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Has anyone noticed this?

By RknRlKid ·
Am I the only one to catch these things? Its like a bizarre trend.

From CNN.com:

CNN Money: Survey: Cyber-crime on the rise
CNN Money: Google to offer Web-based hard drive

In an article about Windows Live search engine on CNN.com:

"An ability for users to save their search parameters as macros that can be run to perform the same search in the future. Microsoft said people will also be able to publish their search macros so people with similar interests can use them."

Ok, I'm not the real expert on these things, but from my observations:

a) Cyber-crime is directly related to the web, because of how porous it is. There is NO true security on the internet, as far as I ever have been able to find. So, putting your data on a web-based hard drive is equivalent to removing any/all security functions.

b) Macros are part of what started part of the whole virus/worm/trojan problem in Windows. Macro viruses were the plague of Office. Now, we are expected to use macros in our internet searches (which in a, above, is already shown to be insecure). An insecure and prone to malicious use medium which uses insecure and prone to malicious use coding!

I really wonder if anyone in the big boy corporations of the computer industry is reading the news. Granted, correlation does not equal causation. But an alarm should be going off in someone's head.

And yes, I would love for you to prove me wrong!

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I wonder

by TonytheTiger In reply to Has anyone noticed this?

"I really wonder if anyone in the big boy corporations of the computer industry is reading the news."

Of course they have. It's a business' dream... get you dependent on their product then make more money on 'protecting' it.

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It's nothing new

by Ivy Clark In reply to I wonder

We all get garbage mailers and sales calls from companies we have no dealings with, and we know they've acquired our data from a database somewhere, which could belong to a bank, shopping centre or insurance company. But nobody's doing anything about it... and what can we do?

Having data on an internet-based database run the same risks for the people who are part of the data... privacy issues remain, but for the big boys, it can only mean one thing - more revenue generating business opportunities.

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No security by design - Macros are tools

by Deadly Ernest In reply to Has anyone noticed this?

A few points.

1. The Internet has no security by design as they were designing a non-secure system that would operate und almost any conditions in a worst case warfare scenario. They wanted a system to continue working AFTER the secure systems were totally trashed.

2. Macros are tools, just littl bits of code that do several things for you - like the old DOS batch files. The reason we had so many security problems with Macros etcf is that MS software is so badly written that it will let you run Macros and executable files in their software without having to specifically tell them to.

3. Much of what a computer does is done by Macros or similar such code scripts but called by different names. Daemons, dlls, run files. All just little bits of code with several instructions, set out to save time.

4. Cyber crime comes about because people want to do secure activities via the general Internet. Only one known way to conduct secure Internet activities and that is via a VPN. set up a VPN for the duration of the transaction and you are secure. Of course this does not cover the case of an nasty software on the computer at either end recording how you set up the VPN. Few business systems will do this for general clients as it is very costly to set up and operate properly.

MS now has a product that they are licencing to give you a one point anti-virus, spam, adware, spyware protection. Nice rip off - most of this stuff works because of their poor programming leaving huge gapping holes that allow them to work. So they make problems then charge you to secure them. Who said the Mafia protection rackets were dead - they just went cyber able via MS.

Mind you most of this stuff don't work in Linux - very interesting.

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