I’ve been in “secret talks” with a friend of mine for the past few months about blogging anonymously. She wants to be a whistle-blower, speaking out about the atrocities and abuse she sees within her industry. But she doesn’t want the consequences of being a “public” whistle-blower.

In other words, she wants to keep her job within that atrocious industry.

I’m so thrilled. I really respect people who want to work from within the industry to change it for the better. But our discussions have been really difficult because I believe you should speak out publicly, not hiding behind a blog. I understand her position, though, and the risk she is taking.
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According to recent reports, US Army soldiers stationed in Iraq are being further restricted as to the sites the can access and they’re allowed online activities.

The reasoning for these restrictions, which see sites such as YouTube, MySpace, PhotoBucket, MTV, Hi5, and Live365 being blocked, is that of security and technological limitations.

Many relatives of servicemen and women, though, see it as a form of censorship, put in place to cover up a war that’s going badly.

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I’m not going to name names, but I heard recently of some WordPress bloggers who had their blog’s “broken into” not because of a vulnerability in the WordPress code, but because their passwords were easily guessed and used.

Is yours?

I vaguely remember a television court drama from a few years ago against a gun safe company, won because a locked gun safe was easily broken into by a child. The combination was very simple like a phone number, 123456 or 654321. For one of these bloggers, their password was their name spelled backwards. The other used the password “wordpress”. Is the password on your blog just as simple?

The most common passwords are:

• Middle names
• Names spelled backwards
• Phone numbers
• The word “password”
• Birthdays
• Single or combination uses of love, god, sex, and money, such as lovemoney or sexgod
• qwerty
• abc123
• password1
• asdf
• car license
• letmein
• yourname1
• default

According to Wikipedia’s explanation of Password Cracking, “Repeated research over some 40 years has demonstrated that around 40% of user-chosen passwords are readily guessable by programs.”

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I love surveys and research that takes an entire section of the Internet and makes some grand, and potentially scaremongering, claim about how dangerous it is.

Research carried out by ScanSafe (yes, conveniently they do make Internet security software) claims that four out of every five blogs contain potentially offensive content, such as pornography or adult language, whilst about one in twenty contain potentially catastrophic computer viruses, spyware, and other harmful software.

However, it transpires that the biggest culprits are YouTube (which I thought was a video sharing site, not a collection of blogs), and MySpace.

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Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report, as reported by Mercury News, warns that identity and data theft has moved away from the fly-by-night model, and has increasingly become professionalized. read more

Jeremy Wagstaff asks over at his Loose Wire blog whether we have overcome our concerns about privacy. With all the ways people can now share information online, and contribute content for public consumption, is privacy still an issue? Or is privacy really an issue at all, in the first place?

If there’s one myth that endures in this age of online participation, blogs, shared photo albums and Web 2.0, it’s that we’ve overcome our concerns about privacy. It sounds on the surface, logical: We must have gotten over this weird paranoia, or else why would we share so much online? Why would we bother about privacy issues when there’s no real evidence that people, companies, governments and the NSA are out to get us?

Jeremy argues that privacy is still an issue, but it’s not really something that we human beings are good at protecting. Technology can be very exciting, especially with how quickly we’ve advanced in the way we communicate and the way we share, store and catalog information. In a way, technology has progressed so fast that we just tend to jump in with using tools that make our lives easier and forget about covering our tracks. read more

Several weeks ago, a phishing attack on popular social networking site MySpace.com managed to harvest thousands of actual usernames and passwords. These users were tricked into entering their account details in a hosted user page that was intentionally designed to appear like a legitimate MySpace login page. Since the page’s URL was within the myspace.com domain, even net–savvy users were caught unaware of the attack.

Are our passwords ever safe? read more