CIPAV: Big Brother Is Watching Via Spyware
If you’re one of those people that is paranoid about who has access to your information, you may already be familiar with CIPAV (The Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier). If not, it’s basically spyware that was developed by the FBI. It captures sensitive information such as a user’s IP address, MAC address, open ports, running programs, operating system, last visited URL, and more.
You may wonder how the FBI could get away with developing and deploying such a program. It was ruled that the information gathered by CIPAV is “the legal equivalent of dialed phone numbers”, and therefore the government can obtain this information without needing to show probable cause or obtain a wiretap warrant. Shocking, isn’t it?
While most of us may not have a whole lot to hide from the FBI, we all deserve privacy. This article will explain to you how to “detect and deter” CIPAV and other similiar programs. If the FBI can develop and deploy garbage like this without us knowing, we should be able to protect ourselves from it.
on November 24th, 2007 at 10:02 am
I hate spyware.
on December 2nd, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Spyware and malware, apart from recording from recording your personal information, slow down your system; keyloggers are used to steal passwords, credit card numbers and the like, and hijacker software are used to take control of your computer. If threats like these are left unattended, they can cause havoc in your life (imagine your credit card information getting stolen; imagine someone grabbing your Yahoo mail password and then sending out malicious mails to all your contacts – the whole scenario is frightening!)
Great Information….
on December 4th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Spyware is more annoying than viruses!
on January 24th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Also just as a side note remember it is extremely important to do a proper robots.txt for your proxy if you don’t then your proxy will crawl the web and google will index other peoples websites under your domain. This seems great but its pretty unethical if you ask me and causes a lot more problems then the benefits of fresh content.
Here is the proper format for PHProxy 5
User-agent: *
Disallow : /index.php?
Just put that in your robots.txt file and upload it to the root of your server.
There are other ones for cgi proxy and glype.
If your worried you can’t do well in the Search Engines without stealing content check out my site at http://www.proxybolt.com and I guarentee you I am doing very well in the SE’s and have a ton of visitors without having to steal.
on February 25th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Unblock Sites
on March 15th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Wouldn’t it be “Invasion of Privacy” by the FBI? That kinder sucks..
on March 23rd, 2008 at 2:19 am
If the internet had any privacy there would not be products like: AVG, Firewalls, Proxies, Anti Spyware, etc. If you have something private to say to someone put it in a letter, yes snail mail. Remember the pony express rider was too bussy looking for Indians to read your mail. Yes I’m afraid the time of privacy has long passed by by
on May 10th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.