WELCOME

Are you being watched? "You bet you are!!"

"Why are you being watched/spied upon?"
I could go into detail and start explaining about user profiles, surfing habits, and how important these are to marketers, but I'm not because you should already know there is no such a thing as Privacy on the Internet whether it's the Web, Email, Chat, Newsgroups, whatever, certain information about you and your computer, and where you've come from and go to are being tracked by Cookies and more recently by "Bugs".

Ooops! Did I forget to mention "Rats"!! That's the new designation for "Worms" that have the ability to infect your system (aka,trojons/worms) that can ACTIVATE you Sound Card and Cam to actually Watch and/or Listen in on you while ya work.. And you were wondering why your new 500mhz seemed slower 286 Dx on a good day!!!

Oh ya, what about Echelon!! This story just keeps getting better all the time..

"So Who's Doing The Spying?"
Well.. I hate to say everyone! But it sure seems like that at times. Most sites use cookies to track visitors and provide instant logon for members but others are into collecting information that may or may not have a value today, but may be worth something down the road...

Some notes of interest.

You will notice there are several links on this page, to two types of software programs.
In My Opinion there are 2 Types of Privacy Issues, the first is simply the use of cookies and spy programs to track where you go and what you do on the internet, also included in this group, are modules built into programs, such as Microsoft uses to Identify you and Track the data files you create in Word, Excel, Access, etc.. They have since issued a patch, ya right...
The second privacy issue is hacking. And all the hacking that goes on isn't being done by some bored computer geeks.. A lot of it consists of hacking into your system by real honest to goodness Companies. That's right!

OK.. What do they expect to find? That's just it, I don't know! (We can speculate right?)
But here's an interesting story (the names have been changed to protect the guilty). I was working here late on night when AtGuard(AG) poped up and informed me a certain DNS number was trying to UDP (TCP subnet protocal) my system on port 2120. I started NeoTrace and ran the DNS, nothing... an unregistered mail server perhaps. So I went to WS_Ping Pak and started tracing every which way. In the meantime this guy or his scan program wasn't giving up, it kept going up the Port List 2323, 2340, 2450, etc.. all told it made ten (10) attempts before I told AG to block it permanently. It got really annoying!!

I kept running the DNS and finally I got transfered to the web address that was using it.
WOW!! This was one big outfit!! What kinda outfit ya ask? A Telco... As a matter of fact they are the internet arm of several major telephone companies here in Canada. I printed all the traces, bookmarked the site and got the log report from AG, hey this could be big news.. I even had my ISP provide me with their server logs for that day and the day before and the day after.

Yep, you're right, there it was in the middle of the night, UDP requests to everyone online, which happened to be me and a tech guy but he wasn't using a firewall. So what was it all about? Who knows!! What I do know, it wasn't some love struck server put'n the moves on my old 300mhz AMD... (More speculation here.)

So what did I do? Nothing.. What can you say, could be some new kinda new internet testing program, like the computer program your local telephone company runs every day to test the lines and detected illegal bugging equipement, oh I mean bad grounds on your telephone line. If it were to happen a second time then I'd take it personal. As it was I gave all the info to my ISP and Wired to create a record of the incident.

Another story, I'll make it short.. I do alot of private email forwarding, and handle the email for several of my clients, so I scan everything passing through my system. G what's happening here! Someone is sending one of my clients an .exe acuteable containing the Happy99 virus. First I send them a note telling them this file won't run on my computer. All I get in return is an auto-reply with another copy of the .exe attached, ya and it contains the virus too. I write root@ asking if username@telephoneco.net is a legit user. Hey these guys were back to me less than an hour, and yes it was a valid address.

I FWD'd them the email, attached virus an all, and the Norton's AV, Fix-It AV and Fprot reports asking them to look into this. G a week goes by so I drop them a note.. nothing... Ya don't think they're more than a little embarrassed to tell me someone hi-jacked their mail server and used dummy accounts to distribute this happy little virus huh..
So how many people do you think got their systems trashed? (Speculation goes here)

So I decided to create this page to discuss the privacy and spying issues related to using the Internet. A while back I went to check on SpinRight version 5 at Steve Gibson's http://grc.com and was surprised to see he'd developed a new program called Shiels-Up. I gave it a try and successfully passed the attempts to hack into my system or gain any useful info about me for that matter. Give it a try and see how You fair out!!

Then use regedit to find this line "HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentUser" in your registration database and change the "RegisteredOwner" from your real name if ya used it during install, to something else, like "Hi I'm Bill Gates" or use your imagination. While you're at it, change your "RegisteredOrganization" to let's say "Microsoft Sucks" or whatever... (No offense intended and of course those names are the registered trademarks of their respective companies/owners.the legalize part)..
If you are on a network and can manage it, change your computername to something like deepspace9, year2010, HAL, go for it.. Then use that name and rename your My Computer icon and your hard drive to the same name.
You'll be surprised the confusion you'll cause....

Anyway, I signed up for Steve's newsletter, and asked him if he'd make it (newsletter software) available to us non-programers when he's got it working smooth.. Through his newsletter I learned he had developed "OptOut" to take on Aureate and Timesink, the new software programs that were spying on your system and what and where you were going on the net. Hey.. I had already discovered and either deleted or disabled these guys.. including CyDoor which I sent him the specs on.

Over the years I've done beta testing for a wide range of Companies and programs, no games.. After getting trashed a couple times, I developed a simple system of tracking all the files installed and changes made to my computers.. For anyone who is interested, I recommend InCtrl4 by Ziff-Davis Inc. or InstallWatch by Epsilon Squared.

As for Firewalls, I use AtGuard whose core technology was bought by Norton/Symantec for use in their Internet Security 2001 which should provide all the benefits that made AtGuard the best (my opinion) but with a spiffy Norton interface.
If you're a BlackIce Defender user check for an update/patch or set security higher than Nervious! The program uses the jet database engine which has been hacked... Hey, according to reliable source.. Also, check this one too, no protection against back oriface..

During the same time I was a Beta tester for ZeroKnowledge who were developing a new concept in privacy protection. Ok I am an affiliate and hope to generate some revenue from this association, that doesn't necessarily make me biased, nor a hardcore marketer/capitalist for that matter!! But I do believe this will be the way of the future.

FREEDOM - ULTIMATE PRIVACY PROTECTION