I am not a big Hilary fan, but I can get behind this. Senator Clinton urged creation of a “privacy bill of rights” Friday to protect people's personal data.

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Dr. Ann Cavoukian is the Information & Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and Jennifer Stoddart is the Privacy Commissioner of Canda.  Why don't we, the American people, have someone like this protecting our right to privacy? 

What does a Privacy Commissioner do:

Digital Right Management (DRM) issues 

Challenging privacy laws (sucha as Ontario's Adoption Information Disclosure Act)

Issues involving ID Theft

*ID Theft is America's fastest growing crime.

 

The U.S. is Governing Against the People

The people we elect into office are supposed to work for US.  The officials that we have elected are being wreckless with our rights.  There is no representatives to argue on our behalf.  There are a few organization that have stepped up to the plate such as the ACLU and EFF. 

Unchecked laws, such as the USA Patriot Act, allow agencies to have complete free run of over our civil liberties.  Even though there are helpful aspects of the Patriot Act (such as the ability of domestic and internationally focused agencies to communicate with each other), it does have provisions that seemed to slip through the cracks.  Frankly, with the current world wide hate of the United States (brought on by the current administrations foreign policies) some sort of action must be taken to protect U.S. citizens.  But I don't believe this must be done at the expense of freedom.  And if it is, the very thing that we fight for has been successfully removed… if our liberties are taken away, we have already lost all future wars to 'protect our freedom'.

Our country is run with checks and balances.  But there is currently no governing body in the way of special interest group lobbyists and policy makers who do not seem to care about our rights to privacy.  Elected officials seems drunk on greed fueled by the money that they get from lobbyist.   

VOIP Wiretapping

Government Want Search Engine/ISP records

Net Neutrality (Verison and other ISP lobbyiest want to kill the freedom of the Internet) 

Local American Counties Putting Personal Data Online:

http://www.smartmoney.com/consumer/index.cfm?story=20050303

I repeat it over and over on what Ben Franklin said centuries ago about the balance of freedom and security:

“The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.”

Authorities are cracking down on phishing and botnets, but the threats are advancing instead of diminishing, two law enforcement officials said.

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Here are 20 things you can do to make your apache configuration more secure.
Disclaimer: The thing about security is that there are no guarantees or absolutes. These suggestions should make your server a bit tighter, but don't think your server is necessarily secure after following these suggestions.

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I've seen a lot of misinformation about securing wi-fi networks. This article debunks those myths by explaining why mac filtering and ssid hiding is pointless in most cases. Looks like the only effective security is WPA with a strong passphrase.

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Just saw the movie Firewall on DVD.  The old man has still got it.  Harrison Ford as usual, delivers.  The man is amazing.  The consistency to his character, Jack, is impeccable. 

Firewall is about a director of security who gets manipulated into taking money out of the bank where works.  The criminals take Jack's family hostage and threaten to kill him if he doesn't cooperate. 

One thing I thought they did really well was to leave out the usual Hollywood visual effects of hacking.  You'll see them in movies like “Hackers” where hacking on a unix system looks like Tron.  In reality hacking looks very boring especially if you don't know what you are looking at.

It is a decent movie.  Perhaps I'll add it to my hacker/security/tech collection (once I start building it).

I got this message from one of my readers. I had given her advice on how to get her money back from an EZ-1 Scam: