Security

Temporary emails.

If you’ve ever needed to give an email to a website that you don’t trust just to download a file or register on a bulletin board then there are several options. I’ve already covered SpamGourmet which has emails that hides the email and times out after a certain number of emails received at the address, spammotel which provides random email address’s to mask your real address, and I discovered a new one called mailinator where you can pick an address at random and a mailbox is created automatically at the mailinator domain but *anyone* can access the mailbox so treat it as a throwaway, insecure address

Installing a hardware firewall.

I wouldn’t have thought that organising an adsl modem to work in conjunction with a hardware firewall would be that difficult. But I’ve been receiving conflicting advise over what routers/functionality needs to be installed. All I need is an router/modem that is effectively invisible to the firewall so it thinks it is connected to the internet and can get on with its filtering,vpn’s and protection. However I am being ignored by BT, the company we are probably going to buy Broadband from (yet another reason to not use them – if they are this bad when we *want* to spend some money with them I hate to think what they will be like when we have a problem), our existing firewall support won’t help unless we buy one particular make of router and get broadband from one particular supplier, and the firewall company won’t help as they say its the resellers problem – so back to square one…..Almost makes me want to go to dialup modem! The fact that we can’t order broadband until the physical line is installed and live also makes a mockery of the whole broadband ordering process.

Security searches at airports

Wired ran an article about electronic device searches at airports. I’ve had a laptop through baggage before with no questions asked and I don’t think the goons on security would even know what a laptop *should* look like when it boots up and whats to stop someone replacing the removable hard disk/cd etc with something a bit less electronic? (careful choice of words here!) The PC would still boot and it wouldn’t be obvious it had been tampered with. The last couple of lines say that certain types of playing cards are also suspicious as they can have sharp edges….that is really going to please Kristen as she loves her playing cards and its the only thing that keeps her sane now they’ve banned sewing needles as she used to cross stitch on the plane. Having said that, it was the only thing that kept me sane the time we had to wait 5 hours whilst they cancelled the plane when she flew back to the states all those years ago! (Tomorrow is our 4th anniversary!)