Bev Robb's List: Internet

The new mobile templates for Google Sites is a follow-up to the mobile sites rollout the company introduced last week.

The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) works to make the online world safer for kids and their families. 

"Imagine that President Obama could order the arrest of anyone who broke a promise on the Internet." That's what The Wall Street Journal's Orin Kerr thinks the latest cyber-security legislation will lead to: An assault on checking Facebook at work. Today the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on proposed changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which would seek tougher sentences for digital offenses.

We should check Cocoon daily

Test any website in real-time to check if it is accessible from China. The Golden Shield Project (a.k.a. Great Firewall of China) i

Borrett says that a third of Europeans surveyed by AVG and Future Poll don’t update their anti-virus protection. It seems, from what AVG says that increasingly cyber criminals are focusing on deceiving the human rather than the machine, fooling the user into downloading and installing malicious software by posing as anti-virus providers or another trusted source.

“This means of entering a user’s computer bypasses the normal security checks and makes the ‘wetware’ the weakest link, Borrett observes.

The report examines how companies have struggled to balance ethical and economic interests in their bid to capture the world’s largest market of internet users. It provides an overview of the “Great Firewall” of China, the past participation of five US technology giants (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype, and Cisco) in China’s censorship regime, and the legal and ethical obligations and commitments that are violated by censoring online content.

The company launched DNSCrypt, software that users can run which helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks on domain names and can also help anonymize your web site requests from prying eyes.

"FinFisher can turn on users' microphones or cameras without them knowing, take periodic screenshots and log keystrokes, she said. The FinSpy Mobile component carries a range of capabilities – including recording phone calls, tracking GPS locations, intercepting text messages and logging keystrokes."

"A shortcoming in browsers including Firefox and Opera allows crooks to easily hide an entire malicious web page in a clickable link - ideal for fooling victims into handing over passwords and other sensitive info.

Usually, so-called "phishing attacks" rely on tricking marks into visiting websites designed by criminals to masquerade as banks and online stores, thus snaffling punters' credentials and bank account details when they try to use the bogus pages. However this requires finding somewhere to host the counterfeit sites, which are often quickly taken down by hosting companies and the authorities or blocked by filters."

"A researcher at the University of Oslo in Norway says that page-less phishing and other untraceable attacks may be possible, using a tried and true internet communications standard: the uniform resource identifier, or URI.

Henning Klevjer, an information security student at the University of Oslo in Norway, suggests in a just-released research paper that it may be possible for attackers to dispense with phishing sites altogether, embedding their entire scam webpage in an encoded data URI that can be passed around from victim to victim."

Australia: "The Cybercrime Legislation Amendement bill 2011 was passed by the Senate.

If a law body wants to search your home they have to apply for a warrant to a judge ... make a good case based on the law and the judge decides.

Today any government bureaucrat can search your online life anytime they want.

But before you thinks that is bad, it is probably about to get even more invasive: "