I’m pretty paranoid about privacyâ€â€I don’t like to use the discount keycards thingies that some grocery stores offer because I don’t want them to be able to track my purchases that easily. This is apparently a feature of my INTJ personality type.
The latest version of Google Desktop has a feature called “Search Across Computers” that stores copies of all your files on Google’s servers. You can read eWeek’s coverage or the original announcement from the EFF (incendiarily titled “Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation”).
My paranoia instills in me a real love for the EFF. They’re suing AT&T for the corporation’s alleged complicity in the domestic spying brouhaha. To advertise the case, they’ve morphed the telecom giant’s “spinning earth” logo into the Deathstar. Love it!
I just read this article about Yahoo and Sendmail teaming up to verify the identity of e-mail senders. This is a big issue for spammers, who often forge their indentities. Incidentally, that’s how e-mail borne viruses spread, too. If you get a message from Joe containing a virus, it most likely was not sent by Joe. Viruses these days spoof the sender’s address, the same way spammers do. Spammers just fake it. But in the case of a virus (and continuing the previous example), it came from from a third person who’s address book had both you and Joe in it. With new measures in place to verify a sender’s identity (which will drastically reduce, but not completely eliminate spam — it will make things a lot easier for filters, too), viruses will no longer be able to spoof the sender’s indentity. While that won’t completely stop viruses (they can just use the real sender’s information), it will make it much easier to track down infected computers, and perhaps even trace viruses back to the original author.
