Personal information is worth a lot, especially to criminals. Over the last couple of years i have wondered if my personal information is really secure online, so many major website have been hacked, with users personal information uploaded online for all to see. To me it appears like large corporations and major websites you would expect to take the security of peoples personal information seriously, actually couldn’t care less about it, so it appears to me. Take Sony for example, last year the Sony PlayStation Network and Sony Qriocity on-demand entertainment services were hacked, in what was possibly the largest data breach ever. Intruders had accessed personal data of up to 77 million users, whose real names, email addresses, passwords, home addresses and telephone numbers had all been stored in unencrypted text. Hackers had even posted up Sony-associated credit-card numbers, despite Sony calming credit card details were encrypted. Now that is one massive amount of personal information out there in the wild. 77 million users personal information, stored in plain text. Great to know little effort was put in to securing users data on such a large scare. That makes me think how many other places my personal data is stored insecurely, and how many times my personal data has been stolen in hacks that have never been disclosed. Another example is LulzSec who hacked into…
For .eu domains whois opt-out is easy, when you know how. You are not however allowed to use services such as namecheaps “whois guard” which essentially hides the whois information when someone runs a “whois” query on your domain. A whois query will return the personal information of the person who owns the domain, including there name, address, telephone number and email address. Example of a whois query on Google.eu: As can be seen the registrants details can easily be seen. For .com, .net, .me domains its easy to use a service, usually offered by the domain registrar to hide these details, however for .eu domains this is not allowed. .eu domain owners are however allowed to opt-out of there personal details been shown, and you will not even have to pay anything extra like you would with a .com domain. Basically when a .eu domain is registered, no matter who the domain registrar is the corresponding European Registry for Internet Domains (Eurid) account is created automatically. Eurid handles all registrations and disputes of .eu domains. This account will allow you to opt-out or select personal information shown on “whois” searches, In order to get access to this account you can…
For .uk based domains whois opt-out is easy, when you know how. You are not however allowed to use services such as namecheaps “whois guard” which essentially hides the whois information when someone runs a “whois” query on your domain. A whois query will return the personal information of the person who owns the domain, including there name, address, telephone number and email address. Example of a whois query on Google.co.uk: As can be seen the registrants details can easily be seen. For .com, .net, .me domains its easy to use a service, usually offered by the domain registrar to hide these details, however for .UK domains this is not allowed. There is a work around however, and you will not even have to pay anything extra like you would with a .com domain. If the domain is just been used for personal use e.g. a blog or a general website then you can whois opt-out to stop your personal information been show on whois query’s. Basically when a .UK domain is registered, no matter who the domain registrar is the corresponding Nominet Online Service account is created automatically. Nominet is the .uk domain name registry in the United Kingdom…
The ability to stop spam is a problem, as a forum myself and a friend run has grown and become more popular over the years, so has the problem of spam to the point where it gets out of control. However an effective method does exist for vBulletin powered forums, best of all its a free plugin. We had already taken several steps to stop spam, including: When a user signs up there name, email and ip address are checked with the database on http://www.stopforumspam.com, if any of the details are in that database the users registration on the forum is denied. During the registration process the user is also required to enter a reCaptcha and answer a question such as “what would you put in a toaster?” It was believed this would be effective in stopping spam as any bot registering would most likely not be able to answer the question or complete the reCaptcha. Despite those measures every few hours the forum would be hit with a wave a spam which will be continually posted until the user account is banned. Example of this: Even after a user has been banned that user could be seen on the active…
Beating domain squatters can be a problem, as i found out around 2 months ago. i decided I wanted my own domain, to use for email and not the @hotmail.com address I had used for years. I decided mattyonline was a good domain main, as it was my nickname with online at the end of it, so could be used for all things i did online. The problem was the .com of mattyonline.com was taken by someone who was just using it to display a page full of adverts, so I thought oh well and registered the mattyonline.net instead as it was free. Anyway fast forward to today and an email arrives in my junk mail from [email protected] which said: Hi, We thought that you definitely need to know that right now the .com version of your domain is secured by Easy domain Recovery and is available for purchase at our page. What we do is take different measures to help you promote your brand on the Internet. Little things’ effectiveness can compare to securing .com to a domain with any other extension. Everyone knows .com, a lot of users will intuitively seek you at .com extension so don’t give…