Category Archives: Tips & Tricks

Is It Time To Change The Way We Post To Social Networks?

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With the announcement last week of the new Facebook Graph Search feature, users of the social network have been starting to think a bit more carefully about their online privacy. But when you read about programmes that are specifically designed to clean up your Facebook profile, you have to wonder if prevention may be better than cure.

FaceWash is one such web app that scans your Facebook for comments posted on your wall, photos you’re tagged in, photos you’ve posted, links you’ve liked, status updates and more for offensive content. You can then delete content that is flagged by FaceWash so that your profile is a slightly more politically correct corner of the web.

But this does then beg the question; why post such things in the first place? The public perception of Facebook – and to be fair, the internet at large – is that regardless of so-called privacy settings, you should assume that anything posted on Facebook has the potential to be seen by the whole world.

So instead of going to the trouble of trawling your online accounts for any comments or updates that you think might be inappropriate, it would perhaps be better to think about things before we post them and adjust our online behaviours. It’s easy for something to be taken out of context or for it to reach a larger audience than intended, so if you’re in doubt about what you’re saying or the privacy of where you are sharing information, maybe you shouldn’t be sharing it online at all.

Instagram’s New Profile Pages – How To Ensure You Retain Your Privacy

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Instagram users should be aware of the privacy implications resulting from the recent roll-out of Instagram profile pages. Unsurprisingly, a profile page on Instagram, the photo sharing service recently purchased by Facebook, strongly resemble the latter’s ‘Timelines’ feature.

But if you joined Instagram with the intention of sharing your photos in the first place, why should you be worried? Well, previously your photos would only by shared with other Instagram users, and there was no easy way to view them all on the web – users would have to browse via the mobile app, which wasn’t too convenient. With the new profile pages all of your photos can be viewed by anyone – regardless of whether they have an Instagram account.

However, all is not lost if you are concerned about privacy. You can tighten things up on your profile by adjusting the privacy settings via the mobile app. Just go to settings and then move the ‘Photos Are Private’ slider from Off to On:

enabling private instagram profile pageOnce you’ve made the changes, your Instagram Profile Page will only be viewable to your existing followers, and only when they are logged in. What this does mean however is that you’ll have to approve all new followers from now on, if there is anyone already following you that you’d like to block, you again have to do this manually through the mobile app.

Presumably if you’re privacy conscious enough to have read this article about how to make your Instagram profile private, you won’t approve followers without just cause. However, there are details on the site’s Help Center explain how to block Instagram followers.

 

Facebook Didn’t Publish Private Messages, But There Are Still Lessons To Be Learned

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This might seem like old news at this point, but now that the dust has settled and the French data protection agency CNIL has published its findings, it’s feels appropriate to discuss the ‘bug’ that saw Facebook publishing ‘private’ messages to some Timelines at the end of September.

Firstly, there was no ‘bug’, and Facebook was quick to point this out right when the issue initially surfaced. However, French media outlets were informing everyone that their messages had been made public, and there was an understandable outcry at the supposed invasion of privacy. Well, it would have been understandable if the facts were correct.

The messages in question were not ‘private messages’, but merely Wall Posts between Facebook Friends – the sort of thing you’d see on your News Feed or on the right hand side ticker bar. However, due to the number of changes that have been made to the layout of Facebook and the way it works over the years, there was some confusion over the privacy of such exchanges.

The CNIL made this point clearly in their report on the matter:

“The way Facebook used to work before 2010 is not comparable to the way the social network works today. The user interface was different and ‘Wall-To-Wall’ messages were much less prominent. ‘Wall-To-Wall’ messages were therefore perceived as private by the users.”

This serves as another stark reminder that you need to be very careful about saying things online, and be sure to check the privacy of any conversations you might be having. Facebook is a fantastic place to hold an open discussion and invite contributions from a wide range of people, but it’s been proven that things can easily become confused when it comes to private exchanges of information.

If you need to communicate privately, or share pictures and other sensitive information with a select group of people, you may find a private sharing network to be a better method of sharing. Start using DADapp to easily and privately share your photos, music, videos and files with your own world, not the whole world.

File-Sharing Sites Taken Down In Police Raid – Will Your Private Files Be Affected?

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A number of file-sharing sites have been taken offline following a raid by Swedish police on hosting company PRQ earlier in the week. Four servers were taken offline, resulting in possibly dozens of torrent sites – including torrenthound.com. linkomanija.net and several sports streaming sites – to become inaccessible.

PRQ was founded by the same two Swedes who later founded The Pirate Bay – the file sharing site that has been blocked by many ISPs in the UK this year. By way of a coincidence, The Pirate Bay also went offline on Monday, but as that particular torrent site doesn’t rely on PRQ for hosting, it wasn’t connected with the raid by Swedish police. The Pirate Bay said on Facebook that the site was suffering through a power outage.

So while this, and other many other raids will have been done to protect the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials such as films and music, there will inevitably by innocents caught in the cross-fire. People who use the sites to host their own files and share legally share information with other people will now have lost their capability to send and share files.

The shutting down of sites due to the actions of some users is becoming more and more commonplace, so if you use such sites to host and share files, then maybe you’d be better off storing your own files and using a private sharing network to share them with your contacts. Use DADapp for the easy private sharing of photos, music, videos and files.

Following Complaints, Facebook Will Finally Delete Your Photos If You Ask

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When you delete something online, it’s very hard to be absolutely certain that it has actually gone. This has been a lingering worry for a number of Facebook users for some time now.

People quite understandably thought that deleting a photo from their profile would mean that the image was wiped from Facebook’s servers, and thus could no longer be viewed by anyone. However, this wasn’t the case. Anyone with the direct URL to the image could still put that into their browser and view the image, even it if was nowhere to be seen on Facebook.

So then the concerned users would email Facebook requesting that the images be permanently deleted, and the social network said they would do so. But in some cases, images it had been asked to delete (multiple times) were still online three years later. Well, today privacy conscious people can perhaps begin to breathe a sigh of relief.

Due to an upgrade to Facebook’s content delivery network (CDN), the social network says its new photo storage system means that all deleted images will be removed within 30 days or less.

In a statement, Frederic Wolens – a Facebook spokesperson – told CNET:

“As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure, we have instituted a ‘max-age’ of 30 days for our CDN links. However, in some cases the content will expire on the CDN much more quickly, based on a number of factors.”

So hopefully this will allow users who are still waiting for their photos to be deleted to finally sleep at night. Have you ever had to ask Facebook to delete a photo? What was your experience and was your request met?

Dropbox Users Unable To Access Files For Nine Hours

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Users of communal cloud sharing service Dropbox have had problems accessing their files and uploading new content to their virtual hosting spaces. Some people have been unable to access their files for at least nine hours, while other users have reported experiencing slow speeds from Monday morning.

Yesterday, a post in the Dropbox forum from Arash Ferdowski – co-founder and CTO – tried to explain what was going on:

“hi all,

we’re experiencing heavy load which is resulting in intermittent slowness/downtime. in some cases there’ll be a delay when syncing files through the desktop client but the delay shouldn’t last more than a minute or two. we had a similar issue yesterday and the team is hard at work on a solution.

we’re very sorry for the inconvenience and will provide updates as we learn more”

However, what seemed to anger some of Dropbox’s users affected by this problem was the silence from the company when the issues became apparent on a wide scale:

“I can understand network problems, everybody faces it someday, and work hard to solve it. What I can NOT understand is lack of communication. I checked your twitter users @dropbox and @dropboxops, and thought the problem was on my side. I lost many hours checking configurations. Then I remembered the forum and came here for help. Big surprise, was not my problem, but everybody’s problem. One tweet when the problem begun, and I could had spent those hours playing with my son. Come on, guys, we know you could have problems, but TELL US quickly! I’m a paying customer who now wonders if should set a Google Drive account as a contingency. We both lose. –pro user Alex P.”

Pushing individual user stories to one side for a moment, let’s look at the lessons to be learned from this episode. People were unable to access files for over nine hours – that’s an entire working day. The commercial implications of this for companies that use Dropbox (or any other cloud storage service) could be catastrophic.

Countless time sensitive decisions are made by companies on a daily basis, and if the right people aren’t able to access and amend the right information when they need to, then some serious problems may ensue. Contracts may not be awarded, payroll may not be able to be processed (just think back to the NatWest glitch and the problems caused to individuals then), and people just generally can’t get on with their daily work. Imagine if your entire workforce called in sick on the same day – your company would be crippled.

Of course Dropbox does have its merits, and I’m not here to say it’s a bad idea – however putting all of your eggs in one basket may be a bad move. If you need to share files privately and easily with colleagues, friends or family, then make sure that there’s no one else holding up the road. With DADapp you can connect directly to anyone in your sharing network to easily share photos, music, videos and files – all privately and securely.

Dropbox Admits Account Breaches, Upgrades Security

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Just over a couple of weeks ago we wrote about Dropbox users receiving spam emails on their accounts that led many people to believe that the file-hosting site had been hacked. When Dropbox admitted that they had brought in “an outside team of experts” to help their own security team, this only served to further strengthen the view that something had gone drastically wrong.

This week saw the admission that a number of Dropbox accounts had been hacked. Yesterday in a blog post by the company’s VP of Engineering, Aditya Agarwal, it was revealed that usernames and passwords were stolen from third-party websites, which were then used to sign in to a “small number of Dropbox accounts”.

While it hasn’t been specified how many Dropbox accounts have been breached, the company has been in contact with the affected users and advised them on how they can further protect their accounts. The file-hosting site is also taking steps to bolster its own security, as laid out in its blog post:

  • Two-factor authentication, a way to optionally require a unique code in addition to your password when signing in. (Coming in a few weeks)
  • New automated mechanisms to help identify suspicious activity. We’ll continue to add more of these over time.
  • A new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.
  • In some cases, we may require you to change your password. (For example, if it’s commonly used or hasn’t been changed in a while)

While Dropbox acted quickly to protect the data it had been holding for millions of users by bringing it outside security experts, this is just one more incident that highlights to problems related to entrusting your data to third-parties. If you have important, private files that you need to share with a group(s) of people, then hosting them in the cloud can be a risky move.

With DADapp you can share files privately with whoever you want, without having to send them in an email or upload them to a third-party hosting service. The User2User capability allows users to establish direct connections with the recipients and share files securely with them, without the need to go through any other channels. To start using DADapp for the easy, private sharing of photos, music, videos and files, visit our website and download DADapp for Windows or Mac now.

How Secure Are Your Online Passwords? Avoid These Common Choices

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How much thought do you put into your online security? These days there are so many different networks and services to sign up to and be a part of, it gets to the point where remembering all of the various login credentials can be a particularly arduous task. It’s not surprising therefore that we often either reuse the same login information for different online accounts or create incredibly simple passwords.

This can make things easier for you to remember how to login to Facebook or speed things up when trying to order something from Amazon, but if you’re using the same key for lots of different locks, think of the potential damage that could occur if that key were to fall into the wrong hands. It seems that rarely a week goes by without news of another dataset being breached by hackers who steal the login information of countless users for an online service. Just last week over 450,000 Yahoo Voices users had their email addresses and passwords posted online.

While there is little that individual users can do to prevent such attacks, a blog post published today revealed the shocking simplicity of password choice by a frightening proportion of web users. Strings of consecutive numbers or letters are commonplace, as is the practice of combining consecutive numbers with the name of the service the password grants access to.

These passwords are often used to login to a number of different networks, so if for example a hacker was to discover the password for your web-based email account, they would feasibly be able to rifle through the content of many other online services that you use.

Many websites tell you how strong your password is when you are either creating or editing account information, so you’d be advised to make sure you heed their advice and come up with something containing upper and lower case letters, as well as numbers.

Of course, trying to remember lots of different passwords and variations of memorable information is very hard indeed – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve clicked ‘Forgotten Password?’ while trying to login to some service or another. However, if you are going to use the same password across many different sites, make sure it’s a strong password that is seemingly obscure to anyone else, but is something that only you would be able to remember or understand.

Unfortunately there are people out there who will attempt to fraudulently gain access to our accounts for malevolent purposes – the best we can do as individuals is to make it as hard as possible for them to crack our passwords.

Yahoo Breach Extends To Gmail, Hotmail And AOL – How To Check Your Account

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Following on from yesterday’s news that the email addresses and passwords of 450,000 Yahoo Voices users were hacked, it has emerged that the breach extends beyond Yahoo and into the realms of Gmail, Hotmail and AOL.

The hacking group D33D Company used what is known as an SQL injection, which exploits software vulnerability, to obtain the personal data from Yahoo. Researchers at the security company Rapid7 found that among the stolen data were 106,000 Gmail email addresses, 55,000 Hotmail email addresses and 25,000 AOL email addresses.

A spokesman for Yahoo has said that the compromised accounts belonged to Yahoo’s Contributor Network, and at this point less than 5% of the passwords posted by D33Ds are still valid. Similar swift action was taken by Google, with a company spokesman saying that Google immediately reset passwords for vulnerable Gmail accounts. Those email accounts were not hacked; instead people had used their email addresses as user names for a Yahoo service.

If you’re concerned that any of your accounts may have been compromised, Sucuri, a company that checks for malware has set up a site that allows users to check if their account details were obtained in the breach. You can check yours here:

labs.sucuri.net/?yahooleak

The motives behind the attack were explained by D33Ds, with a note attached to the stolen data (which has since been taken offline): “We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat.”

Even so, security experts have been quick to criticise Yahoo for allowing hackers to access its systems with such apparent ease. Mark Bower, a vice president at Voltage Security said: “Why haven’t organizations like Yahoo got it yet? SQL injection is a known attack. If what is stated is true, it’s utter negligence to store passwords in the clear.”

As with any hack of this nature, the best advice we can give you is to change your passwords for any of the potentially affected accounts, and also for any other accounts that you may use the same passwords for.

US Government Denies Megaupload User Access To His Own Files

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The case of the collateral damage brought about by January’s closure of file-sharing site Megaupload has deteriorated further for users who still cannot access their own private files.

Kyle Goodwin, an Ohio videographer who runs a business recording high school sporting events, has been told by the US Department of Justice that he has no right to demand his files back from the US government. Despite the fact he was supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and that the Motion Picture Association of America (one of the bodies represented by the prosecution against Megaupload) had no problem with him having his files returned to him, the US DOJ won’t budge.

The reasoning behind this decision is quite long-winded and has to do with the manner in which data was seized and the relevant warrants that were executed, so for the purposes of this blog we won’t delve into the specifics. If you’d like to know more about the legal issues surrounding this, Ars Technica goes into more depth.

The point I’m trying to make is that whenever you entrust any third-party to hold on to your files, you are potentially at the mercy of how they operate in relation to the law(s). If anything untoward is suspected of happening with that company, then you may suddenly find that you are separated from your own data with no indication of when you may be reunited with it.

If you are trying to run a business and important documents are out of reach, then this can pose some very serious problems. This situation has arisen from a legal issue – there are other ways you can lose your data that are completely out of your hands, such as hacking or server malfunctions.

If you need to make files available from a number of locations and to a number of people, then there is a safer and more secure way of doing this. DADapp has a user to user sharing system that allows for the easy private sharing of files, music, videos and photos – without the need for cloud hosting.

It’s more private than Facebook, easier than Windows networking and more flexible than Dropbox. If you’d like to share with your own world and not the whole world, then download DADapp and create your own private social network today.