I’ll post this here, since HaD might not ever “approve” it.
Be advised: HaD is selling your personal information to their advertising customers, such as hologram.io.
I visited this article, then went to hologram.io to look at the offering. I typed nothing in the web page, just scrolled around a bit and closed the tab.
Guess what arrives in my inbox a bit later:
Hi there,
One of the biggest challenges with IoT development is that cellular connectivity is much more of a barrier than it should > be. Hologram is working on changing that with our latest product, the Nova – available starting today in limited supply.
Looks like UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) to me! I wonder how they got my email address.
Guess what I won’t be buying one of?
So that’s what “Address never made public” means, eh? So much for me trusting you, Brian.
(I don’t sign in with WordPress, Twitter, or Facebook. Privacy Badger didn’t stop it, either.)
I was viewing the story about hologram.io and IoT over cellular. Beware.
If you browse the web, you information IS being sold and use regardless of whether you give permision or what ‘blocks’ you implement. The very idea of ‘big data’ is that you can extract VAST amounts of information about users (even anonymous ones) if you collate enough information.
This is one of the reasons I find the idea that name, address, and email are in some way ‘private’ information.
If you want to see the web trackers that follow you around when you browse, Download the plug-in Disconnect on chrome. It is a pretty cool tool and even allows blocking of these trackers. I never realized how crazy this is till I had the plug-in. Pop through a couple big websites and there will quickly be 20+ trackers following your traffic from sites you have never visited or heard of as well as the big guys like youtube, ect.
Only certain types of trackers, essentially active ones. Passive ones based upon your ip address are not blockable. There are several other types that aren’t blockable either. In large part the ‘blocking’ relies upon either the tracker claiming they will behave according to your wished or upon detecting behavior you specifically object to (such as posting targeted ads on pages your viewing). Both of these are pretty easy to by pass.
By the way, it is the fact that companies can collect vast amounts of data about you that has created all of those ‘free’ web pages. In essence your not the customer of these pages, your the product that they sell.
A TOR browser is your best best, but in order to work you have to use it for everything and can NEVER provide your real information to any site. Which effectively makes the Internet far less useful to most people.
Sorry don’t mean to be a prat. Just ABP and Badger still leak. For software solutions, Peerblock, Privoxy, Pi-Hole, and NoScript are about the only ways to protect oneself along with a private vpn. Sure when setup there will be a lot of training the software to suit what you allow but that’s why you want it.
TOR browser/TOR itself isn’t that good either since most sites can detect which exit nodes you’re coming from, actively break its usage, and for privacy well frack that. The alphabet soup of spies and lawyers already sniffed and correlated to your device’s MAC/IP and ISP the moment you used it.
Passive tracking can be defeated by running a private VPN that’s obfusicated and accessable after a portknock in some VPS service like OVH. Sure your MAC is still captured when your device gets an IP Address on the network (via wifi or cable) but even that can be rotated and pseudo-randomized via software.
For real secure browsing, just don’t bother with all the addons and extra stuff. Just randomize your mac and create ssh tunnel/socks proxy with a shell account at sdf.org and a few others. Then use links browser locally pointed to your temporary ssh socks proxy.
You should come out to the Midnight Hacker CTF. While the CTF would be mainly for the fun of it it would be great to have individual join up and share their experiences and knowledge.