e-gold privacy (or lack thereof)

Like TOR, e-gold is one of those Internet institutions which enjoys an aegis of libertarian-style privacy and freedom surrounding it. In that light, this Wired article is a fascinating read. On the one hand, E-gold is constantly getting harassed by the U.S. government for catering to international criminals, and on the other, e-gold is actively monitoring transactions and building associative guilt graphs (a term I made up just this moment) in order to track the bad guys who actually do use the service to launder and move money. Neat story, and it underlines the major problem with committing Internet crime while living in the U.S. It's pretty hard to get paid without a friend living outside the U.S.

My kids are going to love Psiphon

Amidst pre-release fanfare, Psiphon was released this week. Since I'm kind of in the detection business, products that promise to provide "strong protection against electronic eavesdropping" are pretty interesting to me.

Turns out, Psiphon is a single-click https proxy MSI installer, so pretty much anyone can run it. And that's about it.

It's a nice idea (the installer part), but the best part is that the Flash "how it works" tutorial looks an awful lot like The Boobah Zone, which, if you have preschool kids, you are probably familiar with.

So, hooray for explaining security and privacy concepts in a language that 3 year olds, literally, can understand.

Access keys in Firefox 2.0

Say, turns out that what used to be my favorite function in Monkeyspaw, looking up a DNS registration, is now Shift-Alt-D, rather than merely Alt-D. Firefox 2.0 has assigned all access keys to the Shift-Alt combination to activate, in order to avoid conflicting with other browser keystroke commands. Shift-Alt-D in particular is more useful, since a lot of people apparently use Alt-D to type in the location bar. I don't personally, since Ctrl-L does the same thing, and is more mnemonic with Ctrl-K, the quick search box.

Anyway, this was surprising. You can tell I'm a little behind the curve in my browser upgrades.

Aside from this minor change, Monkeyspaw seems to work just dandy in FF 2.0.

Slow news day: DHS warns of cyber attacks

I'm joining the crowd of security professionals who don't care about the Department of Homeland Security's warnings of attacks on financial web sites. Financial markets don't seem to care, either (at least, according to the yesterday's NYSE and Nasdaq volumes). Not even DHS or US/CERT, both cited in the press as sources of the warnings, bothered to post formal press releases.