Shoutbox

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Originally posted by nod32
Microsoft has being hacked several times, sombody can hack it then find out what we are saying.

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no they can't

What you call "Microsoft" consists of extremely many servers, computers, webpages, etc... What has been hacked are some webpages. This has absolutely nothing todo with reading stuff which might! be stored on servers which aren't even accessable from the net.

And what is stated in paragraph 9 of the privacy terms is that they have the right to give law inforcement the information they need to investigate or presecute offenses...

You talking to your girlfriend is not something MS is going to bother reading, let alone store for later use against you...

don't be so paranoid...

In fact, you are given far more information about yourself out in your dustbin than you would on the net... OH NOOOOSS!!!1111!!! the garbage men are reading my bills and keeping track of how rich I am... And some poor dude in search for some plastic bags is reading that complaint letter I got from the library for not returning those (porn) books...

^^ although sarcastic, it is far more realistic that this happens than that somebody in a small dark room in Redmond is watching your conversations.

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Originally posted by nod32
If it is not possible to see what other people is saying it possible for microsoft to use wlm to see waht you are talking about and other things like email skype and other things.

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Any Internet communication can be observed and potentially recorded by a number of parties.  This includes your ISP, the other person's ISP, server operators of a client-server application (e.g. Microsoft for WLM) and any number of Internet backbone operators in between.

Recently, a number of countries either have or are trying to pass legislation mandating service providers to log retain data for certain amount of time.  For example, they might like your email provider to keep copies of your email, even after you think you have deleted it from the servers.

One doesn't have to be up to anything illegal to find that undesirable.  It's a matter of principle -- many people regard privacy as an inalienable right.  It can also bite in a number of ways, not the least of which could be discovery in civil lawsuits, if you are ever involved in one.

While you can't do anything about possible monitoring and logging, you can encrypt most forms of communication, making the logged data worthless.  That is what you should be doing if you wish to have some assured privacy.

For instant messaging (and more specifically, WLM) you can use OTR and Simp.  For email, I can suggest GPG, for which you can easily find plugins to integrate it with most email clients.

This only works if the people you communicate with use the same encryption software -- although OTR and Simp both detect it when your IM conversation partners don't have the software, and simply don't encrypt those conversations.

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
In fact, you are given far more information about yourself out in your dustbin than you would on the net... OH NOOOOSS!!!1111!!! the garbage men are reading my bills and keeping track of how rich I am...

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While someone obviously finds the notion very funny, thieves often go through garbage looking for credit card numbers and personal information. 

That is one reason why, in recent years, stores have switched to printing only the last digits on receipts and no one takes card imprints anymore.  Also, at least in the US, it is quite easy to obtain new credit (in form of credit cards or instant financing of large purchases) using someone else's stolen personal information.  It is called "identity theft".

So, that is not at all a laughing matter, and everybody ought to own one of these:

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Originally posted by Adeptus

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
In fact, you are given far more information about yourself out in your dustbin than you would on the net... OH NOOOOSS!!!1111!!! the garbage men are reading my bills and keeping track of how rich I am...

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While someone obviously finds the notion very funny, thieves often go through garbage looking for credit card numbers and personal information. 

That is one reason why, in recent years, stores have switched to printing only the last digits on receipts and no one takes card imprints anymore.  Also, at least in the US, it is quite easy to obtain new credit (in form of credit cards or instant financing of large purchases) using someone else's stolen personal information.  It is called "identity theft".

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Absolutely, and that is indeed the exact reason why I posted that. Although it is funny, such stuff poses much more risc to your privacy than an ISP logging data traffic in a genuine way for legit reasons.

And the problem is quite often that people shout about their stuff being logged by an ISP, while that is perfectly legit and in 99,99999% cases done in a very secure way and for proper reasons taking the law in account etc, but they don't take care of what they throw away in their bin everyday.

Identity theft is something which happens way more than someone reading what you write to someone.

Heck, even take all those hotmail accounts which are hacked, aka password and identity stolen. The amount of those dwarfs the amount of people actually being able to read what someone else is writing.

Simply because that is where privacy issues begin, your identity. Privacy issues don't begin with an ISP logging your chats for legit reasons.

Take that other thread for example where a script was created which shows to others who you are talking to. This is a blunt breach on the privacy of the people I'm talking to. Yet it was apparently seen as 'normal' and no issue, while on the other hand people are affraid that an ISP can see that you've chatted 2 hours with the girlfriend of your friend... I mean

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
Absolutely, and that is indeed the exact reason why I posted that. Although it is funny, such stuff poses much more risc to your privacy than an ISP logging data traffic in a genuine way for legit reasons.

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that depends what you see as a risc to your privacy. Your chats are automaticaly saved and can be read by government officials (that may not be the correct term) up to 3 (more or less) years...

Well that doesn't happen to your trashcan...

but doesn't mean we all have to become paranoid...

It doesn't depend on what you see as a privacy breach. Think about it logically: the risk that the things logged by the goverment (if logged at all in the first place... many stuff like this is more dictacted by paranoid people than it is based on some truth) is abused by the goverment is extremely small if not non-existant..., whereas the simple stuff people leave around all the time (and I'm talking about passwords and even simply emails for example) can easly be abused by people who do not care about the law.

Again, what on earth is so bad about the goverment knowing that you've chatted 2 hous with that girl? A goverment who needs to stick to the law and which will stick to the law...

I think, in all honesty, that the stuff you leave around and/or throw away, which is accessable by anybody and which can reveal a hell of a lot is extremely more riskier than that. And this 'system' is used by burgulars, thiefs, hackers, all the time, just because it is that easy and just because everybody thinks as if it is minor and no much can be done with it....

They who are concearned about their chat being logged (which nobody ever even wants to read in all honesty), should better worry about what they throw away each day or leave around in their handcases when they go to school or work or whatever... eg: I have found more than once ID cards, and even credit cards in the street, lost by somebody. While I have never been able to break in into one of Microsofts thousands mainframes which supposidly contain the chatlog of my friend.

IMHO, a 15 year old being worried about the big brother goverment watching how he tries to chat up with that girl, is just stupid and only the result of this extremely paranoid information age, watching too much conspiricy movies, etc.

I don't care if my ISP logs my chats, there is nothing of any importance in it, I'm not a terrorsit or whatever. And I do trust them to handle that data with care (if they handle it all that is). But I do care very much if my email is showed to strangers because that can extremely easy be abused for all sorts of things by people who do not follow the laws.

I have a feeling (thought it's just a feeling) that it's unlikely that any ISP will passively log MSN conversations. It is also unlikely that they'll do it deliberately without telling people.

To try and understand what I mean... if your ISP monitored *all* traffic coming from your PC, then it would take an *immense* amount of storage. My ISP gives us a 40gb bandwidth limit per month. They've maybe got a million clients. That's a theoratical 40 * 10 ^ 15 gb per month of storage they'd require.

Usually, unless requested to otherwise (by the police, or whoever), I'd expect ISP will only log connections, not actual data transmitted - for this reason. Hence while using MSN Messenger all that'll be logged is your connection to the server - not even who you're talking to! (Unless of course you send a file, in which case a direction connection will be made between your computers).

With a computer, I'd be more worried about a key logged monitoring my every keystroke rather than my ISP maybe reading my chats.

It is worth thinking about though, the infomation on the servers could be used in a bad way. If it were in the hands of corrupt people. The same can be said for the goverment, they could have a warrant and check any infomation they wanted. Though they may look for certain people they could find any infomation. It is shocking that the world is becoming more like what George Orwell said a big brother world, though that is probably going off the subject.

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Originally posted by andrewdodd13
To try and understand what I mean... if your ISP monitored *all* traffic coming from your PC, then it would take an *immense* amount of storage. My ISP gives us a 40gb bandwidth limit per month. They've maybe got a million clients. That's a theoratical 40 * 10 ^ 15 gb per month of storage they'd require.

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But they could do some filtering and traffic analysis to narrow things down, and only monitor the protocols and/or connections that they're interested in. Also, compression is an amazing thing... they could compress the data and archive it on a 500GB hard drive, which costs like $170...

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With a computer, I'd be more worried about a key logger monitoring my every keystroke rather than my ISP maybe reading my chats.

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But you have complete control over that. If your system is secure, nobody can install a keylogger, and if they do, you can detect it. With an ISP, you kinda have to blindy trust them.

My school, wants everyone to believe, that if you cyberbully someone over MSN, or some other IM client,  the victim prints the log, and shows the school, is enough proof to get them to talk to your isp and to pull your internet from your home. Or they said there isp will find your chat log with a special code that only they know, called an IP address. the whole school said ahhh when she said it, as if its like a wholy grail. AS long as you don't upload any piracy, you will be fine.

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Originally posted by Steven
a special code that only they know, called an IP address.

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Yeah, plus you...and possibly your friends and family...