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You know the type. The big mouthed one feeling all tough
behind his computer as if his computer and anonyminity is a
suit of armour. While your busy running your yap Mr big man
let me ask you this ARE YOU REALLY ANON? Are you?? In most
cases the answer is no.
Contrary to popular
belief privacy and the internet do not go hand and hand. Just
for kicks and giggles lets take ourselves on an educational
interactive field trip through what's out there, how do we fix
it and how can we be sure who we are dealing with?
Lets start by
shattering your illusions of privacy! As soon as you
visit a website we know things about you. We know your ip
addy, who your isp is, the browser your running, what site you
were viewing before you came here, how many sites you viewed
in this browser session, your screen resolution and your
colour settings. If you hop on over and post anon on the board
we know who you are. The general public might not know because
we respect your right to berate people anon like the mouse you
are but we know. To set the tone of paranoia (twilight zone
music please) lets start here http://www.privacy.net
this will give you some ideas to how much we know about
who is running around on the net and its a really awesome site
eh. Its not just websites that compromise your privacy,
its emails, games applications.
If your a fan of
Diablo, starcraft or War Craft this article about the makers
will be of interest to you Blizzard
gets sued for snooping on gamers . Not that I'm here to
lay a verbal smack down on Blizzard I love their games. Mattel,
cute FTP and real player are just a few more companies
that made use of spy ware. Spyware is falling out of fashion
but there's still a fair amount of it around. I would recommend
visiting our spyware section to see what you can do about
that.
Next up I would like
you to take a cruise through this nifty site Shields
Up! Test your shields and probe your ports don't forget to
grab his FREE
IP Agent to help turn off the neon sign that's pointing to
YOU.
You are probably
getting the point here so lets get on with how you can shape
things up. first grab this little toy called ID
Serve this is going to tell you about the sites that you
visit, so you can find out how secure their servers are and
give you more idea on who NOT to let have your credit
card number. Use the IP
Agent. get rid of your spyware (except real player I allow
this because it is a must have). use a decent firewall I'm
partial to hardware as opposed to software, after your
firewall such as ZoneAlarm
if you prefer software is installed run the
leek test. things wont be perfect and most of the time
there will still be ways to find out who you are but this is a
good start to securing your privacy and protecting your
system. This should at least give Mr Big mouth something to
think about.
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