As mentioned before I’m studying at NoMA and recently one of my teachers literally bragged about, that they could see, who accesses which documents on our online ressource for material: fronter.com.

I see this as a violation of my privacy, because I just could have copied documents from another student and it is really nobodies business when I download which document. I refuse to use the service until this catastrophic state is removed. I was not informed about this, when I signed up for the service, which is an abuse of my trust.

Share this entry if you agree.

Whenever I receive emails with multiple recipients I from now on will notice people about this wonderful technique called BCC (Blind Carbon Copy). It’s okay people don’t know it from the start, it’s only been around for what? 10 years? With it, you can send an email to multiple recipients, without they are able to see who else got it. Why that? So everybody can decide themselves if they want to share their email address or not, this principe is called privacy.

If you received a link to this page and you are annoyed, leave a comment, but before: think about if I abused the information I got or if I try to prevent abuse.

Big Brother State is a short movie bei David Scharf. It’s a short summary of todays threats to a free society. It’s giving a quick overview on things like trusted computing, video surveillance and data retention compressed to 4:24min. Have a look.

Links:

• bigbrotherstate.com

This slashdot article, based on a forum post in the skype forums reveals, that Skype obviously reads the “/etc/passwd” file and Firefox’ profiles and Addons. The “/etc/passwd” file saves usernames and passwords in Linux. Firefox profiles contain saved passwords, bookmarks and cookies. The Skype team has not yet commented this behaviour. Once again we see that closed source software is not the most relieable.

So you may ask yourself: What’s wrong with Vista? The site http://badvista.fsf.org will inform you about, why they think Vista and Microsoft are bad. I link this site because I think they give an easy to understand overview on problems of DRM and advantages of open source.