Government Monitoring of Social Media

You can't have it both ways. If you want your government to detect whether your kids are being radicalised on Twitter or Facebook then you have to accept that all your Internet activity is being observed.

The UK government keep on asking for greater powers to monitor what its citizens are doing on the Internet and yet they miss much of what is going on. This includes those that are planning to go to Syria on Jihad or those that are going to shoot cartoonists. Even when individuals have been determined their activities are still ignored and they still commit the atrocities that they were planning all along. So my question is: Do governments really have all the powers that Snowden says that they do? If so, they are pretty incompetent.

Why Windows 10 is irrelevant

All those users that have complained about the interface that Windows 8 introduced have long figured out ways to make Windows 8 run and look like Windows 7.

Adding back some of the features that were part of 7 and not forcing the user to have a start screen full of ugly tiles are just secondary issues that Windows users face. Microsoft Windows is still the most popular operating system and as such is the biggest target for hackers and purveyors of malware. It is no better or worse than its alternatives, Mac or Linux.

Wayne - Core Data Recovery

Am I saying anything about you?

It seems that you were looking. Perhaps you should checkout my website tempusfugit.ca

NSA/GCHQ and The Intercept

I really don't know how to view all this. In some respects it is all old-news.

The Guardian and Glen Greenwald's latest ventures  have made capital on the Snowden and other revelations (just recently the Carbanak/Kasperski money going missing from banks). Now it is the hacking of encryption keys from SIM cards.

Sure, governments spy on people - what do we expect? So do a lot of other disreputable entities. One would think that all is lost and we are all totally insecure and nobody can count on having any wealth and/or privacy due to all these advances in technology. 

Wzlom WiFi pirate

There have been quite a few searches for Взлом WiFi Pirate.

As far as I know there is no such application that is called this and the Russian website that promotes it is a sham.

Carbanak - Russian Gang steals $1B from banks

I am amused by the stories that the BBC picks up on a "slow news day".

This morning I awoke to a story on Kaspersky saying the banks worldwide have been targeted by a gang that they have called Carbanak.

I may be wrong but this seems than more than a little self-serving and a promotion for their services and a report that is due for release today.

After all, Kaspersky are in the business in selling software to protect the "computing public" from such attacks.

A quote from the BBC News article:
The gang, which Kaspersky dubbed Carbanak, used computer viruses to infect company networks with malware including video surveillance, enabling it to see and record everything that happened on staff's screens.

There are lots of nice diagrams in the Kaspersky report, but I find it strange that I was hard pressed to find out more information on this gang. As I say, I could be wrong and this story may have "legs".

In any case it may be a good idea to check you bank balances and look for anything suspicious. But, we all do that in anyway????

NetHunter Review

I recently came across the Offensive Security NetHunter project.

I will be reviewing this on my website. From what I can see it is an attempt at the Kali Linux boys to come up with their own version of the PWNIEExpress Pwn Pad. - a pentesting tablet based on an ARM
or Android device.

Many of you will be well aware of what I think of all this nonsense. However, if you have a lot of time on your hands to waste on this, then go ahead.

Tor and ExitServers

There seems to be an added interest in the use of Vidalia TOR (The Onion Router) and the selection of  Exit Servers.

My pages on tempusfugit.ca detail the use of Tor for the access of the BBC iPlayer programming from locations outside the UK. It is not known if the interest in the selection of a Tor server that is located in the UK is connected to this interest.

I describe the topics of what to place in the torrc (TOR Configuration file) and the determination of what computers that are part of the Tor Network that "exit" in a specific geographic location. Choosing a Tor participant that provides a connection to the Internet in the UK will allow the user to access the BBC servers and iPlayer programs. However, Tor will be too slow to allow streaming of media.

To determine whether a computer on the Tor Network is an EXITSERVER you can access a Torstatus report. To do this you can either read what I have posted on www.tempusfugit.ca or you can consult the Vidalia TOR website. The TorStaus report will tell you if a server actually connects to the Internet or if it is just one of the computers that provides a (somewhat) random connection to other computers on the network that effectively provides an obfuscation of how an Internet user connects to Internet services.

I may be wrong, but in today's age of surveillance the use of Tor to obscure your identity may be the reason that this topic is of interest. Accessing Web content that was originally intended to be accessed from a specific geographic location, such as the UK for the BBC, is not a reason for using Tor.

I am also surprised that there is so much out-of-date information relating to the removal of DRM from BBC downloads. The notion that all you need to do is to find a program or software to perform the appropriate file conversion it will overcome the restrictions that you find when you download using iPlayer is common.

Mass Surveillance and File Download Services

It was interesting to me that when looking for evidence that government agencies, such as the NSA and GCHQ, were "Targeting Individual Computers" to determine who the "Bad Guys" were that I came across Mr Glen Greenwald and The Intercept website.

According to Glen:

The ostensible aim of the surveillance is to sift through vast amounts of  data to identify people uploading or downloading content that could be connected to terrorism - such as bomb-making guides and hostage videos.

This was in an article on The Intercept about the surveillance being carried out by the Canadian Security Services (CSE).

Services such as Rapidshare were cited.

This was from an article dated 25 January 2015 - if this is the extent of what the so-called "Snowden Revelations" have resulted in then it would seem that the Security Services of the world have not really progressed that far when it comes to "cracking down" on the activities of terrorists. The monitoring of Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were not even mentioned.

Alka Saha - Know How to Hack

Alka Saha is doing Masters in Computer Science from University of Delhi, India. She is a passionate blogger, loves to write, plays chess and is music lover. She is blogging since 2011 and has contributed a number of great articles to the internet.

It is a pity that her articles are little more than "Click Bait"

Found when searching for "how to hack by phablet"