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Read more about the article Online anonymity

Online anonymity

Is it possible to be truly ‘private’ while still having some sort of online presence? How much sharing is too much? What can the ‘bad guys’ find out about a person online?

These are all reasonable questions to ask. I respect that some people make a conscious choice to be ‘anonymous’ online, and aim to separate certain aspects of their personality from their ‘real’ identity. There can be any number of perfectly valid reasons for having such concerns and working to retain a degree of anonymity.

I read some good thinking on this topic from Lou Plummer and from Vixiss on the Viscissitudes blog a while back. As for myself, I don’t really attempt to hide who I am behind different presences online. I’ve had chats with people over the years who seem surprised that a ‘savvy’ technical person would be so seemingly unconcerned about their personally identifiable details being available on the internet. I’ve tried to explain my thinking with varying degrees of success, and this post is another such attempt.

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Getting tough on spam users…

I run a simple little blog here.  I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive.  I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments.  The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else.  Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.

Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed.  Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress.  There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs.  Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.

never_underestimate_stupid

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Thin wedge driven into WPA wireless security protocol: TKIP compromised

A lot of folks these days have at least part of their home network on wireless ethernet, or WiFi. I have two wireless access points in my house, for example, and plan on adding a third. Wireless networking has security considerations: unless your WiFi network is encrypted, someone outside your home can use your bandwidth or, potentially worse, intercept your data. Wireless security was improved significantly a few years ago with the introduction of WPA (WiFi Protected Access) after the previous security method, WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) was “cracked”. Since then, wireless networking has been pretty much secure against any intrusion. Until now…

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