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Ask any IT professional about security and you can almost always prepare yourself for a story or three about people using strongly encrypted passwords such as ‘password’ or ‘admin’. Or if it is a particularly good day, helping people understand that encrypted functions exist… Here is story from CBC.ca about how fallible people actually are when it comes to all this new fangled technology.
“Insecam.com, a new website, is broadcasting online private security camera footage from thousands of spots across Canada — all without the knowledge of the people who own and operate the cameras.
Insecam.com has feeds from internet protocol cameras (or IP cameras) all over the world.
“This is one of a series of websites that have been around for a while that basically go through and troll the internet for open ports,” said Tod Maffin, a tech columnist based in Vancouver. “Until fairly recently that information was just kind of held for people’s own curiosity, but now, as we’re seeing, this site and other ones as well are posting their findings.”
It is fairly amazing, you can spy on people across the world. Most are fairly uninteresting; parking garages and the like, but a couple are in residential areas and stuff. Crazy.
“Many of these cameras come with default passwords to access the footage on a website while you’re away — and often people fail to change them.
That’s where Insecam comes in. The site accesses the feeds using default passwords and broadcasts them.
CBC News watched several feeds from various locations in Winnipeg on Friday, including a car insurance sales office, a candy store, a tattoo parlour and others aimed at people’s front doors, backyards and properties.”
A word to the wise when it comes to technology. RTFM. (Read the Flippn’ Manual) Oh, and use a difficult to guess password.
Sparsely populated, cold for half the year and a relatively well off population makes Canada a lively hub of Internet activity.
“Canadians spend more time online than users in any of the countries tracked by measurement company comScore, which also said Canada had the highest penetration of internet access. About 68 per cent of the Canadian population is online, comScore estimated in April, compared to 62 per cent in France and the United Kingdom, 60 per cent in Germany, 59 per cent in the United States, 57 per cent in Japan, and 36 per cent in Italy.
Canada was the only country in which users logged an average of more than 2,500 minutes online a month, which is almost 42 hours. Israel was second with an average of around 2,300 minutes, while a few other countries were around the 2,000-minute mark.”
Most Internet couch potatoes! Hurrah notoriety! And we like watching youtube videos with reckless abandon!
“In Canada, YouTube per capita consumption of video is No. 1 in the world. It’s just absolutely crazy in terms of how passionate Canadians are about YouTube,” said Chris O’Neill, Canada’s country director for Google. It’s estimated that about 21 million Canadians visit YouTube each month, compared to 147 million Americans. But considering the U.S. has 10 times Canada’s population, Canadians are way ahead on a per capita basis.”
There is some heartening news though, apparently we reference Wikipedia more than anyone else in the world. Hopefully as a starting, not an endpoint, to data gathering.
“The average Canadian web surfer reads 16 Wikipedia pages a month, which is the most in the world — one more than German users, two more than Polish users and four more than Americans. Canadian users generate about 217,000 edits a month, which ranks 8th among the most productive countries.”
We should really keep this story quiet, as with the “economic recovery”, I’m sure Steven Harper will try to take credit for it.
Theoretical Physics is always just so darn useful according to the CBC:
“A geometric “atlas” of the internet has been created in an effort to preserve it in the coming decades.
U.S., Spanish and Cypriot researchers say they have discovered what they call a negatively curved space hidden beneath the surface of the internet known as a “latent, hyperbolic” geometry.
This discovery has enabled them to create a new way of mapping the internet, a process they believe will help it to operate in the future.
“We compare routing in the internet today to using a hypothetical road atlas, which is really just a long encoded list of road intersections and connections that would require drivers to pore through each line to plot a course to their destination …,” Dmitri Krioukov, principal investigator of the project, said in a release.
I’m a little fuzzy on ‘negative parabolic space’ but the abstract from the journal is actually quite helpful.
“The Internet infrastructure is severely stressed. Rapidly growing overheads associated with the primary function of the Internet—routing information packets between any two computers in the world—cause concerns among Internet experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade. In this paper, we present a method to map the Internet to a hyperbolic space.”
So, if the intertoobz fail, we’ll at least know why.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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