Tech Wreck News

Posted by Pamela S. on Friday, August 3rd, 2012

There is always news in the tech world, because every moment there is a security breach or a new innovation. Time seems to go so much faster in cyberspace. It is almost like driving a car at 100 miles per hour. If you have to stop, it is going to take longer, and chances are there will be a crash – a tech wreck.

One of the problems with cyberspace is that no one seems to agree on how to regulate it. The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 was before the Senate and failed to get enough votes this past Thursday. The Democrats attempted to force the bill through using a process know as cloture. You need 60 “ayes” to pass, and the vote was 52-42.

President Obama was all for the bill, but he is going up against a number of Internet privacy groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is against it, based on amendments which could remove privacy protections.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and a group called Fight for the Future are campaigning hard against the bill.

This ad is from the Fight for the Future campaign “ Do You have a Secret?” The group claims that the Cybersecurity Act will allow the National Security Agency to spy on U.S. citizen’s online activities.

These groups are banking on reaching the same seven million people who signed Google’s petition against SOPA.

I’m sure that many of people who are against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Cybersecurity Act are among the 955 million people who have a Facebook page. If you have more than one Facebook page, a profile page for your pet, or a fake Facebook page, it may soon be gone.

Facebook claims that there are 83.09 million fake accounts on Facebook, and they aim to take them down. Many of these pages, approximately 14.3 million, are undesirable accounts used for spamming.

So I guess this is a good thing, unless you use Facebook for investigations and a fake profile  helps you obtain information. There are still many ways to trick Facebook and if your fake Facebook page appears authentic, you should be able to get by.

The other problem with Internet accounts, as we all know, is the vulnerability to hackers. I wrote about my experience with the Yahoo! hack a while ago. Now, Dropbox has been hacked. Dropbox is a file hosting service that offers “cloud storage, file synchronization, and client software.” I have used Dropbox; it’s terrific, but I never used it for sensitive documents.

Dropbox has handled their security breach in a much better manner than Yahoo!. Luckily, usernames and passwords weren’t published online by the hackers, as they were in the Yahoo! case. Dropbox is notifying users by email and asking people to change their password. As in all of these situations, if you use the same password for more than one account, you need to change them all.

Dropbox is initiating new security measures to avoid this kind of breach. Users will be required to provide two identifying steps when signing in. Once again, it shows that being proactive with passwords is the way to go. Make them difficult to crack, change them often and don’t use the same password for different accounts.

We depend on the Internet for so much more than social networking. We do our financial transactions and our business online. We interact with companies on a global scale, and we need to feel safe. You may not be able to control hackers and security breaches, but your online safety is partly in your hands. Put those hands on the keyboard and come up with some new passwords.

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