Cyber Spies

BBC Radio 4 - File on 4 - broadcast 25 September 2011 -  b014q04r

In the current digital age security has taken on new faces. Cyber Spies are not, but are in some cases, figments of TV and radio program script writers imagination. Some of the material on the BBC Radio 4 programme "Cyber Spies" was that, and FUD put out by those that are responsible in keeping us "safe" - or at least providing the illusion that we are.

Stephen Grey investigates the use of computer hacking by the police and security agencies to combat criminal exploitation of the internet and asks if it is legal.

• Lawful Interception 
• Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000  - the reason that my frame of reference is from a UK perspective is that we listen pretty much exclusively to UK radio, even though we currently live in Canada.
• Cyber security

Finfisher

Finfisher IT - Gamma International gammagroup dot com - Andover, Hampshire UK

Mentioned on the BBC programme "File on 4 - Cyber Spies" for supplying cyber-surveillance solutions to the Mubarak government in Egypt pre the Arab Spring uprising. Denied by Gamama International but reports of how it allowed the Mubarak regime to monitor Skype, Hotmail and GMail messages of dissidents.

Hosni Mubarak, his former prime minister Ahmed Nazif and interior minister Habib el-Adli seem to have been instrumental in government run cyber-spying.

• BBC Radio 4 - File on 4 - broadcast 25 September 2011 -  b014q04r 
• The Gamma International website - details of the Finfisher IT Intrusion Training Program
• Mubarak fined for mobile, Internet cut - By Ashraf Madbouly - The Egyptian Gazette. Saturday, May 28, 2011

Quote from The Egyptian Gazette:
In February, Vodafone also accused the authorities of using its network to send pro-government text messages to subscribers.

• Lawful Interception on The Technology Muse
• Cyber-security

AMD Llano Notebook review

The following notebooks are now available:

• HP DV6-6144ca with Radeon HD 6755G2 - Vision A8-3500M
• HP DV7-6188ca with Radeon HD 6755G2 - AMD A8-3530MX
• Acer Aspire AMD Quad-Core A6-3400M (AS5560-SB410)

The Twinlinks Scam

If you receive an email from Rebecca Wilson (Mary McKibben) claiming that she has a unique scheme to help you build your page rank by participating in her link building program, then you may wish to know that many see this as a scam.

Hello,

Let's do a 3-way link swap with your website www.tempusfugit.ca. I'll give you 
two links in exchange for one from you.
3-way linking is a very effective link building strategy. Since you're getting 
the links from third party websites, they appear totally natural to search 
engines. Such inbound links help your website rank higher in Google and 
other search engines.

    Visit (link removed) to submit your website.

    Thanks,
    Rebecca Wilson

    Founder & CEO, TwinLinks

The difference between a "normal" and "deep" links

With reference to the screenshot above, there is no definition of what a "deep link" is and how it differs from a normal one. It is assumed that if you fall for this scam you are also likely to be taken in by the promise of these extra links. 
  

• Other SEO Scams
• Three-way Links
• My definition of a scam

Number1onGoogle

Chris Jones - A spokesperson for Lamnia (formerly SBA Media)

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, is an Officer of Parliament who reports directly to the House of Commons and the Senate.

• Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act
• Personal Property Security Act - PPSA.ca

Apache Rewrite Conditions and Rules

In my rebuild of the content of this website I don't want all requests for pages that were on www.tempusfugit.ca to be redirected to tempusfugit.ca/techwatch.ca

Asus drop asuswebstorage

The new MeeGO Netbook is specified with DropBox for cloud storage.

Does this mean that they are admitting that their web storage solution sucks?

They have finally given up pestering me with extending my 10G storage that I got with my Netbook over 2 years ago. I have bought at least half a dozen computers since then and I never did get Asus webstorage to work as they said it did.

I still get hits from those looking for a review

Deleting the IBM/Lenovo Service or Recovery Partition

Deleting the service partition will recover disc space, however this is a non-trivial exercise.

The basic procedure is to restore a partial image of the HDD to a new HDD. The main partition  is restored only. The manufacturers service partition (IBMSERVICE in the case of Lenovo) is NOT restored.

You can also increase the size of the HDD at the same time - going from a 30G or 40G drive with only 20G of usable space all the way to a 320G, 500G or more - all space usable!

Alternatively you can completely re-install Windows (or the operating system of your choice) after reformatting your hard drive. All of the drivers, for Lenovo at least, are available for Windows on the Lenovo website. You may have more of a problem with obtaining Linux drivers. Lenovo/IBM/Thinkpad do have a very active support forum.

Other posts related to RRBACKUPS on this blog:

• How to recover lost disc space taken up by RRBACKUPS 
• Deleting the SERVICE partition and recovering even more disk space

A recap on RRBACKUPS

Having featured many pages on the Lenovo/IBM backup software Rapid Restore & Recovery on my website I am making this post on this blog so that I have a reference to the archived pages.

Links:

• How to recover lost disk space used by RRBACKUPS
• Deleting the IBM/Lenovo Service or Recovery Partition
• File recovery from RRBackups data files  It probably can be done, but the effort to do so is too involved.

Transferring vidoes from your PVR to your computer

I have started a detailed "how-to" on my website.

ipdl.exe

ipdl.exe is the iplayer downloader that was developed by PoRu and was broken in December 2010 when the BBC made changes to the way that they encode their streamed Internet content.

Links:

• Download the last working version of ipdl.exe
• Systems and programming on the Technology Muse
• get_iplayer pages on this blog
• RTMP - Real Time Message Protocol 
• The Po-Ru website that describes the demise of ipdl.exe

The TorrentFreak forum and website

This is a forum that is dedicated to all things that are related to downloading from P2P sources.

Design and administration of a website

In addition to the posts relating to running a webserver from your broadband Internet connection these are my posts related to website administration in general:

• Analyzing  web server logs
• CMS - Content Management Systems (Software)
• The Legal implications for your ISP - w.r.t. running a webserver on your broadband connection.
• The personal information held by ZoneEdit - a DNS service
• The selection of a DNS service
• Remote administration of a webserver using VNC