Anonymity fosters crime?
An ingenious bank robber dressed as a road maintenance worker pulled a heist which was made possible partly thanks to the internet and its inherent anonymity.
The robber pepper-sprayed a guard outside the Bank of America in Monroe, Washington, grabbed a bag of cash from a Brinks truck, and jumped into a nearby creek, where his “get-away inner tube” awaited. He then floated down to the Skykomish River where presumably he had a boat or a car or possibly a zeppelin stashed.
But that wasn’t the genius part. Security guards couldn’t pursue the robber because there were a dozen other people at the bank dressed exactly like him — dust mask, safety goggles, work gloves, blue work shirt — thanks to an ad the robber had placed on Craigslist. They’d all been instructed to show up at the bank at 11 am dressed for a job that promised $28.50 an hour.
Is it time to reconsider the value of anonymity on the Net? Asks Bob Cringely in his story.
Your Privacy under threat
Bob Cringely has talked about his nosy uncle whose name happens to be Sam!
And the news is that the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Government of U.S of A, Mr. Donald M. Kerr has staked a claim to all of your Internet records. Well, is the news purely US-centric and hence doesn’t affect you? Well, you have another think coming. The majority of records of gTLDs are housed in US and again the vast majority of web servers are hosted within the boundary of US. In simple terms internet is virtually controlled by the Uncle Sam.
So, it is something that concerns every one of us!
Let is see why the big deal!
Why is our friend Cringely screaming? He must have some valid point to make, going by his credentials!
Here is a quote from Kerr’s speech that Bob is concerned about:-
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Don’t take passwords lightly
Listen to this sane advice from this renowned techie columnist Bob Cringely, who has an intelligent ear to the ground all the time, or perish!
CHANGE YOUR DAMNED PASSWORDS!! Most people don’t do this — ever. They have one or two passwords they use for everything, often associated with one or two user names. If a system forces a password change they’ll move to password B in hopes that when the next move is forced they can move back to password A. If you have an eight-character password that mixes numbers, letters, and non-alphanumeric characters in various combinations of upper and lower case — in other words a REALLY GOOD password — I can pretty much guarantee you’ve been using that exact same password since 1998. People are lazy. People don’t want to learn arcane eight-character passwords on a regular basis.
But identity thieves aren’t so lazy, especially when they have technology to help them. They can start a sweepstakes website that requires only free registration to win that cruise of a lifetime to Bora Bora. And in doing so the thieves can know that a majority of registrants will use a username and password combination that they also use at a lot of other sites, like bank and brokerage accounts. Not only don’t they need to actually award the cruise, they don’t even have to break into your bank account in order to benefit from the username/password combo. They just sell that information to another crook.
That crook knows your name, address, and likely username and password. Forty percent of the people in your town use the same bank. Fifty percent of his stolen usernames and passwords are valid. Forty percent of bank customers use online banking. Add this all together and that crook has more than enough information to raid the bank accounts of enough folks to make his day and ruin theirs.
It doesn’t take just a fake website to accomplish this kind of phishing expedition. There are thousands — probably tens of thousands — of web operations that require user sign-ons but don’t do anything to protect the user database from being stolen by employees. “We’re not selling anything,” they tell themselves, “so it doesn’t matter.”
It matters.
Half my credit card accounts now require me to go through an elaborate e-mail validation scheme if I try logging in from a new IP address or from a computer lacking the proper cookie. Half don’t require this. The half that do were probably the targets of some huge and successful crime spree — a spree we never heard of because it was never made public. Billions of dollars are ripped off this way each year from banks and other financial institutions but we never hear about it because that might encourage more crime.
So CHANGE YOUR DAMNED PASSWORDS and put an end to this kind of scam. Perhaps remembering new character strings will help to stave off Alzheimer’s.
So, don’t forget to change your passwords every Tuesday, and remember the new passwords - may be it is a good idea to tattoo them between your toes!!
Be really afraid of Microsoft!
Here are some “snafus” and intentional monkeying by the ultimate boogeyman of computer world, Microsoft of Windows, as reported by Robert X. Cringely in his latest column:
- Windows Update automatically installed Windows Desktop Search 3.01 on systems that had been configured not to run the resource-hogging application. Microsoft’s response? “Oops, sorry.â€
- The forced update has caused many users’ systems to suffer an involuntary reboot earlier this month. The culprit? Windows Live OneCare, which automatically changes your Update options to be automatic even if you had disabled it.
- The vulnerability that allows a malicious PDF file to turn your PC into a zombie is yet to be fixed, even after three months. a patch is still coming!
And do you really wanna play around with next (Scoop! Don’t you reveal this to anyone!) Windows Really Good Edition?
Then Click Here!
Here is how BOB concludes the story:
The ugly truth is that Microsoft is using security fears to force its enslaved base (that would be you and me) into installing stuff it wants us to have. Somebody needs to put a stake through its heart, before it kills again.
The moral of the story is:
Go Ubuntu, oh, Ubuntu!!
“Smart, Secure and Easy!”
Bob’s Pulpit!
One of the web pages I love to visit regularly is I, Cringely, the Pulpit, the very insightful, informative, well-reasoned, futuristic and incisive essays of Robert X.Cringely on the happenings on the techno-world and their real impact on the society. Bob’s prophesies are always proved true! The ones on Taguchi and the threat of ID theft were really eye openers. His essay on Microsoft’s .NET is the pièce de résistance!
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About Me
I am S.K!
Ok, what's the big deal, you may ask! But you may miss a good deal if you do not dwell deep into this web site, specially hand-crafted for you. But what about me, the person? Wait, I am not good at making things up. If you stumble upon a good-sounding résumé, please pass it on to me!
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