected accounts.

[photo: flickr/Daquella manera]

This seems like a really good idea. A German company called Armatix has developed a handgun that can only be fired by someone wearing a biometrically unlocked wrist watch. An LED light on the gun glows green if it’s set to be fired or red if it’s locked.

Read more here:
Armatix handgun can only be fired by someone wearing the correct watch

Newsflash: Sending text messages while driving is dangerous. There’s really no safe way to send a text while behind the wheel unless you’re at a stoplight or pulled over. And while there’s no nationwide texting ban for regular drivers, Uncle Sam has just decreed that anyone driving a large commercial truck or bus anywhere in the country can be fined up to $2,750 if caught texting while in motion.

The rest is here: 
Nationwide no texting law goes into effect for buses and commercial trucks

Geez, not to sound ungrateful but it’s like hey wallet industry, what took you guys so long? I’ve been sitting on this dirty wallet of mine for years with no obvious way to clean it. Thanks to the miracle of carbon fiber (it’s seriously a cool material, I’d wear a carbon fiber sweatsuit if I could), this $50 wallet from Hammacher Schlemmer “will never stretch, fade, or develop cracks like a leather billfold.” And yes, according to the product page, “this is the wallet that withstands a gale force wind or the torrents of a dishwasher.” So if you get caught in a hurricane you can huddle everyone under your wallet for protection.

Read more:
Finally, a dishwasher safe carbon fiber wallet

Hope you’re ready for CES’s flood of USB 3.0 drives and accessories .

See the rest here:
The BlackArmor PS 110 gets Seagate in the USB 3.0 game