OhRyan.ca

It looks like the privacy hippies were finally right about something, your mobile phone really is a pocket sized tracking device.

Turns out that as of iOS 4.0, iPhones have been tracking your physical movements and logging it along with the phone’s backups.

A small team of researchers have discovered these logs in iTune’s backup files, they’ve released a handy little app that collects all the data from your user folder and plots it on a map. iPhoneTracker.app and further information available here.

Here is the visualization of everywhere I’ve been since Sept 28, 2010:

You can see lots of activity in and around Winnipeg (including trips up to the Gimli and Victoria Beach), a flight to Toronto and subsequent travel around southern Ontario and a road trip to Minneapolis. It’s fascinating.

I’m not sure if this is a terrifying privacy hole or a neat little hidden feature. I’m leaning towards neat feature, since the data is stored locally on your computer and can be encrypted automatically by iTunes.

At this point in time a method for disabling the “feature” does not exist. I expect Apple will be responding in short order.

In a blog post today Facebook detailed some of their new security improvements:

Starting today we’ll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools. The option will exist as part of our advanced security features, which you can find in the “Account Security” section of the Account Settings page.

Enabling this option will effectively prevent you against Firesheep and similar account hijacking methods. I think it’s fairly safe to assume this feature is a direct response to Firesheep, even if it seems to have taken them 4 months to roll out. Though, it could also be a response to Zuckerburg’s account hack yesterday.

I’m going to go one step further than Facebook and say, you should absolutely enable this option as soon as it’s available to you.

The following set of rewrite rules will redirect all Android, Blackberry, iOS, Windows and WebOS devices to a specific mobile directory on your website. Additionally, it will redirect Google’s mobile crawler – according to Google search spam czar Matt Cutts this is perfectly acceptable and even somewhat encourage.

To implement these rules:

1. Replace “mobiledirectoryhere” with the path to your mobile site. If your mobile site is located in a subdirectory, use the full URL (including “http://”) and you can omit the first RewriteCond.
2. Then copy & paste the ruleset into the site’s .htaccess file or the main apache configuration.

Rationale

Since the last time I wrote about mobile browser detection and redirection in 2009 the mobile device landscape has changed once again. Smartphones dominate the mobile browsing landscape and feature phones are almost not existant in server logs.

The old redirection rules I posted attempt to redirect every mobile phone under the sun. At this point in 2011, it’s probably safe to completely ignore ancient phones and simplify your Apache rules in the process.

Have you been seeing decreasing BitTorrent transfer speeds?

Have you received an annoying notice from your ISP accusing you of illegally downloading a Hollywood blockbuster?

Would you like to live in a better internet?

Well, I have the answer for you: encryption. You see, every BitTorrent packet your computer sends or receives contains header data stating that it’s BitTorrent traffic as well as the filename and other identifying information. By default, this data is send in plain-text, your ISP is able to intercept any traffic you send an inspect the contents (see: deep packet inspection). Your ISP may use this data to actively throttle your BitTorrent traffic (or even your connection in general if they so choose); they may also match the filename against a list of known filenames for movies or other blacklisted content and then send you (fake) legal demands.

By enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client, you make it much more difficult (individual results may vary) for your ISP to determine that a packet is a BitTorrent packet; it may also prevent you from receiving those nag letters in the mail.

Any BitTorrent client worth it’s salt will have an option buried somewhere in the preferences to enable encryption.

I’ve attached a screenshot for the client I use, Transmission:

TorrentFreak has an older with instructions for Azuerus (now Vuze), BitComet and µTorrent. The instructions may be somewhat out of date, but I’d imagine the settings would be in similar locations. When all else fails, Google it.

Update: Doug McArthur notes in the comments, enabling encryption may end up filtering out peers on less popular torrents.

In August I posted a method I found for watching Hulu in Canada (or anywhere outside of the US for that matter). Unfortunately, that method was a little complicated and Hulu fixed it a few days after Lifehacker posted about it. Last Night I found a new hole and this one’s a fair bit simpler. Here’s a handy instructional video.

The Firefox modify headers extension can be downloaded here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967/

Check out the reddit discussion for more details.