Still trying to unblock Facebook in china? I’m not a computer nerd so I won’t try to be one, and I’ll assume you’re not one either otherwise you’d probably already know how unblock Facebook in China. It took me a while to figure things out, so hopefully this article can help you out. As far as how to unblock Facebook in China, basically there’s proxies and vpn. The difference is not that important, but what is important is what works and what doesn’t. To unblock Facebook in China I used free proxies for a while which were extremely slow and you could only view a few pages before their ads popped up to buy the paid product which was frustrating to say the least. Recently china’s firewall has gotten smarter and I’ve found that many of the proxy sites were blocked or extremely slow. So I moved to vpn. A vpn is basically using an IP address from another country. What’s an IP address? It’s like the address of your computer. That’s why when you use Google in China it comes up with the Chinese Google. They can see that you computer is using the internet from China – they even know what city your in – maybe even your personal address (I’m not quite sure about that). So when you’re trying to find Youtube, certain Wikipedia pages, or just trying to use Facebook in China, they cut you off. When you use a vpn they will think that your computer is somewhere else – The US, England, Sweden, etc, so you can then access sites you would as if you were in that country using the internet. Now different people have different experiences using various VPN companies. I personally have tried a few, and although many claim to specialize in working well to access Youtube or unblock Facebook in China, many are slow as a monkey’s uncle, or at least slow down local sites (Chinese sites in this case) This can be frustrating if your trying to see something on youku.com and upload pictures to you FB account at the same time or some situation like that. Also, some of them cut out sometimes which means that you have sign back in to the VPN and in some situations log back onto the site you were using or reload the video you were watching. To unblock Facebook I’ve been using 12vpn and it works great. It’s never dropped the signal, its fast for both western and Chinese sites, and it’s cheap. Lots of places charge 20 bucks a month…12vpn is only 30 dollars for one year. 30 dollars means you have 10,000 Mib per month which is plenty for most people. I don’t know exactly what that is but watching video and uploading things use more of it. I’ve never used even close to that amount and I often watch South Park and movies online etc (I am careful about signing out when I’m not using the internet). Thirty dollars a year is not that bad – less than three dollars a month and you can unblock Facebook in China and all that jazz no problem. Nathaniell is an American expat living in the Fujian province of China. Visit his website http://unblockfacebookinchina.info for more information about getting around China’s Great Firewall.
A few weeks ago I participated in a cyber roundtable pulled together in Washington DC. This was, in part, a meeting to kick off a new organization that will seek to bring security technologists and policy makers together. (Much more on this at a later date). The participants (who met under the Chatham House Rule*) included uber security geeks, privacy advocates, Defense Industrial representatives, and policy influencers. There was quick acknowledgement from all of the participants that there are multiple problems in the way the cybersecurity challenge is being met, including technology and R&D investment, information sharing, and a lack of understanding of those problems as evidenced by the bills wending their way through Congress. So I was heartened to see that the US Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) consortium is stepping up to address at least the technology issues. NITRD is supported by 14 Federal agencies including the National Science Foundation and DHS. They held a meeting May 19th to propose three areas of investigation that would lead to game-changing research and development and opened the discussion to public comment. Herewith are my comments that I submitted to their forum. (The comment period ends today, June 18) The first proposed theme is Tailored Trustworthy Spaces . This theme, while at first glance appearing overly academic, is crucially important and is actually evolving on the Internet. It reflects the way we change how we behave and interact depending on the particular forum we are participating in. A Skype conversation with a child away at school, funds transfers between bank accounts, executing stock trades, using a VPN to enter the corporate network, commenting anonymously on blogs, a Linkedin discussion group, Craigslist, Twitter, and Facebook, are all examples of different trust environments we participate in. We adjust how we interact, who we trust, what information we reveal, and in some case adjust our browsers or even the computer we use to participate. A bank may still require Internet Explorer to access its online accounts but the security conscious will use FireFox for general web browsing. Some people have even started to use separate computers for some activities. Research should begin with what is working today and what about those solutions is succeeding. The concept of segmentation should be included to provide damage control when a trustworthy space is breached. As new models are developed they should be deployed and tested quickly to discover their failings. Behavior monitoring should be used to alert when new and unusual behaviors arise. Remember Network News Groups? Initially NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) gave rise to vast forums where like minded people could discuss politics, cats, even knitting. When spammers started spewing postings to the thousands of groups NNTP died out. Built in defenses against spam behavior may have saved News Groups. The key point is that all possible attacks on a Trustworthy Space cannot be predicted. Monitoring, reporting, and alerting should be included (along with privacy protections.) The second theme is Research into Moving Target (MT) technologies. This is a great concept and ties into the next theme of economics. Few will disagree that monocultures, thanks to the wide deployment of a single code base, rife with vulnerabilities, is the single biggest cause of the cybersecurity challenge. While technologies such as Solidcore (just acquired by McAfee) can be installed to make a Windows machine impervious to attack via essentially randomizing memory and system call registries and other randomizing in the network can add to the investment at attacker must make to be successful, there is one area that is ripe for exploration. The decades long movement towards platform consolidation should be reversed and R&D efforts should support that reversal. Certain environments (critical infrastructure, DoD, the intelligence community) should move to multiple platforms just to increase the number of systems an attacker must have tools to compromise. As a start Windows systems should be limited to desktops only. All servers for DNS, directory services, databases, applications, and cloud computing should be on non-Windows platforms. This would ensure that popular vectors, developed by cyber criminals to attack and control the target rich consumer space would not also lead to infections of SCADA controllers, transaction processors, or real time environments. Certainly handhelds, ships, tanks, airplanes, medical equipment and manufacturing systems should never share a code base with a dominant consumer product. Over time even desktop environments should be transitioned to multiple different platforms. R&D efforts could enhance the management of multi-platform environments. Open source communities could be supported to enhance the protections of Linux variants. The third proposed theme is Cyber Economic Incentives In October, 2006, I was asked to join a workshop on modern malware hosted by the Santa Fe Institute and co-chaired by Matt Williamson, principal research scientist from Sana Security, and Esther Dyson. I can sum up the overall sense that was shared by the participants at the end of the second day: This is a war. The enemy is organized, well financed and smart. Reactive measures such as research and signature generation are falling behind. Most important, when the workshop convenes again, at least half the time and effort should be devoted to understanding the economics of cybercrime. As far as I know that follow-on meeting never occurred (or I was not invited 
While the intent of this theme seems focused on providing economic incentive for improving the security practices of the good guys I would not neglect research into understanding the motivations of the bad guys as well. NITRD has asked the right questions and proposed valuable avenues of future investment. I applaud this effort and hope that support for it comes from the member agencies. One final suggestion is that international participation should be invited. We are all in this together and only by pulling in the brilliant researchers around the world can cybersecurity challenges be addressed. * “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed”.
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Facebook Safety Facebook is an excellent tool to stay in contact with friends and family, and also to meet new people, however we quickly forget an important childhood lesson—”don’t talk to strangers” – “but they are my friends you may say…” As Fb (Facebook) relies on people’s openness to share their information on a semi-public forum, some dilemmas are posed. There is a strong need for humans to be connected to each other and Fb seems to take advantage of that need. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Whether it’s reconnecting with distant relatives or keeping track of close friends without having to duplicate information, or even to see what happened to that high school sweetheart, the strong interconnectivity of the internet cannot be denied or ignored. Thus it is easier to learn to adapt and live with, rather than find ways to live without this valuable tool. The uses of Fb are far reaching. A Cape Town organisation has successfully located numerous missing children by posting their pictures on their group site. The effect that Fb is having on our society is still not clear. In terms of research, Fb is still new and there is currently a large amount of studies being undertaken on various aspects of the impact of Fb. For example, many corporate companies have implemented policies to deal with social networking forums such as Fb, MSN (another social network –Windows Live Messenger) and the like, owing to reduced productivity in the workplace. The current research on the effects of Fb on family life, work and mental health will be interesting. The problem is that research takes time and the publication of these findings too takes time, and Fb is still relatively new. So you have taken the time to create a nice full profile on Fb. You have even included details as to where you live, work, your contact numbers and interests. You then are going on holiday and you post that on your status update something like “Ten days before holiday to Thailand!” The problem is that not only does everyone know that you will be out of town, they also know personal information about you and possibly your family. There would most probably be some pictures of your house on Fb in your photo albums and suddenly you have made it really easy for a would be burglar to have an option here. People even post that they are missing their husband while he is away. This can be a security risk too. Before going head first into the Fb world, I would ask myself some questions: 1. Do I provide personal information and photos etc on my profile? 2. Am I really friends with all the people who have access to my Fb profile? 3. Do I trust the people who can view my profile and its contents? 4. Do I know how to use the security settings on Fb? Who would you let into your home after hours? Who would you let into your home and allow them to look at your videos, photos and weekly plan? The information that you put onto Fb can easily become public and is available 24 hours a day. Information such as where one works, while may be interesting for friends to see, can have a negative effect. The more information that you make available about yourself the more information a would be predator can get. For example, a con-artist could easily get more information about you by pretending to be a close friend when telephoning your business for example. By already having quite a lot of your personal details, it becomes easier to convince your reception or a co-worker for further information, such as your other contact numbers and so on. Now the con-artist could impersonate you when contacting some of your service providers as he/she already has your personal numbers, work numbers, email address and possibly your home address. This is the information that is often used to verify you to your service providers. A con-artist could contact a common service provider such as a telephone company and request that they want to change the postal address details. The operator from the service provider may confirm your address details to the con after he/she has presented other personal information such as birth date, contact numbers and work address. Even if the service provider does not accept the information that the con provided, they will tell him/her what information they require before they will be able to divulge or make changes to your account profile. Thus, the con can contact other service providers and between a few, and with some clever communication can get the missing information. Each service provider asks different security verification details and it is likely that the con will get through to at least one service provider to whom can provide further information, such as your home address. Now you are not only at a financial risk, you may be at physical risk too. Included in this fraud is attempting to predict passwords for example by having personal information about you. A common hacking tool is called “social engineering” whereby a hacker psychologically manipulates situations to gain further information about you to fill in missing gaps that he/she needs to con you. For example, many people use their child’s name as their password on their computer, or their birth date, or any easy to remember information. By creating a trust relationship with you, you may without knowing it, be giving possible passwords/access information to a hacker as he/she attempts to create a psychological profile of you. If you lose your credit card or your identity document, Fb becomes even more unsafe. If the person who finds these personal documents becomes a friend of yours on Fb (or if your profile is open to the public), then the balance of your personal information is available. Cases of fraud regularly occur in the work environment whereby a fellow co-worker is involved in fraudulent activity either directly or indirectly via a partner. In the work environment, information such as identity numbers, home phone numbers and possibly addresses are fairly easily available in many companies. It is also common for co-workers to be friends on Fb, the rest is self-explanatory. The point is that, the more information there is available about you, even more information can be obtained from that very information. Thus, fraudulent activity becomes easier with more information. Phishing (technique of fraudulently obtaining private information) is a common occurrence that takes many forms such as emails from legitimately looking companies attempting to update their database, and requiring you to confirm details via email or telephone for example. The more information there is available about you, the more openings there are for fraudsters to gain entrance into your life. The possibilities are endless and the methods used to con people too are endless. Psychologically deviant behaviour is a concern for public forums. We need to be aware that child friendly websites have been known to attract not only children but paedophiles too. Facebook has a minimum age for membership of 14 years of age. Paedophilia is a concern for young teenagers and I would not rule this out as a concern for parents just because “every one’s child is on Fb and therefore it must be safe”. If this was true then crossing a street would pose no risks as everyone is doing it… . The point is that parental involvement is always important. I am not saying that one needs to be like a hawk, but what I am saying is that teaching your children about the risks and role-playing possible scenarios that they may be faced with, is an important part of any new activity that has risks. For example, the same way a parent needs to oversee a child when learning to swim (and thereafter for many years of swimming), the same applies for internet based activities. Excuses such as my children know more than me and they teach me about computers is a common complaint. It is easy to get advice and that does not mean that you need to be a computer specialist, but as a parent you already have the knowledge of what would be acceptable behaviours for your children, so it’s just the vehicle that you need to adapt to. This can be fun too. Facebook provides a perfect place for voyeuristic behaviour (the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people, usually while they are doing personal actions). Once a Fb user lets another Fb user see his/her profile by accepting a friendship, the profile remains open to each party unless either the friend is removed from the profile (“unfriend”- Oxford word of the year for 2009) or privacy settings are applied. Now if your profile is open to your friends, these friends can view your photos, videos and other information at any time and as many times as they want. This activity goes unnoticed, so if [...]
Learn about using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and others. What are they and how are they used? A small but rapidly growing percentage of employers are using social networking sites as part of their recruiting process as well as part of their business processes. Social networking sites can be dangerous when used as part of a background checking process but present tremendous opportunities when used as part of the sourcing process. MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster are amongst the most popular sites, especially amongst high school and college students. Unlike most sites where even regular visitors spend at most minutes a week and look at a handful of pages, visitors to social networking sites often invest hours a day at the sites, viewing, and disclose a tremendous amount of information about themselves and their friends. On-line recruiting expert Steven Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com career site has tried to demystify social networking sites and demonstrate the tremendous risks and opportunities they present to employers in articles he has written. The articles are recommended for people who want to find out more about these sites and their scopes and opportunities, both positive and negative sides. We realize that more and more companies use Facebook for a reference check amongst new hires candidates. Whether this is positive or not, whether it is ethical or not is not the discussion here, but we should ask ourselves. Has our private sphere become to public, and do we have a responsibility ourselves as individuals to protect our private information if we do not want some elements of society to use them against us? My personal answer is that we should be careful with information publicized in sites like Facebook. Both legal as well as illegal companies and individuals can use the information on Facebook if it serves their purpose. Therefore the trap for us as individuals could be that we open up for big brother syndrome ourselves, without thinking of the consequences of this. Serena Software uses Facebook as part of their intranet. 800 employees in 18 countries. Facebook is the frontend of their intranet with links to a cheap CMS system that is beind their firewall. It all started with Facebook Friday. The management in Serena Software encouraged their workers to use one hour every Friday to update their profile on Faceboook and create relations to collegues, customers and partners, friends and family. So Facebook acts as a front end with a CMS in the back end where links to confidential documents behind the firewall is performed. The process of change in Serena Software was focused on web 2.0. 35% of their 800 coworkers 800 does virtual work together. The management wanted that these coworkers should know each other better and get to the same understanding, make relations and feel engagement in the company’s activities. Facebook is free and a good web 2.0 sofware, so it fell natural for Serena to use this application as part of their intranet. They made privat groups for the employees on Faceboook and developed some simple programs for the intranet. Then they made links to relevant documents inside the firewall and therefore secure.The make press releases on Facebook and the human relationship department makes links to relevant information sources. This way the employees learns not only about the documents, but also about their coworkers behind the documents. Some customers communicates today with Serena Software through Facebook. These customers does not use e-mail anymore. The relations between the customers and the coworkers in Serena Software has become stronger, since they know each other very well on a personal level Both employees in Serena Software as well as the customers updates their profiles on a regular basis and tell each others what they do, so it creates a stronger bond through Facebook. Serena also use Facebook to recruit employees to the company. Potential coworkers knows about Serenas cooperation tools and therefore easy can get in touch with the environment and potential decision makers easier, Serena will know about the candidates since they also updates their Facebook on a regular basis and therefore latest news around this person is known. Ernst & Young hires more than 5,500 college students and recent graduates pr year for internships and entry level career opportunities, only in North America alone. In addition to the traditional on-campus recruiting efforts, employee referrals, and advertising on job boards and other media, Ernst&Young now has a page on Facebook, which is one of the most popular social networking sites amongst college students. Ernst &Young’s sponsored Facebook page contains information and discussion boards aimed at college students. Although students and other individuals use Facebook for free, Ernst&Young’s paid an undisclosed fee to Facebook as their page is more like advertising than it is to a traditional Facebook profile page. The risk of this is of course that there could be negative comments posted to their page by students and other individuals who use Facebook and even enabling people who don’t like Ernst &Young to connect more easily and perhaps allow their negative views to be more widely disseminated. The price paid for the presence on Facebook is only part of the true cost, since Ernst & Young will have to take the costs related to the tremendous amount of staff time required to properly maintain a Facebook page. If they are not responsive to students who contact them through the page, they will look out-of-touch and do more harm to their brand than good. Ernst & Young’s page is the first sponsored page on Facebook that is used exclusively for recruitment purposes. Other organizations such as Microsoft have pages that include information about their hiring efforts, but this is the first time that an organization’s Facebook page has been only about their efforts to hire college students who are searching for internships and recent graduates who are hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. So far about over 5000 Facebook users have linked to the Ernst & Young page as members. Once you have a Facebook profile, you can search for people or organizations which are of interest to you. You can find the Ernst & Young page by typing in Ernst and Young (without the quotation marks) into the Facebook search engine. Facebook then gives you the option of becoming a member of the Ernst & Young page and you can accept this. That’s all it takes. Now Ernst & Young’s recruiters will be able to review your profile. If you are a college junior or senior with a high GPA in a program such as business, finance, or accounting, the phone would probably be ringing right now. This is probably a brilliant move by Ernst & Young. This is a big step towards Ernst & Young becoming more transparent. It also sends a powerful message to students that Ernst & Young is listening to their needs, wants, and desires. Recruiters who tell highly qualified candidates that they must apply through traditional channels will lose those candidates if those candidates want to connect through newer channels such as Facebook because those candidates have options and they know it. Other companies such as Opera software has also adopted Facebook as a part of their business and uses it actively for various purposes.
