Here’s a little nugget of news that will make you pause and consider. In the past few years, a new category of home improvement tools and equipment has exploded. These new products are a lot like digital cameras, but instead of a button that you push to take a photo of something, a lot of these new products can record data. This is great to know, but it’s also scary.
A recent article in the New York Times notes that some of these new products seem to be recording audio. This is great because it can save you a trip to the bathroom and potentially a few minutes of audio. But this is also a problem because you can’t know what data is being recorded until you know how long you’re looking at it and whether or not it’s being recorded in the first place.
Its a good idea to be aware of what data is being recorded before you take it, but this might be one of the most dangerous things you can do because you might unknowingly take an action you don’t intend to.
I find this especially important for the kind of data that is easily copied. If you are always checking the internet for sensitive data, you will be very vulnerable to a breach. What is even worse is if you’re not taking the time to actually check your data. This especially applies to the kind of data that is easily copied. If you’re not taking the time to actually do a full forensic analysis before making decisions, you are putting yourself at risk.
This is the reason I’m glad that I used to check my email every day. I felt like I was being watched. Now, as a sysadmin, I feel like I am just a dumb-ass in the hands of a bad guy. When I think I am doing something bad, I am usually so over it that I am shocked that anyone would actually think that I am doing something wrong.
If you use email to send an email or a text message, you may want to consider using a secure email service like Hush. Unfortunately, you may not be able to read the sender’s email if its sent to a non-standard domain (like a.edu account or something similar) and the recipient has the ability to read messages being sent to a.edu email address. Many people do this so they can send messages to their work email accounts.
Hush tech means that you use an encryption/encryption service to encrypt your email messages (like Hush) and send it to the recipient. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work well if the recipient has the ability to read the message. Many of the services that are using this technology, like Hush, are not secure, so when you send them an email, they can’t decrypt it. This means that if the sender is sending an encrypted email to a.
You couldnt encrypt an email message with Hush unless you paid to use Hush, but they are also not secure.
Hush works by encrypting the email with a secret key that the recipient can only decrypt with the sender’s password. This means that no one can decrypt an encrypted email without the sender’s password, and that the messages sent by Hush are actually encrypted with the sender’s email address. So, you can send an encrypted email and have it not be viewable to anyone who has the Hush service activated.
The service is free but you can have a message that appears to the recipient as if it was not encrypted at all. This feature has been pretty controversial amongst bloggers and in particular some “crypto-curmudgeon” commenters on twitter, so I thought I’d throw it up there for the benefit of all readers. It’s a bit of a problem when the encryptor is not 100% secure. But, it can also be used to protect against the theft of your own email.
