Archive for 'December, 2002'

AlterSlash ~ the unofficial SlashDot digest.

It’s a much better read than Slashdot itself. All the stories along with 5 of the highest scoring comments.

Your Windows clipboard can expose sensitive information from your PC.

If you use your Windows clipboard alot then who knows what websites have collected from you.

The biggest threat is if you copy your internet banking security code or password to your clipboard, then go surfing. You may even copy your Credit Card number when buying online, so it is easier to fill in the details, you may then go to a site that harvests your clipboard information.

If you do the above, dont, as there is an exploit out that can gather that information from your PC. There are a number of malicious websites just waiting for you.

I have provided an example that you can see for yourself how this works, the example does NOT harvest the information, it just displays it as an example of what malicious websites can do.

Copy some text then click on the link below for an example:

Clipboard Exploit

I never thought I’d be linking to Alternet – always saw them as a little extreme. But then I came across this article written by a 92 yr old Granny – Doris Haddock.

Doris walked across the U.S. in 1999-2000 for campaign finance reform. She made this speech to Citizens for Participation in Political Action in Boston, on Sept. 27, 2002.

…Some of you may be old enough to remember the Reagan Administration. Mr. Reagan and those around him believed in a very new kind of American hero. This new hero was a business hero ? not the fellow who built up a family furniture store on Main Street and supported the Little League and the Scouts; this new hero was not the woman who worked late hours to create a successful travel agency, nor was this new business hero anything like any of the hard-working Americans who built-up our middle class, advanced our standard of living and gave us the resources and leisure for the proper civic life of a democracy, with its leagues and Rotaries and Lions and Elks and VFWs and party conventions and all that glory.

No, the Reagan business hero was the corporate takeover artist.

Any regulations that might get in the way of these ruthless new capitalists were removed ? removed so that reptiles of uncommon greed and brutality might rule the earth, which they now nearly do.

What soon happened was that ALL corporations of medium size or larger had to look over their shoulders. How did a corporation protect itself in this environment from a hostile takeover? It had to close down any factories that were not earning obscene profits. Never mind that a factory had served a town well for a century, or that it provided a healthy and regular profit for its stockholders. If it seemed to be underperfoming by the new hypergreed standards, or if it could be closed in favor of opening a foreign plant that provided a slightly higher rate of return, then, in this new atmosphere, the company was derelict in its duty to its stockholders if it did not ruthlessly act….

Go read the article: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14506