cloaking your online activity

[Huskerwirejay]

It’s probably impossible to cloak your online activities fully, but there are steps you can take to make them harder to follow. http://nyti.ms/JUSNIq


Sent from iPhone

[Red Dead Redemption]

It appears that HWJ may have posted something, but I am having a hard time discerning it...

[Huskerwirejay]

IT WORKS!

[McKinneyTXHusker]

It’s probably impossible to cloak your online activities fully, but there are steps you can take to make them harder to follow. http://nyti.ms/JUSNIq


Sent from iPhone

Uh, HWJ?? To anyone with any modicum of technical smarts, this is VERY old news...

[4qtrhsker]

Uh, HWJ?? To anyone with any modicum of technical smarts, this is VERY old news...

What a d... I may not be much on computer tech, but I have no doubt there are a few things I could teach you.

[McKinneyTXHusker]

What a d... I may not be much on computer tech, but I have no doubt there are a few things I could teach you.

Quite likely - I think there are things that most any of us can teach most anyone else - everyone has their own strong points. Still, this is something that's been done - and been written about and described to make it easy - for years. Just the facts.

[RedPhoenix]

What a d... I may not be much on computer tech, but I have no doubt there are a few things I could teach you.

You shoulda left out your first three words.

[Showman]

Uh, HWJ?? To anyone with any modicum of technical smarts, this is VERY old news...

Between this and my Omaha Steaks beatdown, I'm starting to think we've got us a negative nelly on our hands

Thanks HWJ, there's some interesting stuff in there.

[McKinneyTXHusker]

Between this and my Omaha Steaks beatdown, I'm starting to think we've got us a negative nelly on our hands

Oh yeah, that deal on half of the 11 lb cow! Haha! If teasing you about that makes me negative, whatever!

[LutheranHusker]

That reminds me...my Omaha Steaks order arrived Wednesday...can't wait to start eating!!!

[huskernut]

.

[Huskermedic]

You shoulda left out your first three words.

those hours spent watching kitten videos

Did they interview you for this story?

[Nishioka]

Or you can forgo trusting others with your e-mail correspondence altogether and set up your own mail server. It is an option that is not just for the paranoid, according to Sam Harrelson, a middle-school teacher and self-described technology aficionado in Ashville, N.C., who switched to using his own mail server this year using a $49.99 OS X Server and $30 SpamSieve software to eliminate junk mail.

I've run mail servers in the past. They're too much of a pain in the rear end. Not just in maintenance, but from remote providers blocking entire swathes of IP addresses just to fight incoming spam/virus traffic. It's difficult enough as an entity with 10,000 users to get Microsoft or Yahoo to ease up on the filtering, let alone one person at home. Not something I'd do myself.

Plus, as the article notes, you're not really gaining any privacy by running your own mail server when everyone you e-mail is off-network anyway.

The other suggestions for using TOR or a VPN are worthwhile though.

[Huskerwirejay]

Uh, HWJ?? To anyone with any modicum of technical smarts, this is VERY old news...

Thank-you for your opinion about the timelessness of an article publish the day before I posted it here. The next time they ask ME what to publish, I will defer to you and advise the New York Times that you are one to ask re: timely topics in technology.

Further, I would suggest that you share to thoughts with CNN, the WSJ, Smart Money, Bloomberg, Wired, Forbes and USA Today--all of who have written about just ONE of the suggested tools in this article THIS YEAR.

As a HuskerMax user, you most likely know that HuskerMax send information to quantserve.com.

"Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) provides services to online marketers and media companies that helps them better understand general web audience characteristics and deliver advertising to groups of people based on broad demographic, geographic or interest-based insights. The company's innovative direct-measurement approach generates publicly available traffic and audience profiles for millions of Web destinations. Quantcast also provides solutions that help manage the delivery of advertising in real-time so that advertisers can reach relevant audiences with a projected set of characteristics across the Web. Participants in the Quantcast measurement and/or ad delivery service are required to include appropriate notification in their privacy policies.

[MilesBFree]

I've run mail servers in the past. They're too much of a pain in the rear end. Not just in maintenance, but from remote providers blocking entire swathes of IP addresses just to fight incoming spam/virus traffic. It's difficult enough as an entity with 10,000 users to get Microsoft or Yahoo to ease up on the filtering, let alone one person at home. Not something I'd do myself.

Plus, as the article notes, you're not really gaining any privacy by running your own mail server when everyone you e-mail is off-network anyway.

The other suggestions for using TOR or a VPN are worthwhile though.

Yep.

And $30 spam prevention software on a server is very likely not going to be as good as a multi-million dollar spam package from companies who only do that. I have a couple of domains with 1and1.com and very rarely get any spam whatsoever. Looking in my spam folder in webmail (on the server, not Thunderbird) it is shocking the amount of junk in that folder. All zapped by the server. But as you said, that isn't really relevant to the privacy question.

TOR may not be the safest thing to use at work. I have heard it can look like a network attack (possibly outbound) to the security guys due to the way it works. Not that I have found that out the hard way...