Sell Hack is marketing the “Hack In” button to salespeople looking to reach new prospects. The company’s website claims that people who install its plug-in will be able to use the button to view the email contact of LinkedIn members with whom they’re not connected, such as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner: Raising the question of why your email would be visible through viewing the profile. LinkedIn is a social network equivalent of herpes - once you have it, you'd like to get rid of it.]]>
From now on, any emails sent to a users @facebook.com email address — which all Facebook users could claim upon signing up for the social network — will now be automatically forwarded to the default personal email address used to sign up for the site…
It’s not for lack of trying to make it work. Two years ago, Facebook gave users a nudge toward using their Facebook.com email addresses by switching the default settings and displaying those addresses on users’ pages without letting them know beforehand. It did not go over well.]]>
"I immediately got email addressed to the [former] account owner and the nature of them made me uncomfortable," Harris said in an interview, noting that a number of emails were from men looking to meet up with a woman.
In the following weeks, Harris was sent emails from department stores, including emailed receipts from recent purchases at Nordstrom. He also received timecards that detailed mileage reimbursements and included the former account holder's name and address.
"It seemed odd to me that this email was coming from all over. It's clear that while the owner supposedly hadn't logged in in a while, she was still actively giving out that email address," Harris said. Terrible idea, Yahoo.]]>
“I’m still holding out hope that victory in the courts will allow me to restart my service in the future,” he said today onstage at the Privacy Identity Innovation conference in Seattle. For now, Levison is making use of “the electronic equivalent of a methadone clinic” by messaging people through Facebook, LinkedIn, text and the new encrypted communication service Silent Circle. ”I haven’t needed a real and valid email address to register for something yet,” he said.
“Anything that I consider sensitive, I try to talk about it to people in person, with my cellphone off, in an area where I know that nobody’s pointing a parabolic mic at me,” Levison said. “If you’re fighting the government that’s what you need to do.”]]>
I’m uneasy about this, but it was my choice. I made it, and I expect millions more will too. That’s because, starting with the introduction of a fast, app-like webmail service and followed by the release of native, Gmail-specific mobile apps, Google has been recreating — and taking control of — what had become the last piece of digital real estate users could legitimately feel like they controlled: their inboxes.
Gmail’s new tabbed inbox was what finally pulled me over: It accomplishes, using Gmail’s enormous data resources, what few, if any, personally designed email filter systems can. Should we be counting the days until Google turns off IMAP?]]>
Within hours of announcing Lavabit’s shut-down, a defense fund set-up by Levison raised over $40,000. By the next day, he told RT, that number had climbed to $100,000. He has since hopped on a plane to Washington, DC to meet with his attorney in an effort to begin fighting in a battle that could very well pave the way for the future of communication. Long and interesting interview. (RT stands for Russia Today.)]]>
People have been warning about the privacy risk posed by Gravatar, short for Globally recognized avatar, since at least 2009. That's when a blogger showed he was able to crack the cryptographic hashes that the service uses to uniquely identify its users. Gravatar, it turned out, derived the hashes with the user's e-mail address, and the blogger was able to translate about 10% of the more than 80,000 user IDs he harvested.]]>
Upon logging out of Immersion, you will be presented with a choice to save or delete your data, which contains your compressed email metadata and user profile. See your world the way the NSA sees it.]]>
That apparent revelation prompted dozens of news articles in the last few days describing the practice as "creepy" or "freaking people out." One wondered if it was an "aggressive invasion of privacy."
The only problem is that Yahoo hasn't, well, actually changed its policy. At all. A version of Yahoo Mail's terms of service adopted in 2011 gives the company the right to "scan and analyze all incoming and outgoing communications content sent and received from your account" and use the profile to "match and serve targeted advertising" to you…
This week's controversy underscores how short memories have become in the modern Internet era: the same privacy flap occurred in June 2011, when Yahoo actually adopted the policy in effect today that permits email to be scanned.]]>
Mr. Thurston said he encountered another kind of irksome communication when a friend asked, by text message, about his schedule for the South by Southwest festival. “I don’t even know how to respond to that,” he said. “The answer would be so long. There’s no way I’m going to type out my schedule in a text.”
He said people often asked him on social media where to buy his book, rather than simply Googling the question. You’re already on a computer, he exclaimed. “You’re on the thing that has the answer to the thing you want to know!” Do you say "Hi" to open an email and reply "thanks"?]]>
The fix is an easy one – companies simply need to generate a new key at the stronger length and place it in their DNS records. But they also need to remember to revoke their old key, Harris says.
“As long as the old one is still in the DNS record, even if you’re not using it, an attacker can still use it,” he says. (Thanks @ponk2k for the link.)]]>
What’s important to other people is not (as) important to you.
You are inherently lazy and egocentric.
Ruthlessness is a hell of a time-saver.
Read and learn]]>