In spite of cutting down the crime in United States going out at night is still dangerous. Women are more unprotected than men. According to the Senate Judiciary Committee, three out of four women in the United States will be victims of one violent crime during their lifetime, so there was created a No-Contact Jacket, which associates protection with comfort.

Wish to transfer large amounts of information for asset reunification, data cleansing and mailing list projects? Need those to be protected? Well, that is the issue.

Tracesmart Corporate enhanced the security of their proprietary file transfer service to include a fourth tier of password protection. According to the SourceWire if three wrong attempts at the password are entered, access to the files is automatically revoked, ensuring that data cannot fall into the wrong hands.

Managing Director Michael Trezise comments: "As a company, ensuring the security of data – whether it be a clients or our own – has always been a fundamental practice. We have always demonstrated a strong commitment to data security, and the enhancement of our file transfer system will not come as a surprise to those who know us and know our working philosophy."

The file transfer system was developed by Tracesmart Corporate’s in-house IT team and the fourth tier password ensures that the system provides the most secure method of transferring data. Paul Weathersby, Technical Director, elaborates on some of the technologies used, "Our file transfer system is built upon a HTTPS transfer system which utilises SSL encryption – a proven technology. We have always used this form of coding across our site as it is one of the most robust data encryptions available. It is the same system employed across a variety of industries for securing credit card details during payment transactions."

In the same source, Weathersby reveals that: "Whilst the system has always been incredibly secure, this additional feature demonstrates to our clients that we never sit on our laurels when it comes to the safety of their data. Whether a client is trying to trace people or conduct a large data cleansing project, they can rest assured that their data is in safe hands."

References:
http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=38975&hilite=
http://www.tracesmartcorporate.co.uk/

Tall or small, thin or thick, blonde or brunette there is place for everyone on Dating DNA Web App for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch Internet devices. The most important is to be compatible with somebody. And how is that possible? Well, iPhone and iPod Touch users can immediately start browsing photos and compatibility scores with thousands of singles worldwide by visiting iPhone or Apple’s websites.

Security is one of the most important aspects that we demand from each service we use everyday in the highly developed technological world and especially in the World Wide Web. How much secure are we? How much dangerous the insecurity might be? It mostly depends on the sphere and the level of threats, whether privacy is under threat or our personal details as consumers of the banks are expected to be reachable by hackers. According to IP-ATM Security banks and financial institutions are failing to properly secure their ATMs. IP-ATM Security identifies three main threats to ATMs. These are:

Internet protocol (IP) worms;
Disruption of the IP network and denial of service;
The harvesting of consumers’ transaction data for malicious purposes

The harvesting of consumers’ transaction data for malicious purposes gives opportunities to hackers collect consumers’ personal details, their card number, account balance and transaction history.

According to the SourceWire press release there are several reasons ATMs have become less secure. One of them is the way in which ATMs operate. ATMs hardware platforms with proprietary software and communications protocols have been migrated to commodity-embedded hardware platforms (essentially PC-based with Intel microprocessors), commodity operating systems (primarily Window and Linux), and standard IP networking. “70 per cent of current ATMs are now based on PC/Intel hardware and commodity operating systems (mostly Windows XP embedded) and this trend is expected to continue. Essentially, these new ATMs are PCs that are running PC operating systems, using the standard Internet Protocol (IP) with some additional peripherals housed in a secure vault-like box.”

No change is done if there are not advantages in the newer system. Among the advantages of the new system are: cost; performance; flexibility; standardization and enhanced functionality

And there is no coin with one side. Advantages are faded by threats the name of that is “hackers.”

2008 analysis of ATM network traffic by Network Box “found that only the PIN number was encrypted and that a large portion of the traffic travelled in plain text, leaving card numbers, card expiry dates, transaction amounts and account balances clearly readable. Therefore, a hacker needs only to access some part of the IP network between the IP-ATM and the payment processor to be privy to the aforementioned details.”ATM finds the most effective way to solve the issues is to use a multifunction device with:

Routing,
Firewall,
IDS/IPS,
VPN capabilities,
Protecting, the ATM network.

The specifics of the network are:
Separate from the rest of the bank’s network, monitor and control.

Encrypt all traffic coming out of the ATM machinesThe growth of the ATM marketAccording to SourceWire Mark Webb-Johnson, CTO of Network Box, comments: “Most people simply assume that because an ATM is invariably provided by a bank, the transactions and the data being transmitted must be secure. This assumption may have been true in the past, but today ATMs operate in a way that makes them far more susceptible to attack. “We’ve already seen in August 2003 how the Nachi (aka Welchia) Internet worm crossed over into ‘secure’ networks and infected ATMs for two financial institutions; and we’ve witnessed the SQL Slammer (aka Sapphire) worm indirectly shutdown 13,000 Bank of America ATMs. The chances are that if banks don’t use technology that can actually provide an effective level of protection – technology that is already on the market – then it is very likely that more high-profile attacks are to follow.”

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US. Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says. The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities. Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers. The court also ordered that Dynadot should "prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court." Other orders included that the domain name be locked "to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar" to prevent changes being made to the site.

Wikileaks claimed that the order was "unconstitutional" and said that the site had been "forcibly censored".

The case was brought by lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. It concerned several documents posted on the site which allegedly reveal that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion. The documents were allegedly posted by Rudolf Elmer, former vice president of the bank's Cayman Island's operation. A spokesperson for Julius Baer said he could not comment on the case because of "pending legal proceedings".

The court hearing took place last week and Dynadot blocked access from Friday evening. Wikileaks says it was not represented at the hearing because it was "given only hours notice" via e-mail. A document signed by Judge Jeffery White, who presided over the case, ordered Dynadot to follow six court orders.

As well as removing all records of the site form its servers, the hosting and domain name firm was ordered to produce "all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account". The order also demanded that details of the site's registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person...who accessed the account for the domain name" to be handed over.

Wikileaks allows users to post documents anonymously. The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents. It provoked controversy when it first appeared on the net with many commentators questioning the motives of the people behind the site. It recently made available a confidential briefing document relating to the collapse of the UK's Northern Rock bank. Lawyers working on behalf of the bank attempted to have the documents removed from the site. They can still be accessed.

Notorious 20th-century bank robber Willie Sutton said famously, "I rob banks because that's where the money is." It seems 21st-century criminals are following his footsteps.

But while Sutton disguised himself as a cop, a window washer and a Western Union messenger, cyberthieves use a different type of subterfuge - phishing - to cover their identities and wipe out bank accounts. Phishing occurs when fraudulent e-mails that appear to be from a legitimate source are sent in an effort to obtain sensitive information from a user. Those computer exploits and others are detailed in a survey of security threats and vulnerabilities for 2007 by the IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force. Of the top 20 companies targeted by phishing in 2007, the report says, 19 are in the banking industry. Computer users are often tricked into visiting fraudulent sites because of "danger, danger" e-mail subject lines like "account security measures," "important notice" or "(your bank name) security notice."

One sneaky thing some malware (malicious threats) does is to modify a user's server information. For example, a user types www.bankofamerica.com into his or her browser. But instead of the computer using the service provider's server, which would take the user to the real Bank of America server, the computer uses a bogus server run by phishers and that takes the user to a fake Bank of America server. The phishers take the user's login information and empty the account. Most users, even the savvy ones, wouldn't know that their server settings have been hijacked.

Just a few years ago, computer viruses and worms seemed designed for bragging rights and a hacker's 15 minutes of fame, but the game has changed. Now, instead of creating chaos by shutting down or paralyzing computer systems, the bad guys are getting more bang for their buck by taking over systems and using them to commit crimes.

The IBM Internet security report shows that nearly 90 percent of all vulnerabilities allow this type of remote exploitation.

"The authors [of this malware] realize they are better off as parasites than they are killing their hosts," - said Chris Rouland, engineer and chief technology officer for IBM Internet security.

Rouland said that some other malicious trends include growth in Web browser exploitation, especially for Windows Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. He said that although fewer vulnerabilities were disclosed publicly last year, the number of "high-severity vulnerabilities" increased by 28 percent compared with 2006.

The X-Force collected and analyzed 410,000 new malware in 2007. That's a third more than they analyzed in 2006. And wildly popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook are now prime targets for exploits.

What's an average computer user to do?

Though tech-savvy, proudly paperless home computer users may shun those so-20th-century snail mail bank statements, it might be worth it to go retro and compare your online banking information with the paper record.

Rouland says criminals in Brazil have figured out ways to wipe out bank accounts and leave no trail in an individual's online account. And bank customers may be out of luck if the theft goes unnoticed for a while.

Usually, banks give only 90 days to remediate an account problem. In the old days of worms and viruses and denial of service attacks, many of us learned, often the hard way, that computer security was often an afterthought compared to "user friendliness."

But these days, with organized criminals around the globe stealing with such great stealth, the bank with the best security might turn out to be the big business winner.

Facebook a social networking website, launched on February 4, 2004, founded by Mark Zuckerberg counts more than 60 million active users worldwide, that is over 1% of the world's population. According to Alexa the site’s traffic ranking increased from 60th to 7th in a year. Facebook is one of the mostly covered issue in news world. It became the subject of discussions too many times. This time it is quizzed about data protection policies by the information Commissioner’s office.

According to findings the user cannot delete the profile even after their termination. The information remains on the server of Facebook and it admits that there is not full compliance with UK data protection.

Though a statement from the site announces, "We take the concerns of the ICO and our user's privacy very seriously and are committed to working with the ICO to maintain a trusted environment for all Facebook users and ensure compliance with UK law."

In order to fully delete the account it asks for more effort and “log in and delete all profile content".
But are the users eager to delete all the information about them on Facebook? Answer is as follows: "An individual who has deactivated their account might not find themselves motivated enough to delete information that's about them maybe on their wall or other people's site."

The systematic reader of BLOGVASION could have noticed that we have covered the issue of children’s safety in the World Wide Web several times. The intensity of highlighting the topic is the increased interest in providing children safety mechanisms.

One of the revolutionizing broadband to safe children from bad influence of internet is introduced by Spidermail as announces Shahrokh Nikkhah the chairman and CEO of Spidermail. The software protects the children from inappropriate content and make them safer. Internet that has its advantages and disadvantages, and represents the real source of education and threat to the children at the same time. The software protects children from gambling websites, too.

Shahrokh Nikkhah said: “A determined child is able to circumvent most protective software or security measures.“There are chat forums, blogs and even whole websites dedicated to getting around the problem, or a child may simply have a friend at school who knows how to disable the software. He added that there are a number of simple methods to bypass the software. CDsautomatically and immediately establish a new, subscription-free Internet account that may not work with software previously installed on the machine.

And some of the more undesirable elements on the Internet might find ways to evade the security systems that you have installed.According to the SourceWire Spidermail is a trailblazing new service that offers an ideal solution to this problem.It differs because the state-of-the-art filters are built into the internet service itself, instead of installed on the family computer.These filters are centrally administered by Spidermail’s experts who constantly update the system 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Each family owns its traditions and reveals the secrets. Among them there are amazing, mere and less interesting stories. Tracing pedigree themes attract and involve, People keep diaries, and surely we don’t want them to be forgotten. We have to know our history from where we are and how we appeared? There is a popular study of genealogy, this involves the collection of the names of relatives, both living and deceased, and establishing the relationships among them based on primary, secondary and/or circumstantial evidence or documentation, thus building up a cohesive family tree. A family tree is generally the totality of ones ancestors represented as a tree structure, or more specifically, a chart used in genealogy. Nowadays you can easily create your own genealogy list; you don’t have to be very competitive, but stay simple. With the advent of the Internet, the number of resources available to genealogists has vastly increased; however, some of these sources must be treated with caution because of issues of accuracy.

The family network for online family trees has been launched in English. A huge interest in the European countries shows a trend concerning family trees and genealogy on the internet. The pan-European service is the Germany’s community of the year and the fastest-growing German Social Network.

Christian Richtscheid, Manager in charge of the international website says that: “Due to our easy-to-use interface, you can create your own family tree with a few clicks completely free of charge. Relatives can be invited automatically via email and after registering look at their tree or participate in the building process. This way, a family network can be built up all around your family tree.”

There are various possibilities for active users to add information on living or deceased relatives such as photos, birth places or hobbies. All information in the family trees is only visible to family members that have been invited previously.

Christian Richtscheid explains: “In most countries, the family is the core of society. This fact, in connection with English as the world language, opens an extremely wide-spread target group all over the world.”

The web-site is available in English, Italian, Portuguese, German and Spanish so far. This internationality allows the creation of multinational family trees across language barriers. If family members already have a family tree on their PC, they can easily import their data completely free of charge.

“I’m very proud of my family tree, gathered history is very important to me. My little child always asks if what have been doing his grandma when I used to be a teenage. An answer is always the same- let’s see our family tree.”-says Antony Moier .

You want to know who was your old grandfather or maybe his cousin, her mom or uncle. It seems that you need your own folk’s history. The genealogy truly can help keep family traditions alive or reveal family secrets.

"The average economically active individual in the developed world is on about 700 databases," said Niamh Gallagher, a researcher at think tank Demos who has spent six months researching the spread of personal data.

We almost never have thought how many people know our identities. For example, just USVISIT border system is cheking identities of the UK tourists in 30 separate databases.

However sharing data is not as negative as it might seem from the first sight. According to Gallager: "It's much harder to live your life without sharing information than it is by sharing". Anyone that tries to stop their personal data leaking away often find they are denied benefits enjoyed by those that are happier to share.''

For example, if you want to keep your name away from the credit checking databases you can pay for everything in cash. However this will create for you problems while taking loans for mortgage.

There are a lot of people who are allowed to check your personal information and control whether you are using it correctly. Only in UK there are 287 000 data controllers. Actually these people are just overseeing those actually work to maintain and expand the data-holding bases. Even more then that: the existence of the word wide web makes it possible to transferr your data worldwide and makes it available for those who will be ready to take a bit of trouble for getting it.

Indeed the hi-tech firm Garlik, helping people to control their personal information at least to some extent, says there are about 1000 sites on web where a persons details can be found. This is mainly because the fact that giving your personal information to one organization or firm, makes it available to many others as well.

"There is no awareness of what happens to that data when you give it away," said Ms Gallagher, "It is not so much the organisations with which you willingly share data," she said, "it is where it goes after that." The times are gone when the firms were interested just in your contact information, now they are willing to know what type is your credit card, how often do you go shopping, what sort of goods you like and so on. So that to build their marketing strategies on this information.

The interests are growing around the issue of personal data. According to Dr Kirstie Ball a senior lecturer at the Open Univerisity: "That personal data held by every organisation you interact with runs the parameters of your existence, your consumption, your entitlements. "We're all interested in the collection and application of personal data and its consequences for individual rights and social science concepts such as trust and discrimination," said Dr Ball.

"It merits study and understanding because its consequences can be tangible. For instance, she said, an employee ticking the wrong box when they enter your data into a database could mean a person ends up labelled as a former criminal or credit liability.

Although it is possible to ask the data companies and organizations reveal your data, very small number of people actually do so, as it is connected with a considerable amount of problems, including the task to make sure all of this information is accurate.


Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7107975.stm

"Dear Mr. Schmidt, You may be aware that Privacy International yesterday published its first privacy ranking of leading companies operating on the Internet. Google Inc performed very poorly, scoring lowest among the other major companies that we surveyed."

This is a beginning of an open letter sent by Privacy International's Director Simon Davies to the Google's CEO Mr. Eric Schmidt.Privacy International is a London based human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations alike.

Privacy International released a report on Saturday where Google has ranked at the bottom of the list containing 22 companies. According to Privacy International, other companies have problems with their privacy practices, however none of the 22 companies sunk to the Google's level.Google has certainly made a message that Privacy International's report was based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about Google's services.

According to Privacy International "Google has embarked on a smear campaign within the media to discredit both PI and the report".Well, research methodologies are not always 100% accurate. Even if we assume and agree on that Privacy International has no interest in placing Google at the bottom of the list, there is a chance that the survey had some inaccuracies and misunderstandings.

However, Privacy International is not alone. An independent European panel is already inquiring into Google's policies to make sure they conform to Europe's privacy rules. Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick Inc. has already alerted a number of consumer groups in the USA and the nation's regulators are under pressure to make Google change some of its privacy policies.

If you carefully think about the amount of data that Google gathers, matches and analyzes, it may sound fair to put the search giant at the bottom of the list. In my opinion no other company has such powerful facilities to collect, match and analyze the user data than Google has.

Deciding if this is good or bad is up to you. If the data collected will be used to improve the service and overall user experience, I have nothing against. If users won't benefit, that's another story.