Darkavich's Daily Ramblings Ramblings of a Mad Sys-Admin

Ok, this scares the crap out of me.

There is a company that is gathering GPS coordinates of all the WiFi devices out there. They have integrated this positioning lookup service into the iPhone and iPod-Touch. It is capable of determining your location by scanning for WiFi SSID’s and signal strengths. It is able to send this data to a lookup service that then returns a relatively accurate location of your device.

The company is Sky Hook Wireless and the technology is scary accurate. They have the following posted policy:

“Skyhook Wireless respects the privacy of your location. Skyhook does not collect personally identifying information, track your location, or share your location without your consent.”

This is a fine and good, but I can envision a malicious web site that you connect to with your browser, polls your wifi information and locates your position. This can be used for both positive and negative uses. I can imagine the pop-ups on the browser telling me that my favorite restaurant is close or worse that bounty hunter that is after me for jumping bail is notified where I am… 😉 But seriously, this has some amazing possibilities but can easily be mutated into something very Big-Brother.

So I am listening to Security Now podcast and they talked about the fact that Firefox stores your passwords in the clear inside the browser and anyone that walks up to your computer can view them.

All they have to do on a mac (windows is the same) is: Preferences-> Security -> Show Passwords -> Show Passwords

BAM!!! There are all your passwords. You can check “Use a Master Password” to protect yourself.

Now on to Internet Explorer, it appears there is no way to protect the passwords and simple tools like: IE Passview make it simple for anyone to display your passwords.

I don’t know if Safari or Opera has this same problem, but it just goes to show you don’t store anything in your browser…

Well after the latest round of companies switching over to Blu-Ray, Toshiba has announced it’s killing HD-DVD as a movie format. You can read the Yahoo article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080217/tc_nm/toshiba_hd_dvd_dc_3

My phone froze after trying to call someone. Very unhappy about that….

I found this article that shows how to really reset it if the normal reset doesn’t work:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305720