GuruNews, Volume 8 Number 38, 10-16-08

Thu Oct 16 21:05:55 EDT 2008

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Vol. 8, No. 38                 

10-16-08

1 Hacking Sarah Palin       

2 Oh great, we're toast!   

3 Anti-aging Internet, FTC whacks spammers, EA has hoof and mouth, Obama GTA

4 Multi-mail

5 New broadband

The compromising and publication of a few of Sarah Palin's Yahoo emails has raised the ire of Republicans and Democrats alike.  It's a blatant violation of privacy and was totally over the edge.  The perpetrator should definitely suffer the consequences, but the media and their "experts" have devolved into blithering idiots when talking about it.

For one thing the email account was never "hacked", at least not in my opinion.  It meets the legal definition, but like most legal blather that's a broad definition.  

The miscreant who gained access simply tried to log into her account and clicked the "I forgot my password" link.  He then answered her "security" questions using information easily gleaned from newspaper articles and blogs about Palin's life and political career.  Once in, he changed the password.

No special tools were used.  No "script kiddie" used easily obtainable hacking utilities to get in; no genius social engineering skills were involved.  Simply researching a bit and answering a few questions were all that the task required.

This is less a heralding of the "madd skilz" of the miscreant and more a denunciation of Yahoo's woefully insecure email setup.  The service is free and anonymous.  You have to provide an email address but the security questions are a joke.  Things like your favorite musician or teacher, the street you grew up on etc.  All of the questions save one have answers that a public figure (like a candidate, an actor, an author etc.) would have likely answered during interviews.

The only semi-secure question was for your frequent flyer ID, which seems a little invasive of your privacy in its own right.  At least one of the questions wasn't your mother's maiden name.

Websites that want to offer email or other private accounts should ditch the pre-selected questions and allow the user to add their own questions.  That way you can get a little more bizarre and use things like the brand of tires on your second car or your Dungeons and Dragons character's name from college, the serial number of your mouse or your most annoying Windows behavior.

Things that people wouldn't guess about you if you were an average Joe or that you wouldn't discuss in an interview if you were in the public eye.

All that aside, this brings me to my second beef.

I heard a guest on the morning show on WHAS radio last week discussing the issue and he stated that he and his wife were removing all personal data from their home PC.  He was afraid they would be "hacked".

I will never say that any computer is safe if it's connected to the Internet but if you have one you can take precautions.  Operate behind a router, use a quality antivirus program, do frequent scans for spyware, and don't click every little thing that pops up on the web.  That's all it takes.

You can store your personal information in encrypted files, which XP makes easy to do, or you can disguise a file full of sensitive data as something else, like a recipe in a folder containing several hundred.

Removing all useful data from your PC is overkill and paranoia at its most obvious.

Your personal PC is very unlikely to be specifically targeted by "hackers" and rendering it all but useless for your personal activities defeats the purpose of owning one at all.

Just buy a deck of cards and a roll of stamps.

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

A team of scientists from the University of California Los Angeles has found that internet use among the middle aged stimulates certain sections of the brain and can counteract the natural slowing of thought processes that occurs as we get older:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2228325/internet-boosts-brain-power

The Federal Trade Commission won a huge antispam victory in court on Tuesday, with a federal courts in Chicago's order to freeze the assets of a botnet spam group generally known as HerbalKing:

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4114

I am sure that EA CEO didn't mean to sound this callous in a recent Q&A, but someone should remind him that everything he says will likely end-up somewhere online:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10067147-62.html

Senator Barack Obama has become the first presidential candidate to pay for ads found inside video games:

http://tinyurl.com/4hybg4  

Copy us on the good stuff! 

Matthew Dattilo

thepcgurus at gmail.com 

www.mattstodayinhistory.com

Download of the Week

You don't have to be an elected official to use web-based email, but it can be a hassle to check multiple accounts several times each day.  There are so many free Web-based e-mail programs available---Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and others--that many people use multiple ones. It means manually checking each account multiple times throughout the day--a productivity-killer, if there ever was one. ePrompter solves the problem neatly. It automatically checks all of your Web-based e-mail automatically every 15 minutes, and alerts you when any has new mail. You'll be able to do this for up to 16 different accounts. In addition, you don't even have to log into the different Web-based mail systems in order to see your inbox, read your messages, and respond to them--you can do all of that directly from within the program. You can delete mail as well.  ePrompter is free here:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/E-mail-lients/ePrompter.shtml 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com

Email Question of the Week

Q:  I have finally gone and done it, I have upgraded to broadband internet access.

I may need an additional firewall, are their any free ones you could recommend? do you think I will need an additional a/v I currently have AVG free version do you think this is adequate? If not what do you recommend?

A:  I like ZoneAlarm, it's free from http://www.majorgeeks.com/ZoneAlarm_Free_d388.html  (click a mirror and wait for the download window, don't click the Recommended Download link.

For AV, you can only run one.  AVG and Avast are the best free ones that I'm aware of so unless you want to get a retail product like Panda or Kaspersky it's probably best to leave well enough alone. 

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

Contact info and legal stuff

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