privacy tagged posts

Intro
I was lately surprised by my new ‘Ubuntu Server’ computer connecting back to a strange IP address: 91.189.92.11 on port 443! I immediately started investigating the case and did a whois lookup on the IP address to discover that the IP points to this domain productsearch.ubuntu.com – a page that will display a 403 Forbidden Error.

What is productsearch.ubuntu.com?
So apparently according to this website: If you’re an Ubuntu user and you’re using the default settings, each time you start typing in Dash (to open an application or search for a file on your computer), your search terms get sent to a variety of third parties, some of which advertise to you. Ubuntu should protect user privacy by default. Since it doesn’t, you can use the code to the left to disable the parts of Ubuntu which are invasive to your privacy.

You can also read more about Ubuntu 3rd parties: http://www.ubuntu.com/privacy-policy/third-parties

You’ve seen before how I got targeted by thousands of brute force attempts and how I mitigated the attacks earlier in this post; however, I wanted to do something better and more efficient. A filter at the firewall to block all these attempts from even establishing a basic TCP connection with the HTTP server.

The Problem
One major problem is that these attempts were not coming from a single IP address. Attackers will use TOR to hide themselves and to have different IPs to over-come the first obstacles that is: blocking the attacker’s source IP address.

Inspiration
No doubts, one of the best apps I’ve developed was CCleaner Runner – which got the attention of many software websites (in different languages!)such as this, this, and this.
The application was running perfectly each time, but as I believe: there is always a space of improvement. (Specially that I become better in tweaking algorithms!)

Screens

Description
CCleaner is no doubt the best cleaning app out there but one functionality that is missing is to auto clean the browser’s cache, temporary files, history, etc when closed. Many users use CCleaner to clean up their Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE browsers, so why not automate the whole process?