warning in dream fragment

[crikkett]

I woke up remembering a fragment of a dream this morning, it was a warning about online privacy.

The warning was about having your IP recorded while visiting certain sensitive websites, and about being tricked into giving up personal information while surfing or doing business online.

The reasons for what I interpret to be an intuitive dream may be a few things my Inner IT witnessed yesterday:

- I paid a bill online. After I logged in I was asked to provide an answer to one of a set of 'security questions' that were waaay too personal: your pet's name, where did you honeymoon, etc.

BEWARE: these values are common passwords! If you know the name of someone's favorite pet (or beau) you can hack their passwords most of the time. DON'T THINK THAT ANSWERS TO 'SECURITY QUESTIONS' ARE KEPT PRIVATE!! What I did was pick a question and give the answer "decline to state". So what if my marketing profile is one of suspicion and belligerence, I show myself to be one of the few folks who actually reads Privacy Statements and EULAs, and I spare myself all the ads for cheesy vacation getaways.

- The news surrounding Bush's complaints that Congress didn't grant telecoms immunity.

- The news surrounding a Judge's order to disable DNS for wikileaks.org, a whistleblower site, which was meant to block our access to leaked information of wrongdoing on behalf of a swiss banking interest.

These two items reminded me that multiple interests attempted to hack DNS root servers last year, all unsuccessfully. DNS root servers are the switchboard operators of the Internet, attaching domain names to IP addresses. If the root servers are hacked, and say you go to your credit card's site to pay your bill online, you could be redirected unknowingly to a thief's site who will gladly take your payment (as well as all the info necessary to make further deductions from your bank account at will).

- The 'noetic dot' page that you all turned me on to seemed to have been hacked yesterday, but I think there was simply a web update.

(what I call the noetic dot is Brad Anderson's Global Consciousness Index which can be found here: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/gcindex.html - I embedded it into my start page. It's really fun to watch.)


Remember, George Bush says that the Internet is not private. Email is not private. So conduct yourself accordingly and protect your interests. If you want more help being paranoid I'm happy to offer advice (it costs nothing and is worth the price :P ).

PS dangit now i have to go change all my answers to the security questions since I showed my hand. Really.

[I Have A Dream]

1. Thanks for the very important reminder, crikkett.

I can't wait for a world where such things don't happen. (I truly believe that we'll have this someday, although it may not be during this lifetime.)

:hi:

[crikkett]

2. Thanks! And sure enough my husband

just came in to tell me that his favorite websites (turn out to be hosted in Canada) cannot be reached this morning, by domain name or IP lookup, even though our connection is fast and strong.

I wish there were an Internet traffic report or something... but that would mean our ISPs would have to be much more cooperative and transparent than they are.

[Why Syzygy]

3. You know how to trace a packet, don't you?

That's something like an Internet report.

[crikkett]

5. yes and I didn't think of that...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute
(for others)

Thanks

[demgrrrll]

4. Yahoo keeps everything you search for for a long period of time unless

you follow the prompts to opt out. I cant remember what they were or how to get there but it is possible.

[rumpel]

6. while it is annoying I use

NoScript with Firefox - and especially when I do a lot of research or for example the ERD News posts - I manually clear the cookies.

and I agree with Dream - I hope for a day when such things are no longer in the human consciousness.

thanks for the warning

[Why Syzygy]

7. I have att/sbc dsl

and they had about five security questions for something I had to do. Every once in awhile, I have to re-provision my modem with the network for some reason. Oh! It was when I was setting up new email addresses under the main account.

I couldn't get on DU for awhile today, and still can't re-connect with youtube.