To help streamline the security process and better protect laptops, starting August 16 the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will allow passengers to leave their laptop computers in bags that meet new standards.

For a bag to be considered checkpoint friendly it should meet the following standards:

* A designated laptop-only section
* The laptop-only section completely unfolds to lay flat on the X-ray belt
* No metal snaps, zippers or buckles inside, underneath or on top of the laptop-only section
* No pockets on the inside or outside of the laptop-only section
* Nothing packed in the laptop-only section other than the computer itself.

TSA will only allow laptops to stay in bags through screening if they provide a clear and unobstructed X-ray image of the laptop.

Are there some websites that you are unable to open in a browser from your computer?

One possible reason is that those particular websites are listed in your Windows hosts file. A spyware program such as Spybot Search & Destroy inserts a list of entries that might include those unreachable websites. A recent peak at my Windows hosts file revealed close to 8,000 listings inserted by Spybot! Those websites listed were all mapped to the incorrect IP address 127.0.0.1.

Type the following command in the Run Window to view your hosts file:
cmd /k notepad c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Microsoft’s free online library of articles, how-tos and includes:

* Dealing with “” or “”
* Help safeguard your personal information online
* Home office security checklist
* : Is your trusted Web site a clever fake?
* What to do if you’re a victim of credit card fraud
* Protect your privacy with online payment services
* How to limit your personal data in online directories
* 5 safety tips for using a public computer
* Using Office security features
* Use public wireless networks more safely
* Retire that computer more safely

What is III 2006?

Several hundred people from a variety of fields — academic, nonprofit, corporate, military and more — are gathering for the week to experiment with how we can do a better job responding to disasters (natural or human-caused). Our goal is to find ways to communicate efficiently and get services to the people who need them. San Diego is the test-bed for this week’s scenario.

If possible, we need a bottom-up news flow that will be useful both to the responders and the people in the community. And it would be incredibly cool if we could get bloggers in San Diego to join this experiment in the following way:

1. Once or twice a day starting Monday morning, do a posting — with or without photos — from your neighborhood on something happening there. Obviously there’s no disaster going on, and we don’t want people to make things up. So they should post something that is a real occurrence or scene.

2. Tag each post with this Technorati tag: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/” rel=”tag”>strongangel3<a>
(stands for Strong Angel III 2006)

3. Make the posting title the street address closest to where this is happening.

We are going to try to pull the results into a map that gets automatically updated and annotated during the week with neighborhood-level information.

Here’s a site with a more detailed description:

http://www.strongangel3.net

ToorCon is just around the corner again this year. In its 8th running year, it is still San Diego’s exclusive convention, bringing together Southern California’s year after year to attend the high quality presentations and participate in the annual festivities.

This year we are still aiming to provide the same highly technical lectures you’ve come to know and love, but also set the theme as “Bits & Bites” which will highlight the low level skills of the trade and focus on , , , , and other nifty bit-twiddling and byte munging techniques.

Once again, we will be offering an intensive full-day Deep Knowledge Seminar on Friday the 29th that we are also accepting submissions for.

This year’s event will be held at the San Diego Convention Center. The reception and conference will take place on September 29th-October 1st in meeting rooms 24-26 at the San Diego Convention Center’s (front) upper level.

Decide for yourself whether or not you agree with the philosophy regarding internet age restrictions from PeaceFire and using circumventor to get around Web-blocking software (filtering programs designed to reject Web sites not suited for children.) If you are a parent, you should be aware that these instructions exist.

Will Self Destruct, a free one-time secure web messaging service, allows you to create a one-time secure web page for a recipient.

You can create a secure anonymous email message to a friend or colleague by entering their e-mail address and the message, i.e. sending a password or other sensitive information that you don’t want other people to see.

The recipient will receive an e-mail with a link to a one-time secure web page which they will be able to view once and only once. Once the url has been accessed the message is deleted.

From the Will Self Destruct FAQ:

Q: Okay, so what do I use this for?
A: To be honest with you, were not precisely sure. Here are some ideas:

Sending out passwords? it’s much better than your password sitting in someone elses mailbox for eternity, or
Report fraud to your boss or institution, or
Inform authorities about illegal activities, or
Tell employees to stop using the internet for private use, or simply…
Tell someone you love them (why not?)

Asterisk Logger is a handy tool to have when you need to reveal a password behind the asterisks to recover an ftp login. Other password recovery tools might be of some use.

Previously I posted about the community discussion held at USD about safe Web surfing.

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

Last night I attended Surfing the Internet: Who’s Watching? Who’s Censoring?, a PBS These Days community discussion hosted by Tom Fudge at the Joan Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. The presentation was recorded and will be heard tomorrow on KPBS and will be made available as a podcast, as well.

Panelists included:
David Brin, science fiction writer and author of The Transparent Society
Lance Cottrell, Founder and CEO, Anonymizer
Pam Dixon, Executive Director, World Privacy Forum
Lawrence Hinman, Director, Values Institute, University of San Diego

USD is a beautiful campus with a first class venue at the Institute for Peace and Justice. The following is some of what I heard with a little elaboration of some of the more interesting points that were made.

David Brin jokingly talked about how David Copperfield and David Bowie had knocked him off of page one of Google (when searching for “David”) and relegated him to the second page (he’s at the 20th spot today). He stated that American’s “get” the wild west Internet culture, but some other cultures don’t like it. The Internet is changing and becoming more controlled by government. He offered insight regarding the fact that the real problem is government increasing its secrecy and not the blinding of the government by restricting its use of technological tools to gather information. That statement drew some scattered applause from the audience. Mr. Brin said that databases are an expansion of human memory and cameras are expansion of human vision. He went on to describe the futuristic concept of “penny camera stickers”, where children paste stickers that are embedded with miniature cameras on walls. The stickers would have 1-year batteries and their own Internet address.

On the subject of the passing of 20th century anonymity, Mr. Brin said that in the 21st century, we are becoming more of a global village, where when you are walking into a shop in Bangkok, facial recognition software will let the locals know who you are. Finally he mentioned a project he is consulting on, where bank branches will offer biometric centers to prove you are who you say you are for password verification.

Lance Cottrell mentioned the recent lawsuit against Google’s methods for ranking Web sites, by a company that dropped in Google rankings. (The complaint alleges Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior and misled the public by positioning its search engine as an objective source for finding Internet content.) He went on to describe how the Web is more dynamic than some people are aware of. Web sites will alter pricing or even which products are displayed depending on who you are or where you are or where you came from. For example, if a customer came from a product pricing comparison site, it shows the customer is price sensitive and the prices could be adjusted downward accordingly.

Mr. Cottrel related how Anonymizer was started in 1995 for consumers but now the government uses his company to go after terrorists and cyber crime. Terrorist sites have become more sophisticated by having different versions of their sites displayed depending on where you come from. The CIA in Virginia may not see the beheadings yet visitors from the Middle East will see the entire barbaric act.

He talked about Yahoo’s decision to locate infrastructure in China as a mistake. He referred to Yahoo! complying with the Chinese Secret Police without argument by turning in dissident, Shi Tau, a reporter with The Contemporary Business News in Hunan, who is now serving 10 years in jail. You can’t reach Anonymizer directly in China, so users there need to know what the current pseudonym is in order to get to it. Anonymizer tries to show the Chinese government erroneous URLs in order to fake them out. Anonymizer has a “freedom spam list” which users are unable to opt out of, which the company uses to help ferret out the government officials who are moles.

Anonymizer avoids having to give information via subpoenas by not maintaining any log information at all.

Pam Dixon was asked to define googlebombs. She said that a combination of market data with search information could be considered a form of harmful censorship. She mentioned RFID networks as another privacy concern.

Lawrence Hinman wrote a recent op-ed piece, Why Google matters. During the discussion he mentioned that the Patriot Act allows the government to ask a professor about students and makes it a federal crime if that professor tells the students that the feds were asking about them.

Project IP lists just about everything a webserver can find out about your computer. Your clipboard contents may be vulnerable.

Only works in Internet Explorer on the Windows platform. It reportedly works with varied success when IE is running in an emulator such as VMWare on another OS. If you have to use Windows, at least dump IE and use Firefox.

Rogue, evil websites can use this to steal potentially sensitive data from your Windows clipboard.

Fix it now!

Go to Tools – Internet Options – Security – Select a security zone – Custom Level – Scripting – Allow paste operations via script and set it to Disabled or Prompt.

Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Computer Safari and other Browsers.

This paper will help you configure your web browser for safer internet surfing. It is written for home computer users, students, small business workers, and any other person who works with limited information technology (IT) support and broadband (cable modem, DSL) or dial-up connectivity. Although the information in this document may be applicable to users with formal IT support as well, organizational IT policies should supersede these recommendations.

Steganos LockNote will change the way you work with confidential notes. Application and document in one: the mechanism to encrypt and decrypt a note is part of it. Secure, simple, independent. No installation required.

Why use Steganos LockNote?

Store your most valuable notes as a LockNote
Hide your serial numbers, passwords, phone numbers and everyday notes in a safe place. Your informations will be encrypted using a password and most modern AES 256bit encryption technology.
Secure, yet simple
Just double-click a LockNote and enter your password to access your text files as usual.
No installation required
Move LockNotes wherever you want, as often as you want. A LockNote document does not require much more hard drive space than an unencrypted document.
Encrypt existing text files in no time at all
Simply drag and drop existing text files on a LockNote window: they will be encrypted automatically.
Open and free LockNote is open source and is based upon open source technologies, e.g. the gcertified CryptoPP program library for strong encryption.

Network Solutions Enhanced Whois Directory is a service that tell you who has registered a particular Web site, using a “Whois” database search.

Some corporations and people mask their Whois records by using agents to register the domain name.

Some of the listings haven’t been updated in years, so they may be incorrect.

It’s also possible to use a proxy service to hide your information; GoDaddy.com offers a private registration in addition to the domain registration fee.