Finally, Micro$oft knows how to do a silent update for your IE browser. Maybe just learned from Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Anyway, this is a smart move to stop or at least to slow down the loss of market share (to Chrome and Firefox). M$ won the browser war against Netscape by bundling IE to Windows since Windows 95. But is has been a loser in the same battlefield against Firefox, nor against Chrome. Security, speed, and W3C standard are the major reasons tech geeks abandon IE. IE 8 and IE 9 did have some improvement in security and… Read More
According to TechCrunch, Carrier IQ is a “mobile intelligence” firm that provides logging software for carriers and devices OEMs for use in their devices. Carrier IQ claims that they deliver information “on the performance of mobile devices and networks to help the Operators provide optimal service efficiency,” but Android security researcher Trevor Eckhart discovered that CarrierIQ was capable of tracking data that’s more fine-grained than what would be expected for simple diagnostic feedback. The Carrier IQ website claims that the program has been installed on more than 140 million devices. If you are using Sprint+Samsung or Sprint+HTC, you should check… Read More
Everyday millions of third-party add-ons are installed for Firefox. Some of them can impose serious privacy and security holes for the computer. Finally, in the latest release, Firefox 8 disables third-party add-ons. This is a correct step among so many mistakes in recent releases. According to the official Mozilla Add-ons Blog: These add-ons installed by third parties present a number of problems: they can slow down Firefox start-up and page loading time, they clutter the interface with toolbars that often go unused, they lag behind on compatibility and security updates, and most importantly, they take the user out of control… Read More
In our safe surfing guide series, I mentioned one important thing for safe surfing is dumping IE and choosing a better browser. One of the safest web browsers is Google Chrome browser, which is becoming more and more popular. The security features include: Sandboxing. Almost all browsers now have tabbed browsing, even IE has it for a long time. But Chrome differs itself from others by implementing sandboxing. The tabs have individual processes with sandbox capabilities which restrict privileges for third-party apps. This (sandboxing), according to Google and security experts "prevent malware from installing itself on your computer or using… Read More
After the post on "How to surf safely? Dump IE, choose a better browser" was online, a reader pointed me to a so-called research report that IE 9 crowns the browser security. According to the report, IE 9 can block 96% socially engineered malware; while the distant second (Chrome) can only block 13.2%. The full report is freely (anyway, nobody is willing to pay such so-called reports) available here. It sounds like a story told on April 1. And it actually is. If you happen to read the report, you will notice their research was based on "NSS Labs has… Read More
This is part 4 of the Safe Surfing Guide series. You may check other parts as well to read the complete safe surfing guide. To surf safely, your browser can also play an important role. There are so many choices for browsers now: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, SeaMonkey; all are freely available. But unfortunately, most users are still using the crappy piece of IE, simply because it is bundled by M$. You should dump IE when you get your new PC. Most computer viruses or malware reply on IE, because M$ tightly integrate IE with the Windows OS. In addition,… Read More
This is part 3 of the Safe Surfing Guide series. You may check other parts as well to read the complete safe surfing guide. Malicious code and malicious link can be easily hidden in emails. When you open emails, the execution of the malicious code may be triggered. Or, the malicious link may open automatically and download nasty things to your local computer. Another security issue for your email is phishing. The sender pretends to be someone else, e.g., Facebook, or your banker. If you follow the link, you are trapped. If you follow this Safe Surfing Guide series, you… Read More
This is part 2 of the Safe Surfing Guide series. You may check other parts as well for a complete safe surfing guide. After reading the part 1 of this guide, you installed the antivirus software (hopefully, it is Avast), you may still expose yourself to something named malware occasionally. Malware includes all malicious software. Some examples are: computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, adware, and rootkits. The purpose of malware is to steal some information from your computer or to gain unauthorized access of your computer. Normally, in the computer security industry, we classify them into virus and malware.… Read More
The No.1 threat of safe surfing is computer virus. Unless you are using UNIX or Linux, you are facing computer virus on websites almost every day. In the DOS era, the computer virus was mainly spreading through floppy disks. At that time, it was cool to bring a box of floppy disks around, just like nowadays bringing an iPad around. The ever-increasing threat of virus in the last 3 decades was the result of the dominance of M$ Windows+ the proliferation of the Internet. The Internet is a good innovation: it changes the way how information is propagated, and make… Read More
In the previous article, I shared with you the 3 methods to get the latest proxy when your proxy is blocked by your ISP your organization. Actually, one reader reminded me that I should also include social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get the latest web proxy. This is absolutely true: the new social media can play an important role in disseminating such useful info. Some web proxy lists also have a Facebook fan page. But these fan pages usually are not very active. This is probably due to the fact that the auto-posting to Facebook walls is not… Read More