You may remembering my post FaceBook is pure evil that I deactivated my Facebook account. Now when one deactivates their account you would tend to think that all your information would be deleted. Not so with FaceBook.

All your messages, the stuff on your fun wall, super, wall your photos etc. are still there available to other FaceBook users. FaceBook maintains this is so you can seamlessly reactivate your account when you decided to go back to FaceBook. Lately this little feature of FaceBook has been prevalent in the news. Many newscasters referring to it like the song Hotel California “You can check out, but you can never leave.”.

 So what can you do to get out? Well if you are like me and have already deactivated your account you have to reactivate it. Go in and line by line delete all the information in your profile. Delete all the applications that you may have signed up for such as Fun Wall and Super Wall. Delete all your inbox and sent messages, delete all the photos you may have uploaded. Once you have done all that deleting once again deactivate your account.

 But your presence is still not completely gone. Facebook maintains back ups of this information on its servers. In order to have this removed you must e-mail FaceBook. From what I have read this is no easy process, and some people have even resorted to legal action in order to get themselves removed. Do you need more proof that FaceBook is evil?

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 Just about everyone on the web has heard of Face Book. Heck I thought it was a great idea when I first signed up. I mean I have moved around a lot and I thought it would be cool to catch up with long lost friends and such. But you know, I never felt quite right using Face Book. I mean I’d like to think that I have been around when it comes to the internet. When using Face Book I just never had that “warm fuzzy feeling” (this is how we describe things in bomb disposal when things are going right – if you don’t have it something is about to go wrong).

 You see I just couldn’t figure out how Mark Zuckerberg and his investors from Face Book were making any money. Sure they had advertising on the site but who clicks those anyways? (Judging by my AdSense stats not many) However Face Book kept getting bigger and bigger and here I was getting more and more Zombie, Werewolf, Vampire, and who knows what else requests. It seemed odd to me that all these Face Book applications required access to your profile and such. Then it dawned on me – data mining. Face Book was one vast Data Mine!

 What is data mining you ask? Well briefly it is extracting useful information from a large amount of information. Basically Face Book knows your age, your geographic location, your relationship status, your education, your profession, your mood (if you choose to update it) and a bunch more. Not only do they know this about you but they also know this about all your friends as well. This is valuable stuff if used in the right context. I mean this is marketers gold! Don’t kid yourself that they are not selling it either. Don’t believe me? Check out these videos.

 I don’t know about you but having my information sold like that just makes me feel dirty. As of January 6 2007 I have deactivated my face Book account. When Face Book asked me why (a nice courtesy to keep you in their evil clutches). I wrote a them a nice note about how data mining ranks up there with spammers.

 As always I want to hear what you think, good or bad.

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 Have you ever wondered what might happen if your lap top or USB drive ever got stolen? Now granted you’d lose all your files and the information that was on your lap top or USB drive and you would have the cost of replacing the hardware. But have you ever thought about that valuable information you have stored on your hard drive in your lap top or on your USB drive?

  Okay so maybe your not James Bond, and you don’t have access to Top Secret government documents but you do have valuable information there that in the wrong hands can prove quite costly. Identity theft has been on the rise in the past few years, information that you have on your portable computer equipment could make it quite easy for some devious person to steal your identity or the identity of the of other people whose personal information may be on your hardware.

 Don’t think your windows or other operating system password is going to save you. Just do a Google search on Windows password crackers to see just how easy it is to get past the windows log in. In the case of a USB drive the information is just sitting there on the drive waiting to be pulled off and taken into the hands of the malicious thief.

  I don’t travel all that often but I do frequently take my lap top and USB drives with me to business meetings and other engagements. I often have information that if it got into the wrong hands could be costly to both myself and my clients. This can exist in the form of CAD drawings of unreleased mechanisms that have yet to patented, to financial spread sheets. If competitors of my clients got a hold of things it could be all bad.

 That is why I use a nifty free open source program called True Crypt

. True Crypt works on Windows and most Linux platforms, it has a small foot print and is very easy to use. What I have learned about computer security is you can create the most secure system in the world. But if it is not user friendly your users won’t use it and it will be worthless. True Crypt is very user friendly and easy to set up. They have an excellent beginner’s tutorial with screen shots that will get you up and running in minutes.

 But one of the best features I like about True Crypt is the fact that it provides plausible deniability. What does this mean? Well until decrypted, a True Crypt volume appears to consist of nothing more than random data. They claim that there is no way to identify the data as a True Crypt volume until it is mounted. But it doesn’t stop there. True Crypt also uses some clever stenography. You can hide a True Crypt volume with in a True Crypt Volume. Why would this be useful? Well lets say that there is a possibility you may be forced to provide a password or mount your true crypt volume. You can make one volume that has garbage data in it, data that is not really that sensitive but looks like you might want to hide it. Then with in that volume you can have a hidden volume that contains your actual data.

 While this feature may be over kill for most of us, I still think it is a neat feature to have. However True Crypt also provides another measure of stenography. You can also run True Crypt in traveller mode. This means that you do not need to actually have True Crypt installed on your portable system. You can do this by having the application on a separate disk, or use True Crypt to make a special Travellers Disk and launch True Crypt from there.

 When you have a True Crypt container mounted it seamlessly encrypts and decrypts data on the fly. You don’t even realise it is there in most cases. True Crypt also has a feature where you can hit a “hot key” and it will automatically dismount any mounted encrypted drives.

 In summary True Crypt is a handy tool to have in your tool box of computer security. I encourage you to give it a try, it costs nothing but your time.

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