samadhisoft.com

– I’ve been fascinated with QR codes for a few months now.   But this was the first time I’d realized that they can be quite dangerous.   But then, I suppose Stumbleupon could be dangerous in the same way.  

– It’s an increasingly nasty world out there.   With so many using and depending on technologies they don’t have any real understanding of, I wonder if it will all just come off the rails at some point as the chaos-makers begin to cause so much havoc that it outweighs the benefits of using the Internet.  

– Seems a bit far fetched but I recall reading a SciFi book (Starfish by Peter Watts, I think) in which the global Internet had split into smaller isolated nets each with very tight boundary protections.   We could be headed that way.

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Hackers are now re-angling sophisticated techniques they use to break into personal computers to target and steal information from unaware smart phone users, a report shows.

And internet security specialist AVG says the number of cyber assaults on those with smart phones is likely to soar this year as more people upgrade to the technology.

The AVG report highlights the risks of quick response codes, stolen digital certificates and rootkits – all of which hackers are targeting to covertly break into smart phones.

Michael McKinnon, AVG security adviser, said because many big-name brands were using QR codes as an additional marketing and information tool people were inherently trusting of them.

But he said a malicious QR code sticker on existing marketing material or replacing a website’s bona fide QR code with a hacked one could trick many.

“We want to build awareness that while QR codes are very convenient, we are making it stupidly easy to infect these phones by having these codes with web addresses that can point to malicious software.

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O2 mobile users in the UK are venting on Twitter today, fuming at their discovery that their phone number is being shared with every website that they visit over the network.

I found a colleague who owns an iPhone on the O2 network, and we tried it out for ourselves. Making sure we turned off his WiFi connection, we used the O2 mobile network to access the web.

Sure enough, his mobile number was being secretly communicated to websites he visited, embedded inside an http header called HTTP_X_UP_CALLING_LINE_ID.

O2’s response so far is to tell concerned Twitter users that it is investigating the issue.

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