Six Tips to Protect Your Online Search Privacy

Google, MSN Search, Yahoo!, AOL, and most other search engines collect and store records of your search queries. If these records are revealed to others, they can be embarrassing or even cause great harm. Would you want strangers to see searches that reference your online reading habits, medical history, finances, sexual orientation, or political affiliation?

DVD chips ‘to kill illegal copying’

Embedded radio transmitter chips to track movie, music and software.

Exploit Posted for New IE Zero-Day

Security researchers in China have published detailed exploit code for a previously unknown code execution hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

Tracking Users Via the Browser’s Cache

A demonstration shows that tracking can remain continuous if you clear only cookies or only the cache, but not both. (Firefox’s Clear Private Data tool can be set to clear both when closing the browser.)

How spammers identify their targets

Brent Huston writes about research he did to get inside the minds of spammers and expose some of the processes they use to identify potential targets. Huston says that among the four common ways that spam is spread, the most common method that spammers use is via open relays. Huston’s research also revealed that ‘they were doing much more server analysis’ than he had expected and that they take a multi-step approach: ‘They scan the server for proper RFC compliance, and then they send a test message to a disposable address. Only after these are complete did they adopt the tool to dump their spam’.