Georg Koppen's blog

EU Commission supports Web filter advocates

Submitted by Georg Koppen on 30. April 2010 - 21:05.

The EU Commission supports lobby organizations which stronlgy advocate Web filters. The eNACSO (European NGO Alliance for Child Safety Online) which is trying to fight against child abuse with the help of Web filters got from the EU Commission 300.000 Euro.
Usually, lobby organizations get money from interest groups in order to influence the legislative process. In this case it seems to work in the opposite way...
 
Links:
http://www.netzpolitik.org/2010/computerworld-ueber-censilia-debatte/

Google, data collections und anonymity in the Internet

Submitted by Georg Koppen on 28. April 2010 - 20:53.

The paper "Private Information Disclosure from Web Searches (The case of Google Web History)" (see: http://planete.inrialpes.fr/projects/private-information-disclosure-from...) offers some interesting results in order to think a little bit about (massive) data collections and anonymity in the Internet. In short, the scientists including Claude Castelluccia have investigated whether and how they can obtain personal information of users deploying different Google services (e.g. Web History and Maps).

Java exploit

Submitted by Georg Koppen on 16. April 2010 - 6:27.

On April 9th 2010 Seclists.org published a bug in the Java Deployment Toolkit (see http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Apr/119). Due to this bug it is possible by means of prepared URLs to execute programs on the user's computer. And it is possible as well to install a trojan by drive-by-download and to take the computer over using further bugs in other applications. This security hole is already exploited by infected websites. Above all this problem is critical for Windows users.

Noises of dot matrix printers reveal printed contents

Submitted by Georg Koppen on 27. May 2009 - 20:47.

A team of scientists that has already informed about other unusual possibilities of espionage has now discovered a new method to obtain personal information: they analyzed the noises of a dot matrix printer and were thus able to reconstruct a large part of the printed information.

Let's make JonDonym!

Submitted by Georg Koppen on 23. April 2009 - 21:10.

Philosophy and technology

Do we need JonDonym? The question seems to be out of place, since this is the blog of the company which co-develops that software. But nevertheless, if we have a look at western democracies just a very small minority of people is using services like JonDonym and the majority does not miss anything at all surfing the Web. So, do we need JonDonym?