A few days ago, one of my favorite email provider seemed to be constantly unavailable. Several users on Twitter expressed their anguish at having to pay for email service (this being more secure as opposed to the free ones), and yet being unable to access their emails.

The email service provider soon issued an apology outlining what they perceived to be an unexpected “Nation sponsored” attack attack. It soon became clear that this was a clear case of hacktivism rather than activism. …

You’ve been meaning to do some private research work. As you begin looking up things in Google you recall that there are better alternatives when it comes to online privacy.

You notice a few interesting search results. But you’re also smart enough to notice they’re insecure. After avoiding these, you find a few legitimate one’s & click on the first search result. You’re now officially off the safe realms. But you’re no ordinary user. You recall reading about the counter measures to pesky online trackers.

You gather some information and move to the next source. After half a day of scouring articles you decide to take a break. …

In a story told through the ages, it is said that a special messenger was tasked with sensitive private data in his hands. He compressed the content of the message to a phrase and using special chants hashed it. Flying swiftly, he crossed the length of a strait, before he was attempted to be intercepted. He realized the (wo)man-in-between attack was a threat to the security of the message and hacked his way past the impediment. …

Prep-Talk

In my past decade of blogging, I have moved on from the relic called live journal and side stepped blogger, tumbled into the adventurous realms of WordPress (self-hosted) and enrolled on Steem while looking for greener pastures. In my humble opinion, considering the ease of use and arsenal of free (& paid) utilities, nothing can beat creating and managing content using WordPress. Right from the word go, you really cannot go wrong with it.

It is close to 9 years, since I wrote an article about the importance of people supporting the open source community powering WordPress. They have kept growing consistently over the years and are the core reason behind the fact that WP now drives close to 30% of the websites out there! …

Way back in 2004, one of the world’s largest soft drinks company pulled their “pure” bottled water product off the shelves because it had been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical. In July 2010, a major tobacco maker admitted that child workers as young as 10 were working in tobacco farms related to them. Now in March 2018, a whistleblower (& thorough investigation) helped show that a data analytics firm might have abused data leak from the world’s largest Social Network.

While it might look inappropriate to compare the above three cases, it is worthy to note that they could have just got away with it, if not for some really gritty people/ media working behind the scenes helping to identify and put the pieces of the puzzle together. …

Around one year ago, Google Chrome announced that they would begin marking all sites that are not encrypted with HTTPS as “not secure” in their browser. This move essentially started shaming websites by displaying a “Not Secure” marker in the address bar. However this happened only when the site collected passwords or credit card info.

Later in 2017, they further announced their next steps towards a more secure internet. In this step the warning came up in two more situations: when people enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode.

This war was waged on the grounds that when you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or change the site before it gets to you. This definitely was a meaningful fight. …

In the past, new year resolutions have been a miss-hit for me. I have had my run-ins with the usual suspects:

• Physical fitness ambitions that were, simply put, over-expectations.
• Financial goals that simply ruined my everyday happy living.
• Commitment to family life that was easily hijacked by my techno addictions.
• Blogging pledges that soon turned into woeful unread posts.

Unmistakably, in all those occasions, my resolve was immature, unoriginal and just unwritten decisions that were made up in one corner of my brain; fast written and soon forgotten! This time I am going a step ahead and even penning this publicly. Talk about bold moves! …

Many years ago an ‘unknown benefactor’ from Nigeria dropped me an email about a “once in a lifetime offer” that was simply too tempting to pass! You see, a very distant relative of his had recently passed away leaving billions of $ in unclaimed property. For unbeknownst reasons, all I needed to do now was to pass on my bank account and address details, so that my pal from Africa can work out finer details & help me claim a fortune and share it with me!

This would sound familiar to so many of us who were spammed a decade or so ago. In fact the same story has done so so many rounds, that we all started to crave for a change from this cringeworthy storyline, if not for a way out of spam emails! …