Category: Security
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Why I Don’t Use Windows
Microsoft assumes ownership of the components in your computer. Microsoft does not have qualms about erasing any other operating system you have installed on another drive partition and all the data with it.1 Want to encrypt your hard drive? Microsoft owns the decryption keys.2 Windows is an ad delivery platform and it is virtually impossible…
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The Evolution of Email Headers
Early email messages contained a few simple header fields that recorded the sender, the recipient, and the path the message took through one or more intermediate email servers. Occasional spam was not yet a big deal. Here are all the email headers from a spam message I received in 2004: Received: from 137-34-50.adsl.terra.cl (200.50.34.137) by…
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Security Risk in Microsoft Word normal.dotm
In Microsoft Word, by default, recently defined paragraph and character styles are automatically added to your normal.dotm file and then silently copied into new documents that you create. This can leak private information about what you have been doing or who you have been corresponding with. Here’s an example of the privacy and security issue.…