The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are labelling Apple's latest patent application "traitorware" ...

While users were celebrating the new jailbreaking and unlocking exemptions, Apple was quietly preparing to apply for a patent  on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple to identify and punish users who take advantage of those exemptions or otherwise tinker with their devices. This patent application does nothing short of providing a roadmap for how Apple can — and presumably will — spy on its customers and control the way its customers use Apple products.

Ostensibly designed to respond to the loss of a phone it will give them the ability to;

• Take a picture of your face "without a flash, any noise, or any indication that a picture is being taken to prevent the current user from knowing he is being photographed".

• Record your voice, whether or not you're even making a call.

• Determine your individual heartbeat "signature"(!)

• Monitor all internet activity and record "any communication packets that are served to the electronic device".

The EFF are calling it "downright creepy and invasive". "Spyware, and its new cousin traitorware, will hurt customers and companies alike — Apple should shelve this idea before it backfires on both it and its customers," they say.

The patent's here.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

I've always been a sucker for the latest download, especially when it comes to KDE, so I was pleased to discover this multi-distro compendium of How to Install KDE 4.5 on MakeTechEasier. You'll find directions on how to upgrade Kubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint, so what are you waiting for?

And while the upgraded packages are downloading, check out this preview of what you'll find in this release.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

Most people believe that Google is a search engine company. It's not. It's an advertising agency that just happens to own the world's most successful search engine, and every time you use that search engine, they learn a little more about you.

If you're like most internet users, Google knows more about you than you might be comfortable with. Whether you were logged in to a Google account or not, they know everything you've ever searched for, what search results you clicked on, what news you read, and every place you've ever gotten directions to. Most of the time, thanks to things like Google Analytics, they even know which websites you visited that you didn't reach through Google. If you use Gmail, they know the content of every email you've ever sent or received, whether you've deleted it or not. They know who your friends are, where you live, where you work, and where you spend your free time. They know about your health, your love life, and your political leanings. These days they are even branching out into collecting your realtime GPS location and your DNS lookups. In short, not only do they know a lot about what you're doing, they also have significant insight into what you're thinking.

Back in April a hacker by the name of Moxie Marlinspike came out with a Firefox addon called GoogleSharing to throw a spanner in Google's works.

The addon watches for requests for Google services such as Search and transparently redirects them to a GoogleSharing proxy server. The server contains a pool of fictitious "identities" -- including cookies -- which are used in place of any personal data you might be unwittingly supplying. The altered request is forwarded to Google, and the response proxied back to you. It all happens swiftly and transparently.

There's a few other clever wrinkles. Pooling all traffic and constantly switching identities makes even the proxy server's traffic hard to analyze, and on top of that the proxy constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities it uses.

The result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc... without Google being able to track you by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination.

In operation, it simply requires a click on the Status Bar ...




... to enable or disable it. Brilliant!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Flash cookies are nasty and pervasive. Most users aren't even aware they exist because they're tucked away in hidden files. (Full details here.) Browsers don't delete them because they're browser-independent, and even if you kill 'em the companies pushing them at you can respawn them. These "zombie cookies" -- so-called because they just keep coming back from the dead -- are currently the subject of a privacy lawsuit in the States.

All good horror film fans know that killing zombies isn't sufficient, you have to stop them coming back. And that's what we're about to do.

1: Find the zombies.
Open your file browser, go to the /home/your_user_name folder and switch on View Hidden Files. (In Konqueror and Dolphin you'll find this under the View menu item.) Scroll down and click on the .macromedia file. Under it you'll find a folder called Flash_Player and under that two more folders ...

If you click the expanders (those + signs) you'll find dozens of directories you didn't know you had, each containing a *.sol file. Those are the actual cookies.

2: Back 'em up
I'm always wary of just deleting stuff like this as some of it might be important. So instead of wiping it, let's just rename the folder. Right-click .macromedia and give it another name. .macromedia-ZOMBIES will do.




3: Create a link to zombie hell
Right-click in an empty area of your file browser, choose Create New and select Basic Link to File or Directory. Under File Name enter .macromedia and under File Path enter /dev/null .



/dev/null is Linux's black hole. Anything sent there is immediately discarded, but a report is sent back that the write operation was successful. That means that from now on anything writing to .macromedia gets told, "Yep, that was okay" when in fact it was nuked.

Right-clicking on the .macromedia file (it now looks like a file and not a folder) should make this clear. Choose Properties and you'll see where the file now really points. The command line makes it even clearer. Type ls -la and you'll find a line like this:



Now use Flash for a day or two. If you don't notice any effect, you can delete the .macromedia-ZOMBIES folder.

Footnote: Players of Flash games will be affected by this as most games store high scores and levels in Flash cookie files. You may prefer something more selective. Try the Better Privacy add-on for Firefox.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

If you've ever been tempted to give Linux a whirl but have been put off at the thought of installing it, it's time to take a look at PenDriveLinux.

Sure you can run most Linux distributions from a live CD or DVD, but it's not quite the same. For a start CD/DVD drives are a whole lot slower than regular hard drives meaning that you get a somewhat more sluggish experience, but their main drawback is they're not writeable. Obviously putting it on a USB stick is the answer, but how do you get it on there?

PenDriveLinux have a number of solutions ranging from their Universal USB Installer to the Linux Live USB Creator (both for Windows) through to the well-known UNetbootin (available for both Windows and Linux). If you have large USB stick you can create a multiple-boot Linux stick with MultiBoot USB.

The great thing about PDL is that they're a one-stop shop for USB installations with straightforward instructions for a huge range of distributions and a comprehensive Help section with tools, compatibility tests, cheatcodes, common BIOS USB options and directions on restoring your USB stick if everything goes pear-shaped. It' well worth checking out!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )