AJZ - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Nothing new (Score 2) 374

by AJZ on Monday September 05, 2011 @11:02AM (#37308426) Attached to: Google's Real Name Policy, Why You Are the Product

Ditto to what Trepidity and Seumas said. But I have questions. The article has a quote: "If you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product being sold." So: I just installed OpenBSD on some hardware I had lying around. You see where this is going.

I didn't buy the CD set (yet). It's about an 80% chance that I will now, and 99% if I turn the box into a packet filter as planned.

Questions:
(1) In what way am I the product being sold (by OpenBSD)?
(2) If I'm not "the product", then how can I tell? I'm dissatisfied with any answer that says it's obvious on its face: "I just know in my gut that Google has the capacity for evil, yet OpenBSD is good."
(3) If I am "the product", then by what mechanism am I suddenly relieved of that status when I buy the CD sets?

I'm not trying to argue that OpenBSD is good therefore Google is good, nor that Google is bad therefore OpenBSD is bad. I genuinely can't reconcile my experience with the quote, so I think the quote is an overgeneralization. Both Google and OpenBSD may or may not be selling me as a product, the fact that they're free tells me very little, and I have to research them myself.

Twitter Hit By BZPharma LOL Phishing Attack 81

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 21, 2010 @03:22PM from the 140-character-judgment dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Twitter users are being warned not to click on messages saying "'ol, this is funny,' as they can lead to their account details being stolen. A widespread attack has hit Twitter this weekend, tricking users into logging into a fake Twitter page — and thus handing their account details over to hackers. Messages include Lol. this is me?? / lol , this is funny. / ha ha, u look funny on here / Lol. this you?? followed by a link in the form of http://example/ [dot] com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma [dot] net/login, where 'example.com' can vary. Clicking on the link redirects users to the second-half of the link, where the fake login page is hosted. In a video and blog entry, computer security firm Sophos is warning users that it is not just Twitter direct messages (DMs) that carry the poisoned links, but they are appearing on public profiles due to services such as GroupTweet which republish direct messages. Sophos also reports that the site being used for the Twitter phishing has also been constructed to steal information from users of the Bebo social network. Affected users are advised to change their passwords immediately."

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