Guys "digital life" wiped out.

[harrygunner]

Good read. Most website designers are not very good at security. Yet, some people place valuable data in their hands.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/

Be extra careful if you have an AppleID or other kinds of ID and "single password" access.

[sqlbullet]

And this is why I hate single sign-on.  And why most places I have different passwords for the accounts.

Yes, it is a small pain to keep track of, but that is indeed a small pain versus having to deal with this.

Of course, I eschew twitter, facebook, google+ and social networking in general.  And, I keep things on the cloud only for convenience, and regularly back them up to local storage.  So, my digital life, compared to the author's, is non-existent.

[Vice]

Definintely  a good read.  But boy do I feel like an ignorant dumb ass. 

[EdMc]

Definintely  a good read.  But boy do I feel like an ignorant dumb ass. 

Don't feel alone.......only my ignorance saves me. I can barely operate my cell phone much less all the stuff this guy has had breached.

[REDLINE]

Just read the whole article.  I wish I could say I'm surprised.  Not much surprises me anymore.  Sad though it is.  Clearly, even in this day and age, other's privacy is not taken anywhere near seriously enough.  I believe it's because of greed (and control if you want to bring governments into the mix) getting in the way of caring.  Companies like Apple care much more about their next sale than our privacy.

It's a crazy world out there!  Good Luck to all. 

[Vice]

Definintely  a good read.  But boy do I feel like an ignorant dumb ass. 

Don't feel alone.......only my ignorance saves me. I can barely operate my cell phone much less all the stuff this guy has had breached.

Talk about cell phones - mine got so complicated I couln't fiqure out how to place a call.  So I got a NEW phone.



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[Vice]

Just read the whole article.  I wish I could say I'm surprised.  Not much surprises me anymore.  Sad though it is.  Clearly, even in this day and age, other's privacy is not taken anywhere near seriously enough.  I believe it's because of greed (and control if you want to bring governments into the mix) getting in the way of caring.  Companies like Apple care much more about their next sale than our privacy.

It's a crazy world out there!  Good Luck to all.

I DID read the Whole article!  It was very informative.   I was left with wanting more.

[REDLINE]

Definintely  a good read.  But boy do I feel like an ignorant dumb ass. 

Don't feel alone.......only my ignorance saves me. I can barely operate my cell phone much less all the stuff this guy has had breached.

Talk about cell phones - mine got so complicated I couln't fiqure out how to place a call.  So I got a NEW phone.

LOL!  I dumped cell phones completely a couple years ago.  It was around the time I began wondering why I had it in the first place.  Seems my landline phone works just fine.  As for using the cell phones as "computers" too....seems my laptop works just fine too.  Getting rid of the cell freed up a good amount of cash for other stuff like reloading equipment and supplies.  Technically I do have a cell phone provided by my boss.  It maybe gets used 3-4 times a week at best, but that's specifically work related, and I don't pay the bill.

[Bro KV]

Definintely  a good read.  But boy do I feel like an ignorant dumb ass. 

Don't feel alone.......only my ignorance saves me. I can barely operate my cell phone much less all the stuff this guy has had breached.

Talk about cell phones - mine got so complicated I couln't fiqure out how to place a call.  So I got a NEW phone.

LOL!  I dumped cell phones completely a couple years ago.  It was around the time I began wondering why I had it in the first place.  Seems my landline phone works just fine.  As for using the cell phones as "computers" too....seems my laptop works just fine too.  Getting rid of the cell freed up a good amount of cash for other stuff like reloading equipment and supplies.  Technically I do have a cell phone provided by my boss.  It maybe gets used 3-4 times a week at best, but that's specifically work related, and I don't pay the bill.

Dude, I wish I could dump my cell bill. I pay $185 a month and that's AFTER my 21% discount through my job. We have five lines for me, wife and kids.

I will say that I love my iPhone and I don't even use my laptop or desktop anymore. But I could have almost 200 extra for gun stuff a month.

[REDLINE]

Yeah, back about 3 years ago, and for a few years before that I was paying a hair over $100 month and I never had anything fancy like an iPhone.  And all this cost we speak of for monthly bills doesn't even include figuring in the cost of the phones.  Especially the cost of the phones today.  As Uncle Ted would say;  Are you kidding me?!?  I do understand how many people depending on their walk of life simply can't be without them though too.  I'm glad for you that you get the discount you do through your work, and it's still a lot of money.  Well, a lot of money to me anyway.

[Vice]

As much as I dislike cell phones and email.  I LOve my iPhone.  It has changed the way I operate.

[harrygunner]

Guessing my online account info might be difficult. I view user IDs and security questions like I view pass phrases. Each account has different access info. They are random and completely unrelated to me or the questions asked. For example, rather than the high school I graduated from, I'll enter random word fragments and numbers I commit to memory or record in encrypted files. Same with user IDs. Linux has a program called 'mkpasswd' that calls a secure random number generator to create character sequences.

Up until a little over a week ago, I only used "dumb" phones, the ones that make phone calls.   I was aware of security issues with computing devices and didn't want one unless I could tighten security on a "smart" phone like I do my laptops.  But, my last dumb phone crashed, so I bought a Samsung Android phone.

Since the Android operating system is based on Linux, I figured I can figure out how to configure the OS to beef security. Right now, Wi-Fi, GPS, Google services, and just about everything not needed to make phone calls is turned off.  Downloaded/compiled some programs to access the phone via the USB cable from this Linux laptop. Downloaded the Android source tree ( http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html )  Will take the time later to understand what rooting a phone really is and what it will allow me to do. I know a guy who works on phone firmware to see what he thinks.

The NSA provided a description of their secure Android setup. A lot of their approach involves avoiding public Internet access to the phones by using a VPN tunnel to their computers hosting VOIP services. I've thought about adding a virtual machine to one of my company's servers so I can VPN to a secured proxy running on that VM. Then, limit incoming/outgoing Internet traffic on the phone to the IP address of the secured VM.

Maybe I'll describe what I do to secure my Linux laptops in another thread, if anyone is interested.

[sqlbullet]

harrygunner, you might check this out.  Rooting android from Linux (or BSD/OS X) is not well documented.  This is one of the better tutorials I have found:

http://www.cypherpunk.at/2011/10/08/manual-rooting-android-on-linux-2/

[harrygunner]

'sqlbullet' Thanks for the link. I'm checking out the adblinux executable that runs on Linux from your link.

It's not really a phone anymore. It's a computer with telecom functions. Has a multi-core CPU and plenty of storage space. One can even install Ubuntu on it and use it as a PC. Someone needs to make a combination small flat screen monitor/foldable keyboard that uses a single USB connection. Then, the smartphone can be a part time tablet.

I'm going to see if I can archive the firmware that's on the device so I can recover if need be.  I archive the drive of a new laptop, mirroring the entire disk right after unpacking it. I booted off a KNOPPIX 6.7 CD, mounted an external USB drive and ran:

dd if=/dev/sda bs=4M conv=notrunc,noerror | gzip -c - > /media/sdb1/laptop_diskimage.gz

The fresh 640G disk compressed to 40G. If the laptop is incompatible with Linux or defective in some way, I can set the drive back to "store bought new".

Looks like people are hosting pre-rooted firmware as well as non-rooted original firmware.  All this could be fun.

-----

Starting to like the VPN idea for the phone.  I access Internet through a proxy inside a SSL tunnel from my laptop all the time. Traffic between the phone and the proxy could be compressed. So one can surf more before hitting a limit or having the phone provider throttle back access speed.

Hot spots are dangerous places. A bad guy in the cafe can put his wireless NIC card into 'Monitor' mode and capture packets  from other users.  I know it can be done. An older lady wanted to know her wireless access password. But her adult son, who configured the router was out of the country. To help her, I did that and captured packets to my laptop from her laptop while she surfed. Fortunately, she was using WEP and a program I downloaded quickly recovered the router password.

So, being able to tunnel to a safe server is important.

[sqlbullet]

Or avoid using hotspots/WIFI.  I am grandfathered in on unlimited data on my phone, so I don't even turn Wifi on. I hadn't considered tunneling back to home and then routing all traffic over the tunnel...And probably won't since the 4g on my phone is far faster than the DSL at my house.

Sucks to live in a city that won't get on the fiber bandwagon.  Friends in other nearby towns have 40 meg connections both ways for half what I pay for 7/1.5 dsl.