Hear no Evil, See No Evil. Big Brother watches you.
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How do you safely browse the Internet while protecting your identity? Advertisers, hackers, and malicious spyware are constantly trying to track which websites we visit, our browsing habits, and what we do on our computers.
How do we protect ourselves? We have been told to run anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, don’t run scripts, don’t click on links that you don’t trust. I think it would surprise most people no matter what you do it is almost impossible to hide your identity online.
Web browsers try and make you feel safe by private browsing mode. It is a feature that clears all your browsing history, cache, and cookies. These are the most common methods to track online activity.
Unfortunately, these are not the only ways to track uniqueness to a system. System fonts, location, browser ID, OS ID, time zone, ISP, and many other pieces of information that are transmitted when using the Internet. This information can be used to create a matrix that can successfully create a digital fingerprint and identity you.
Panoptic is a project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that takes 17 bits of information and lets you examine if a unique digital fingerprint can be created from your computer. There had been over 430,000 people that had tested their system against the Panotpic website before I tested my system. My web browser returned a unique fingerprint that identified my machine different from all of the other 430,000 machines tested before mine.
Every time we install an application we change our system, every time we add a browser extension we create a change to our computer. The combination of these and other actions creates something unique that can be observed and tracked. This sounds like the beginning to a science fiction movie doesn’t it?
You can try to run the test yourself. The Panotpic project can be found at: http://panopticlick.eff.org/
3 emerging Cisco data center technologies
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2010 is predicated to be the year of cloud computing. We are already starting to see movement towards that direction. Cisco Systems is making some significant investments in data center technologies. This week we will examine some of the most promising data center technologies that are available on most Cisco data center equipment:
Multi-Chassis Port Channeling: There are two major implementations of this technology. VSS (Cisco Virtual Switching System for the Catalyst 6500 and vPC (virtual port channels for the Nexus platform switches).
Virtual Port Channel (provides a mechanism for two physical chassis, connected by a special inter-switch link, to be treated as one bridge instance by the Spanning Tree Protocol. Data flows are directed in such a way to minimize the traffic over the inter switch link. VPC is used as the inter-switch link between Nexus 7000 and Nexus 5000 switches. This will allow all links to be active and carry traffic.
VPC technologies seem to be the future for data center switches. Although in its current state it still uses spanning-tree protocols and technology to prevent loops in the network, many of the spanning tree problems that networks experience are generally shielded from VPC. Furthermore, future versions of VPC may completely be independent of spanning-tree.
VPC Summary:
- Empowers port-channels to be spanned across two upstream switches
- All ports in forwarding state; none in spanning tree blocked mode
- Efficient use of all available bandwidth
Cisco is positioning the Nexus platform that will deliver the next generation of data center technologies. VSS treats the upstream switch as a single network entity, while VPC maintains two separate control planes, from the two devices. Therefore, these two technologies have their respective place in the overall architecture and shouldn’t be compared side by side as a way “to eliminate spanning tree.”
The downside of VPC is that it only currently works with the Cisco Nexus 5K and 7K platforms. Although the Nexus platform provides high density, high speed connectivity for data networks, it is still a relatively new platform that has not been proven yet.
Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS): If Cisco’s Call Manager was a PBX solution in a box, Cisco UCS is surely a data center solution in a box. UCS is a blade server that is designed for virtualized environments. However, it is much more than a blade server. Cisco has implemented a unique management interface than can help streamline management of data centers. In addition, built in Nexus data center switching technology makes this one of the most promising offerings Cisco has in its data center portfolio.
Cisco QTV: Data centers process information. However, they are not islands. Data centers often share and exchange information from their location to other locations via high speed WAN links. Traditionally data is transferred from one data center to another data center occurring over layer-3 boundaries. Many network engineers will find a need where they require layer-2 adjacencies over existing layer-3 connections. QTV is an upcoming, unreleased technology that promises to link layer-2 domains over any layer-3 transport.
Google’s Streetview billboard advertising controversy
By · CommentsGoogle announced they would replace billboards and other advertisements in Google Street View with new, paid advertisements from clients. In other words, a Google Street View image of a billboard may have the advertisement that was on the billboard at the time the picture was taken, but can be replaced with a new advertisement.
Google is a multi-billion dollar corporation. It has some great technologies and applications. Google Android is a solid smartphone operating system, Gmail is a great email product, and Google Docs has some good uses. It is almost easy to forget, that almost everything Google does, the hundreds of millions of dollars they invest, all the technology they develop, is primarily geared towards increasing advertising revenue.
Google Maps is a popular web application used by hundreds of thousands of people each day to get directions, maps, look up information about a local restaurant, read reviews, and many other things. Over the last four years Google has been collecting pictures from the street level to show more detailed maps and images. A national progression would be for Google to allow advertisers to buy cyber real estate and advertise in front of the many Google users.
I think Google is about to open a big can of worms. What happens if Microsoft owns a billboard near its building, and Apple buys advertisement space near, or even on that billboard in Street View? Surely, one does not want his competitors to be able to promote their products in cyberspace at the same location that he or she has paid for in the real world.
Consider the fact that the ad may no longer be running in real life or might not be relevant. Google Street view images are pictures taken in a certain moment in time. A billboard may have had movie posters for Spiderman when the image was taken. Is there anything wrong with updating the image to a newer movie if someone wants to pay for it? Many of my friends felt Street View gives them a sense of nostalgia because they can see how a place looked when they remembered it. However, when questioned further, many of them did not really seem to mind.
Google and many other corporations are going to be looking for ways to increase revenue and reach larger audiences. Google and other corporations who are looking at similar types of marketing strategies do not need to question their ethical or moral behavior in this situation, but rather their legal behavior. I would not want someone to prohibit how I used my pictures and photographs. I am certainly allowed to publish and modify images I have personally taken, and even share them with friends and family. We even buy edited photographs of major landmarks by artists who have captured an image, but have turned it into art. Why shouldn’t Google and anyone else be allowed the same rights as photographic artists? After all, if we really were not interested in what Google is offering, no one is offering us to buy their products and use their services.
