Security seegway

[SimonInEdinburgh]

Continuing the discussion from Photography - sharing hobbies and leisure:

@fryingtonite sounded as if you knew what you were talking about when you mentioned browser fingerprinting

@mrfrederickson is CISM & I am CGEIT, do You have an IT security background or just a passionate interest?

I think there is a case in point with the forum policies (@RedFraggle )

Configuration of the website and the discourse software is such that posts are open to search engine crawlers I suspect this is the stroke associations self-interest in generating search engine traffic to bring in visitors with the potential of them entering a donor funding funnel.

However it makes a community of potentially vulnerable people who discuss their emotional and other challenges pretty much openly amongst themselves without awareness of the degree to which they are exposing ourselves.

We don’t currently have a voice in any of these considerations and I do believe a voice of the community is appropriate elements of the site governance. I’ve suggested it to management so far without any engagement or acknowledgement

Also @Bobbi has started a thread that is may have some relevance at Sotware I get from the internet. A new topic - I believe he also has an interest in online and security but I do not know for a fact.

Ciao
Simon

[mrfrederickson]

Hi Simon I have 23 years in information security and cybersecurity retired now because of my stroke

[fryingtonite]

@SimonInEdinburgh

No, not a security background per se, but decades or work in IT and am an ex computer programmer, but have picked up bits more recently having an interest in privacy.

I agree, making the content of the forums public is quite the risk. If that is the case, why bother registering? Search engines are one thing, but as we’ve all heard of late, AI is even worse. Like you, I don’t use my surname and use a handle I’ve never used before, so some protection at least.

I’m not a great fan of being spied on. So what have I got to hide? Nothing, that’s the point.
I read a good response to the statement “If you’ve got nothing to hide then where’s the problem?” The answer was “Do you close the door when you go to the loo?” I thought that was a great answer. If I tell you what I had for brekky, that’s my choice. If I’m tracked, logged etc and get spam offering me corn flakes, I’m annoyed and violated.

I did have a play with the TOR browser as the duckduckgo site recommended it for complete privacy, but it’s quite slow so Youtube vids are a non-no.

On the cookies front, I use a cleaning tool called ccleaner. They nag you to buy it, but I haven’t yet. It cleans out cookies from all browsers, web cache etc. I usually run it after doing a bit of a surf.

Most of my stuff is done on my old laptop. We all know webcams can be hacked and even the little LED thats’ supposed to come on when the camera is on.
The best fix I’ve found for this is a little plastic stick-on shutter that slides across when you’re not using it. Got it for a couple of quid from eBay. I don’t know of any virus that can slide a plastic shutter. So why’s it important? Criminals will hack your computer and use the webcam to find out when you go to bed and then can burgle your house if they have your address.
Also, I’ve set my laptop to go to sleep when I close the lid. So at the end of the day, I close it and know it can’t be hacked overnight.

Below is a youtube vid which describes how hackers crack passwords. I think it’s good to know how they do it, so you can guard against it:

The Beast and cracking passwords

Some of it is a bit techie, but the presenter speaks really well.

Cheers

Steve

[SimonInEdinburgh]

Hi @fryingtonite

What did you program in and on? I started with PL/1 on IBM MVS

Been through a lot of different combinations since.

Ciao
Simon

[fryingtonite]

Hi @SimonInEdinburgh

I’ve never coded in PL/1, but am quite old so…

Started with DBase II under Cp/M
Onto Clipper under DOS
Some 6800 machine code (not assembler) in my own time
Some Visual C in Windows
A few years of Borland Delphi (Pascal)
Blimey! Sounds like a CV
With an interest in electronics, many years of flat C programming PIC chips, one of which powered the stepper motor for the microscope for microphotography.
I used to work for a training company that offered COBOL, but when the MD did a talk, he always called it Cobalt. It was hard not to chuckle.

[SimonInEdinburgh]

@fryingtonite
Ah yes dBase2 I went from PL1 to debase 0n mmmost Which was a multitasking executive that ran CPM instances under shared memory and shared disk access!

from there to K&R C and sh(1) scripts under BSD Unix on a 8086! I also did a fair amount of 6502 assembler. I’m not quite sure what you mean by machine code not assembler? On the 6502 the assembler was one to one with the byte codes for operations like shift register left or add register to give accumulator or move accumulator to memory location - thus the assembler was merely a mnemonics substitution.

I’ve also done a lot of stuff like ingress windows 4GL, oracle DBA and unix system 5 sys admin and third level support - before spending years in technical project management then people project management and project management offices and governance consultancy and all sorts of other cooperation shiite

I’ve also trained things like PMP for 20+ years off the back of software development project management training with folk like LearningTree

Nostalgia!

[Strings]

@SimonInEdinburgh

However it makes a community of potentially vulnerable people who discuss their emotional and other challenges pretty much openly amongst themselves without awareness of the degree to which they are exposing ourselves.

This is the part that I find scary and unacceptable. It is almost certainly mentioned in the small print and agreed to when a member signs up, but this statement should be written large and prominent on the forum header so that everyone is kept aware that none of their posts are private and all miight be read by absolutely anybody or off the forum.

[SimonInEdinburgh]

And despite a year or more of saying there are topics that the community members have a right to voice an opinion on we have no mechanism to do so

I think the community members should determine how the community is run!

Moderation that would not in my opinion include anonymous admin who close threads and delete items they disagree with at their sole discretion with no outright of appeal has is currently the case

[fryingtonite]

Hiya

By machine code, I meany byte codes. The device was a cash register board sold by Practical Electronics with a 6800 processor in it. It did do a bit of debugging, with the option to set breakpoints and inspect registers, but it had a cash register keyboard (unsurprisingly!) and all code entry was in straight hex. It was ‘good fun’ . Often if you made a mistake it would crash, wiping out the entire program which was irritating, so I fitted a battery-backed static memory chip in a small header box and a switch on the write enable line, so before you run the program, you flick the switch and your code is intact on a crash which saved loads of time . Also with the battery, you could power off and re-run the same program as before. By default.power off meant program gone

I was living in a flat at the time, and phone bill= argument, so I made a telephone monitor (by request) to log each phone call. It had a printer out of an old calculator, which almost broke my brain working out how it worked . It all did though, and cut down on the ‘who pays what’ Phew!

Those were the days. Type a load of hex and watch it crash. Not much better than punched cards!

Cheers

Steve