PlexNex

Foil Search-Profiling

I've been using this for a week, and it's great!

Track Me Not is a little Firefox add-on that can foil the search engines' efforts to profile you when they track your search terms. You don't even need to be paranoid to see the benefits of hiding your actual search input in a cloud of noise. The search term being used by Track Me Not at the moment is always visible in the lower right corner of the Firefox frame.

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e.covering one's tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

Terms used by the little bot tend to be pretty innocuous: "Ashlee Simpson", "France", and "city slickers", for example. They are nothing like I would ever use, so a clever analyst might be able to find my searches like a bowling pin in a haystack: "installing Skype in Ubuntu", "killing Microsoft", "Glitter & Doom -- portraiture of the Weimar Republic". But, not wanting to leave it to Google and the others, I feel that my privacy is quite substantially more intact, now.

It's alpha software that comes from Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum of NYU.

Download (37k)

Security File: Talk to Vista

George Ou writes:

Voice command is autoloaded if you calibrate the system and enable Voice commands. You can actually activate voice command mode by saying a certain phrase. If this exploit works, you could say that phrase first and then start your commands. Then you'd say "start", "cmd", "enter", then bark out the commands you want.  This assumes it works and that no one near the PC gets suspicious.

"Vista Speech Command exposes remote exploit" | ZDNet (3 Feb 2007)
"Microsoft confirms Vista Speech Recognition remote execution flaw" | ZDNet (3 Feb 2007)

Dan Geer offers a bounty...

I can see it now; all you need is one 0wned host every few feet and you can bark commands to all the others within earshot. First thing you tell them is to join in the sing-along. It would make a great movie scene -- with maybe Richard Clarke looking over his shoulder down a corridor in the Pentagon and saying "Do you hear that?" as a crescendo of "halt-and-catch-fire" rises in the in the distance...

Here's $500 for the first documented case of someone using the white courtesy phone in an airport to page Mr Shootdown, Reese Sett, Sleep Now, or whatever and blanking all the laptops in a concourse. An extra $500 if it's DC National...

Undoubtedly this would make a great scene in parody of a Robert Ludlum movie with Matt Damon and Denzel Washington running through an airport to catch a Lex-Luther type bad guy who looks a lot like Casino Royale's le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen).