Mozilla Wants to Monitor Firefox Use

Mozilla Labs, the research arm of Mozilla Corp., wants 1% of Firefox users to allow it to watch how they use the browser — and the Web in general.

“We need to know how people are using our products and using the Web,” said Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. “That’s where Test Pilot comes up. It will give us a view into what people are actually using, while protecting their privacy.”

Still in the planning stages — a complete roadmap has not yet been proposed, for example — Test Pilot will use a Firefox add-on to collect browsing and usage data, and provide tools to answer feedback questions. At the outset, users submit only a limited amount of demographic information, such as their technical level and geographic location, and as experiments and tests are offered, they can choose which ones to participate in.

The program will be completely optional to Firefox users, Raskin stressed, and privacy will be maintained. “Privacy is hugely important to us,” he said. “We will never record the actual Web sites that people go to, for example — we would do a hash on that — but instead we might count how many times people read the same site.”

Source:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/158283/monitor_firefox_use.html?tk=rss_news

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Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) Does Have A GUI Afterall

Yes, Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) really does have a GUI and can be run on-demand.

On Windows XP, click Start >Run and type mrt and press Enter.  In Vista, click Start and type mrt into the Search box and press Enter.  This launches the GUI for the tool:

Press Next and decide which type of scan that you want to run:

Start your scanning.  When you are done, you will hopefully see this:

But if not, don’t worry too much, this tool will clean the system for you.

Note: As Microsoft states in the tool itself, this should NOT be used in place of a full anti-virus program.  This tool does not provide any kind of realtime On-Access scanning, nor does it check your incoming emails for malicious content.  It should not be treated as complete AV protection.

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Windows worm trickery for Vista

Drives such as USB sticks infected with the virus trick users into installing the worm, according to researchers.

The “Autoplay” function in Vista and early versions of Windows 7 automatically searches for programs on removable drives.

However, the virus hijacks this process, masquerading as a folder to be opened. When clicked, the worm installs itself.

It then attempts to contact one of a number of web servers, from which it could download another program that could take control of the infected computer.

Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7842013.stm

Posted in Coding, Hardware, Networking, Privacy, Security, Windows | No Comments

Google shuts off antiphishing feature in Firefox 2.0

Although the two most-recent builds of Firefox 2.0, labeled 2.0.0.19 and 2.0.0.20, have omitted the defense, earlier editions of the browser were still able to query Google for a list of sites suspected of hosting identity theft scams. But Google is now shutting down the blacklist, said Mike Beltzner , the director of Firefox.

“If you’re using a previous version of Firefox 2, even though the feature is enabled in your browser, as of January 20 no new data will be sent to your computer,” Beltzner said in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog Monday.

Mozilla had warned users last month that Firefox 2.0, which was slated to be dropped from support, would soon lack antiphishing protection because Google wanted to discontinue the obsolete blacklist protocol that served the aged browser.

Source:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/012109-google-shuts-off-antiphishing-feature.html?fsrc=rss-security

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Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it

The myth that to delete data really securely from a hard disk you have to overwrite it many times, using different patterns, has persisted for decades, despite the fact that even firms specialising in data recovery, openly admit that if a hard disk is overwritten with zeros just once, all of its data is irretrievably lost.

Craig Wright, a forensics expert, claims to have put this legend finally to rest. He and his colleagues ran a scientific study to take a close look at hard disks of various makes and different ages, overwriting their data under controlled conditions and then examining the magnetic surfaces with a magnetic-force microscope. They presented their paper at ICISS 2008 and it has been published by Springer AG in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman, Shyaam Sundhar R. S.: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy).

They concluded that, after a single overwrite of the data on a drive, whether it be an old 1-gigabyte disk or a current model (at the time of the study), the likelihood of still being able to reconstruct anything is practically zero. Well, OK, not quite: a single bit whose precise location is known can in fact be correctly reconstructed with 56 per cent probability (in one of the quoted examples). To recover a byte, however, correct head positioning would have to be precisely repeated eight times, and the probability of that is only 0.97 per cent. Recovering anything beyond a single byte is even less likely.

Source:
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Secure-deletion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it–/112432

Posted in Hardware, Privacy | No Comments