Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

I see that a lot of people are getting a bit scared when looking at this. Me, I see nothing scary there (and I’m tinfoil-hat guy) except that clipboard item, and I don’t use IE, so that doesn’t apply to me. Of course, if you didn’t already know that all this information was available to servers you contact, you might get a shock from it.

The average Internet user should be a lot more scared about what ports their computer exposes to the outside world than they are about what information their browser carries with requests. You can pop over to GRC and scroll down to the ‘Shields Up’ item. Clicking through there will let you run a whole bunch of tests against your local machine, to determine what ports and services are open to the outside world. If you’re the sort of person who’s set up port-forwarding on your router, this won’t be anything new to you. If you’re not, or if you don’t have a router, you will get some surprises.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 11:10 am and is filed under Science and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.