Tag Archives: Facebook

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HOWTO set Facebook privacy settings

October 4, 2010 – 2:36 pm

While I’m working on a Facebook inspired privacy discovery project, I need to highly recommend that everyone take the time to review their the official Facebook privacy settings page to understand how data about you is used and shared, but in a nutshell Facebook tells us:

Your name, profile picture, gender and networks are always open to everyone. We suggest leaving the other basic settings below open to everyone to make it easier for real world friends to find and connect with you.

You need to understand that this lack of privacy also makes you *more* available to their advertisers, which is what they’re really pushing for, identity theft and other potential crimes (ie- stalking). You need to login to Facebook and then click on the text Account on the top left side of the screen, and then choose Privacy Settings in that dropdown. (or if you’re logged in, click here). Take a look at these screen shots below, first is the Recommended settings Facebook presents to you:

This is a preview of HOWTO set Facebook privacy settings. Read the full post (366 words, 1 image, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)
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HOWTO securely delete files in OS X on the commandline

January 12, 2010 – 8:51 pm

So I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a few months now, and since I have a 500 Gig harddrive, I haven’t bothered to empty my trash yet. I’m currently on a work trip in China, and it makes me think about the privacy (internet and otherwise) that I have in the US, that I don’t expect here. In fact, since we’re blocked from posting to either Facebook or Twitter, I know this post will only make it there because this site will post if for me after I post it to my site (again, not something you’d think about just living in most other parts of the world). So what a good time to learn how to securely emptying my trash! The first thing I did was use the ‘Secure delete’ feature of the OS X trash folder, but with over 190,000 files to remove, it sat there at 0% while the fan spun up for about 15 minutes. That was it for me, it was clear it was going to take years for this to happen, so canceled that and hit Google to learn the right way to do it via the commandline. One of the best pages talks about srm a secure file deletion for posix systems that is installed by default on OS X. I’ve crafted my srm command to use the nice command to reduce the amount of overhead the process causes (again, the GUI version was taking over the system and heating things up quickly) and the sudo command to ensure all files would be deleted regardless of permission/ownership. In the end in looks like this:

This is a preview of HOWTO securely delete files in OS X on the commandline. Read the full post (328 words, 1 image, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
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