E-Waste: The Dark Side of Technology

GUIYU, China – The wastes arrive here by sea transport, mainly from North America, Japan and South Korea.

They sail across the Pacific Ocean in huge colorful containers and reach Hong Kong where they are moved into the storage areas of the largest commercial harbor in China, waiting before proceeding with their journey toward the Chinese hinterland.

During the day, along the terminal area leading to the dock, there is a constant coming and going of trucks commuting between the city and the rural areas of the Guangdong province.
That’s the place where dozens of millions of tons of electronic junk (e-waste) from all over the world are taken: computers, phones, televisions, printers, refrigerators and an infinite row of other obsolete devices destined to disposal or recovery of the precious metals inside their circuits.
Guiyu is a small town situated a few hours from Hong Kong. As soon as you leave the main road that cuts through the countryside and arrive in town, you can find yourself in a post-apocalyptic scenario where the only signs of civilization that remain are huge mountains of rubble made of tubes, plastic and silicon.
Guiyu is the largest electronic garbage collector in the world. Each year about 100,000 workers, including many children, are involved in the disposal operations and recovery of over 1.5 million tons of materials coming from the consumer technology industry, a quantity that is around 80% of the e-waste produced in a year by the entire China.
The processing of materials is performed using techniques that are not adequate and that over two decades have transformed this small plot of land located in the heart of China in one of the most polluted and unlivable areas of the planet.
In Guiyu the air you breathe leaves the taste of acid fumes in your mouth, resulting from uncontrolled combustion of plastics and metals. The water is not drinkable. The level of poisoning of groundwater has forced the authorities to prohibit even agricultural use. The incidence on the population of serious blood disorders and cancer is among the highest in the whole world.
Guiyu is just the most notorious example, but similar sites, according to a recent Greenpeace report, are located, in a more or less official way, in many other developing areas such as Pakistan, India and Nigeria. These are the landfills of the world, the places where every technologically obsolete device ends its life, and where all means are legitimate.
For the more developed countries they represent nothing more than an investment with a very low cost, a mere matter of economic convenience that also lowers internal environmental impact. The sum of shipping costs and the entire process of disposal is by far less than what it would take to deal with the same materials in their places of origin.
For the countries that do import such wastes, e-waste is merely a business opportunity that feeds a gloomy total market value estimated at millions of dollars every year and causing untold damage to the environment and the quality of life of the people involved.
Some years ago PlanetFunk shot the video of their popular song “Stop Me” in Guiyu. With this data in our hands, maybe it’s time to say “Please, stop”.
Author: Antonio Lupetti @woork
© 2010 Woork Up

Internet Explorer 9 to get tracking protection

Microsoft this morning detailed changes to Internet Explorer 9's security features that will better enable users to keep sites from tracking their activity across browsing sessions.

The feature, which is set to arrive in the first release candidate of IE9 early next year, uses a list to tell the browser which third-party page elements sites can and cannot be blocked from tracking. This includes elements ranging from advertisements to more mundane things like embedded widgets from particular providers.

On Microsoft's IE blog, Dean Hachamovitch, head of Internet Explorer development, explained how it works:

A Tracking Protection List (TPL) contains Web addresses (like msdn.com) that the browser will visit (or "call") only if the consumer visits them directly by clicking on a link or typing their address. By limiting the calls to these Web sites and resources from other Web pages, the TPL limits the information these other sites can collect.

You can look at this as a translation of the "Do Not Call" list from the telephone to the browser and web. It complements many of the other approaches being discussed for browser controls of Do Not Track.

In a Webcast announcing the feature, Hachamovitch said most users have "little awareness of who can track their activity," and that the feature stemmed from that. Hachamovitch also attributed the creation of the feature to the company's more open approach to developing features for IE9.

Microsoft's tracking protection tool gives users control over which site elements can track your activity during a browsing session. Green ones in this shot can, while the red cannot.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Microsoft is letting users and third-parties alike author protection lists and host them on their sites. Users can then download them to their browser. Microsoft has also created lists to resemble what Hachamovitch likened to an RSS feed, so that if additional sites are added or removed, it can be updated without the user having to seek out, or manually update.

Hachamovitch said tracking protection will not replace InPrivate filtering, a feature Microsoft added to IE in version 8. Instead, Hachamovitch referred to it as complementary, given that InPrivate filtering uses algorithms to control tracking, along with not persisting from session to session. Tracking protection, on the other hand, will remain on once a user turns it on.

Microsoft says tracking protection will not be on by default when it arrives next year. Users will need to opt-in to enable it, as well as seek out lists of sites, which will not ship with the browser once it's released.

So far, Microsoft's IE9 beta has been downloaded in excess of 15 million times since its release back in September.

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Want to read about 'Wiki-leaks armors itself to survive cyber attacks' then just click here! 

Profile viewer, Facebook hit by yet another scam

Another day, another scam. Facebook users got hit with yet another scam which claims to show users who have previewed their profile. The scam got visible on the Facebook page in form of an App, claiming to show users their profile viewers while the scam gets an access to your profile.

Millions of users have already accessed the App, in order to keep a check. Opening the Facebook page to check on the News Feed, my eyes paused on a link which seemed kind of appealing while on the same view of looking towards it as something fishy.

The message with a link post, read:

OMG OMG OMG…I cant believe this actually works! Now you really can see who viewed your profile!

For those users who have accessed this App for some reason or the other, you need to get things straight before your profile is used as a worm. Follow the steps to remove the scam from your Facebook account:

Step 1: Login your Facebook Account

Step 2: Go to your Privacy Settings

Step 3: Look for the App in the Applications and Websites section

Step 4: Delete the App and Change your password immediately

How to Protect an Email Account from being Hacked

Here we will mention some most popular ways used to hack email accounts and the solution for such hacking techniques. I would say its always a very easy task to protect your email account as most of the companies already have maximum security enabled at the server end. There are only some precautions you need to take while using your email for protection.

WEBSITE SPOOFING : Website spoofing is the act of creating a website, with the intention of misleading the readers. The website will be created by a different person or organisation (Other than the original) especially for the purposes of cheating. Normally, the website will adopt the design of the target website and sometimes has a similar URL. The solution is that..

• Never try to login/access your email account from the sites other than the original site.
• Always type the URL of the site in the address bar to get into the site. Never click on the hyperlink to enter the site.

USING KEY LOGGERS OR TROJANS : Protecting yourselves from a keylogger scam is very easy.Just install a good anti-spyware program and update it regularly. This keeps your PC secure from a keylogger. Also there is a program called Anti-keylogger which is specially designed to detect and remove keyloggers. You can use this program to detect some stealth keyloggers which remain undetected by many anti-spyware programs.

To keep your system from Trojans is to have an antivirus program that is being regularly updated. Here is our selection of best antiviruses for Windows 7.

ACCESSING YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT FROM CYBER CAFES

Do you access your email from cyber cafes?  Then definitely you are under the risk of loosing your password.In fact many people lose their email account in cyber cafes. For the owner of the cyber cafe it’s just a cakewalk to steal your password. For this he just need’s to install a keylogger on his computers. So when you login to your email account from this PC, you give away your password to the cafe owner. Also there are many Remote Administration Tools (RATs) which can be used to monitor your browsing activities in real time.

Protecting your privacy while using bittorrent!

Torrent these days is one of the most loved platform for downloading files, mostly cracked one. With piracy arrives the risk of protecting your privacy. Here we will explain you how to protect your privacy while using bittorrent, one of the famous torrent clients out there. Viruses and other forms of malware are the most basic of threats.  The files you download are foreign and you should treat them as such; scan them promptly after downloading them.  Most major anti-virus programs have the ability to add folders for auto-scanning, which is probably the ideal solution if you either don’t have time or don’t want to waste effort doing things manually.

Encryption

One way to help alleviate these problems is to enable encryption for your connections.  This prevents the data sent between two peers from being understood by onlookers, although it doesn’t prevent them from seeing their IP addresses or certain details from the tracker, such as amount of data transferred.

This is not a perfect solution, however.  Encryption has to be supported by your peers as well, and they may not have their clients set to use it.  Some trackers don’t even allow encryption, but if yours does, it’s not a bad idea to enable preferring encrypted connections, but allowing unencrypted transfers if none are present.

Enable Encryption in uTorrent

Open uTorrent, go to Options > Preferences, and then click where it says BitTorrent on the left. Under where it says “Protocol Encryption,” choose Enabled and click on Allow incoming legacy connections.  This will allow outbound encryption but still accept non-encrypted connections when there are no encrypted connections available.

IP Blockers

Another thing you can do is use an IP blocker.  These programs run alongside an existing firewall (you DO have a firewall, don’t you?) and your BitTorrent client and they filter out IP addresses based on blocklists.  Blocklists compound ranges of IPs that contain known problems, such as monitoring and bad packet transfer.  How well they work is up for debate, and there is no consensus on whether they do anything at all.  Websites and trackers that are fine sometimes get blocked, and you have to manually allow them.

If you’re a cautious person, however, it’s not a bad idea to run an IP blocker just in case.  The most well-known ones are PeerBlock for Windows and Moblock for Linux, and Transmission for both Mac and Linux has the ability to use a blocklist.  PeerBlock, once installed, allows you to download and update blocklists and automatically starts to block IP addresses.

Install and Configure PeerBlock on Windows

Download PeerBlock from their website.  The beta is pretty stable and provides the most useful features, and is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and 7 (all versions).

Hijack Facebook, Twitter accounts with Firesheep, How to Secure against it

Have you ever imagined how is it is to hack someones Facebook, Twitter, Live accounts with a single click? Yes! Now its possible with Firesheep an extension for Firefox which helps you to hijack an open Wi-Fi connection.

Firesheep is a work of  Eric Butler who made the proof oc concept public after after presenting at a Security event. The purpose of the experiment was to showcase the security risks associated with session hijacking, aka sidejacking.

So what all can be hacked with Firesheep? Nearly  26 online services, which includes all popular online services: Amazon, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, The New York Times, Twitter, Windows Live,WordPress and Yahoo.

The extension is so flexible that it can be customized to allow a hacker to target other Websites not listed by Firesheep. While Firesheep sounds scary, its not as scary as it may sound first. Even though the extension is downlaoded more than 100,000 times, there’s nothing to be scared of.

Install WinPcap on windows (Mac Os doesn’t need this) and get the Firesheep extension and then open it up by clicking on View>Sidebars>Firesheep. Click the button that says “Start Capturing.” Once you click the button, it starts snooping. Then onwards all sessions that are captured are automatically displayed.

How to Bypass Firesheep Hijacks?

1. If you feel your account has been compromised, immidiately logout. As soon as you do that, hijacked cookie becomes invalid, and no longer can be mis-used.
2. Use A VPN: Try using a Virtual Private Network client such as the free version of HotSpot Shield. This piece of software basically creates a secure tunnel for your data that runs between the Wi-Fi router and your computer.
3. USe HTTPS Everywhere: If you’re a Firefox user you can also use extensions such as HTTPS Everywhere built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This extension forces certain Websites to use a secure SSL connection for your entire browsing session instead of just the login.
4. Use Strict Transport Security (STS): Strict Transport Security (STS) is a relatively new security feature that is starting to appear in some browsers. STS automatically forces your browser to make a secure connection with every Web page that supports SSL encryption. Once you start using STS, you will not be able to use an insecure connection ever again when connecting to a specific site such as Facebook or Amazon. Chrome has supported STS since Chrome 4, and Firefox 4 will include STS when the official version launches in the coming months.
5. Encrypt your home/office network:  Use the strongest possible encryption on your Home and office Wifi connections.  WPA2 is much better than WEP.

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Beware of this fake MS Security Essentials !

 

Its a fact that Microsoft Security Essentials is great free tool for defending viruses. However, there is a rogue security product out there which wrongfully claims to be “Microsoft Security Essentials”, and has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.

This malware is distributed via drive-by-download attacks by the names hotfix.exe or mstsc.exe (md5: 0a2582f71b1aab672ada496074f9ce46). After installing this fake malware it points to another link which is supposed to cure the infection, but this link also leads to a fake malware.

So, beware of this fake Microsoft Security Essentials tool which will try to scare you into purchasing a product you don’t need. Don’t fall for it. I can’t wait to see how long it takes for Microsoft to track down and sue those behind this rogueware.