You’ve probably seen those deep-web images floating around on the Internet. Usually, it goes something like this: There is a towering iceberg and the deeper the underwater portion extends, the more “hidden” and “exotic” the content is described to be. Sometimes these images are accurate to a point, but most are just making things up.

So what exactly is ‘deep web’ then? Are there really hidden secrets and treasure buried under some cloak and dagger type conspiracy? Well, in short, the answer depends on your idea of treasure and conspiracy.

In this series of articles, I am going to break down the idea of a deep web, what is it, how it got there, and most importantly, how we can use it for our security—maybe even for lulz.

Anonymity and Darknets

As it stands today, practical knowledge of how darknets (non-indexed portions of the Internet) function will allow you to make more informed decisions regarding risks when rooting a box, hiding files, or communicating securely. Now, keep in mind that nothing short of unplugging your computer will make you 100% anonymous. You can have fifty proxies and a handful of VPNs, but never consider yourself to be completely masked. Look at anonymity as a trade off between function and speed.

The idea is to have enough masking, while maintaining a level of usefulness. While it is not impossible to track your actions, ideally you want to make it logistically too complex to be attempted in a realistic way.

If you need to escape your school’s firewall, a simple HTTP proxy may work for this. If you are rooting an AT&T server, you will want several layers between yourself and the target. Cyber crime laws are changing rapidly around the world, from Cairo to Chicago, and learning how to blend in with the masses is a valuable skill to have. You are harder to track when you are nobody at all.

First though, we need to talk about Google. Yes Google.

Why Google?

When you use Google to search, it does not take your query and search the entire Internet for results; there is simply too much data for that. It runs your search on databases of sites that have already been located by Google’s web crawlers. These crawlers are bots, coded to search for, find, and index content on the web. Primarily, this is achieved by ‘seeding’ the crawler with a few initial links to start with. It scans for more hyperlinks on those websites, connecting to and repeating this process over and over while creating a ‘map’ of the results.

It is this ‘map’ of collected links that your search request is actually looking at. While this is innovative, it contains a few inherent flaws.

The Internet is large. In fact, the Internet is very large, and estimates on just how much of it is actually indexed and publicly searchable range from 40 to 70 percent. Problems arise in the fact that most search engines do not crawl through non-HTTP protocols like Gopher or FTP. And if they choose to, developers can take steps to minimize indexing of their sites altogether (controls like the robots.txt standard and spider traps are commonly used). It is worth noting that network resources requiring authorization are not crawled, under normal circumstances.

The surface web makes up over 90 percent of what you use and do online. The remaining network services require you to directly connect to them, log in to them, or otherwise know they are there beforehand.

So, what good is all of this for you?

Right now, not as much as you might think. Though the content might not be searched, and is sometimes exciting and risque, you are still held to the basic laws of the Internet, TCP/IP.

Every packet you send that zips back and forth has your IP address inside. It has to have your IP address, or the remote server would not know where to route the requests back to. This means that even if you are snooping around where you shouldn’t be, even if it’s not on an indexed site, those server logs can still give you up, even when a normal HTTP/SOCKS proxy is used. When your door gets kicked open and the Feds storm your living room, you will have wished you took the time to truly hide yourself.

Picture the Internet like a city, with each building as a resource with an address. Envision the non-indexed parts as alleyways, still connected to the main streets, but lacking public addresses of their own.

Let’s take it one step farther… what if these alleyways had gates? What if you could create a path through the city using just the alley and your own private keys? You would be much harder to locate and follow. You could always pop out into the city, go into a house as you needed; people would only see you come and go from the alley, would not know where you started nor where you intend to go.

This is the basic idea behind low-latency anonymous networks like Tor and i2p. We will go over both of these in more detail, including installation and configuration, in the upcoming articles, so stay tuned.

Mozilla just released an experimental add-on to Firefox to show users all the third parties tracking them across the Web.

Few people on earth are watched more closely than a consumer cruising the Web looking to buy something. As privacy arguments continue to rage, knowing who is tracking you is critical to the discussion, but hard to determine. Collusion aims to provide that information. Demos and downloads are available now.

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs says it plain and simple: “now it’s time for us to watch the watchers.” Using a visual display, Collusion shows advertisers in red and websites in grey. Kovacs said in one day he found he was tracked by 150 entities. Collusion is to show consumers “what’s happening without their consent.”

• Touchscreen operating system available free to test
• Will work on tablets as well as PCs
• Tablet users will enjoy Microsoft Office for free
• ‘Make or break’ opportunity for ageing tech company

Last updated at 3:06 PM on 29th February 2012

Microsoft is offering the public a free trial of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system from today.

The new operating system will run on tablets as well as desktops and laptops – and is a sea-change for Windows that is seen as a make-or-break opportunity for Microsoft.

Tablets and cloud computing have made Bill Gates’ vision of ‘a computer on every desk and in every home’ seem quaint – Windows 8 aims to adapt the iconic operating system for life in the mobile world of tablets.

Windows 8 features blocks or ’tiles’ that can be moved around the screen or tapped to go straight into an application. The tiles update in real time, so you can see if you have emails, voice messages or Facebook notifications at a glance

Windows’ new lock screen, showing numbers of emails and messages: A free trial of the operating system will be available today after an official launch event. There is no official release date yet for the new tablet-friendly operating system

Windows 8 will come in two variations – one that works on desktops and laptops, and a new version for the ARM microprocessors in tablets, smartphones and other portable devices.

There is no set release date, but it’s widely expected to be available in autumn – offering Microsoft Office free on tablets, which could be a ‘killer app’ that puts Windows 8 machines ahead of Apple devices.

In both versions, Windows 8 features a completely new interface, borrowed from what Microsoft calls the ‘Metro’ style of the current Windows Phone software.

The free trial version is available to download here.

It features blocks or ’tiles’ that can be moved around the screen or tapped to go straight into an application.

The tiles update in real time, so you can see if you have emails, voice messages or Facebook notifications at a glance.

If PC and laptop users do not like the new format, they can revert to the old style with a click of the mouse.

The Windows 8 release has to be good, and soon, say industry experts.

More than 90 per cent of the world’s PCs still run Windows, but while Microsoft remains profitable thanks to divisions such as Xbox, sales of Windows have slowed.

Rival Apple, with its command of the tablet market, has gained. Microsoft’s market capitalisation is now $267 billion, less than half Apple’s $535 billion.

‘Now that the tablet market is being defined by the iPad and the (Amazon) Kindle, if they come out with a buggy first version, they won’t get a second chance,’ said Michael Cherry, a former Microsoft engineer who now works at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. ‘They can’t afford to disappoint customers.’     

Microsoft has not put a timetable on the final release, but Windows unit head Steven Sinofsky has said new versions of Windows should be no more than three years apart, which would put a Windows 8 debut around October 2012.

Bill Gates’ vision of ¿a computer on every desk and in every home¿ now seems quaint

The ’tile’ interface, where a set of panels bring up ‘live’ information – showing, for instance, whether there are emails to read, or bring up Facebook posts – is similar to the one found in Windows Phone, and apps will work smoothly across the two

The public will get its first good look at Windows 8 on Wednesday, when Sinofsky launches the ‘Consumer Preview’ at an event in Barcelona.

Everybody will be able to download a test version of Windows 8 that will run on PCs and laptops based on Intel chips. But they won’t get to try out Windows 8 on an ARM tablet until later this year.

A Windows tablet that works seamlessly with Microsoft’s Exchange email system and Office applications would be a godsend for corporate technology managers, who have been bending over backward to put their CEO’s iPads – ‘executive jewelry,’ as one analyst puts it – onto their company’s email and security systems.

Microsoft’s killer punch is Office. After months of silence, Sinofsky confirmed earlier this month that the world’s most popular suite of work applications, including the newest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, will come installed on tablets running the ARM version of Windows.

That would give Windows tablets a unique selling point over iPads and Android tablets.   

Feb 22nd

Investing in the stock market is a high stakes gamble, with one swing either way making or breaking an investment firm or investor – as many have painfully learned during the past two recession-marred years. And, because of what’s at stake, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was created out of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to regulate the industry, which at the time was decimated by the Great Depression.

As the financial industry has changed, along with the means for conducting business within it, so too have compliance regulations. One of the more recent, and most significant, rule changes is the inclusion of email archiving mandates.

According to the SEC, requirements for the retention and archiving of electronic communications was made effective by Rule 17a-4, enacted on May 12, 2003. Looking back, the rule was necessary at the time, as a Cohasset Associates survey published in April 2003 revealed that 53 percent of financial organizations did not include electronic records, including email, in their records management program. And 39 percent said they did not have an email retention policy.

That was all forced to change once the law’s rule change was put into effect. Still, financial companies can use a refresher on regulatory mandates every so often.

What must be archived?

According to the SEC, broker-dealers may preserve records from “electronic storage media,” as many now deal in such communications anyway. Rule 17a-4 of the Exchange Act, defines the term as “any digital storage medium or system,” which includes email.

In terms of material that must be stored, financial institutions are required to retain a record of each securities transaction they administer, as defined in Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4. This includes any investments they broker, such as the buying and selling of stocks.

The retention of such transactions, information of which may be found in stored emails, is an integral part of the SEC’s ability to protect investors. These records can be used to audit compliance among financial institutions.

How must data be stored?

According to the law, electronic records must be archived in a non-rewritable and non-erasable manner. Records must also be easily accessible when stored. These mandates will ensure the stored document or email is the original and hasn’t been altered, and they can be retrieved in a timely manner.

Of course, this is easily accomplished through the use of an email archiving solution, which the SEC endorses for companies to the meet regulatory compliance.

“One method using such a system stores a specified expiry or retention period with each record or file system. The system blocks record deletion or alteration by any manner of intervention until the expiry is reached or the retention period has lapsed,” an interpretation of the SEC rule posted on the organization’s website states.

For how long must records be stored?

Here’s where a lot of financial institutions run into much confusion regarding their data archiving requirements. Even the aforementioned interpretation of rule changes refers only to a “specified time period.”

According to the SEC, in general, these can be any organization, association, person, group of persons or system that constitutes, maintains, or provides a market place or facility for bringing together purchasers and sellers of securities.

And, according to the SEC, archives must hold electronic data for six months with immediate access, and with non-immediate access for a period of at least two years. Following the specified time period, data may be deleted without regulatory repercussions.

Microsoft product lifecycle policy is actually quite coherent and easy to understand, at least on paper.

Microsoft has a well-documented support lifecycle for its software products. It’s part of the agreement that the company makes with everyone who installs Windows, especially business customers who want some assurance that they’ll be able to get updates and support for operating systems and applications even if they choose not to upgrade to the latest and greatest.

Now that Windows 7 is firmly entrenched in the marketplace, I’m starting to get questions about its life span (and it doesn’t help when high-profile web sites and bloggers get the facts dead wrong, as they did last month with the bogus “XP in 2020″ story). To help clear the air, I’ve put together a chart listing all of Microsoft’s supported operating systems. The calculations start with the general availability (GA) date for each product. Consumer operating systems are supported for five years after their GA date, and business OSes are supported for 10 years (with the last five years classed as “extended support”). The official date of retirement for support is the second Tuesday in the first month of the quarter following that anniversary (which also happens to be Patch Tuesday), which means each support cycle typically gets a few weeks or months of extra support tacked on at the end.

For Windows 7, you can do the math yourself. The GA date for all Windows 7 editions was October 22, 2009. Five years after that date is October 22, 2014. The next calendar quarter begins in January, 2015, and the second Tuesday of that month is January 13. So, that’s when mainstream support is scheduled to end. Extended support for business editions goes an extra five years, until January 14, 2020 (the second Tuesday of the month).

For Windows XP, however, those calculations don’t work, because Microsoft has extended XP’s life artificially. To find XP’s end-of-support date, you should use the Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search page to get the official answer. Enter the name of the OS and click Search, and you get back a table that shows the general availability date, the retirement dates for mainstream and extended support, and retirement dates for service packs, which are governed by a separate set of rules.

Here’s the set of search results for Windows XP:

The one date that matters most on this chart is the one I’ve circled in red—April 8, 2014.

Service Packs 1 and 1a were retired back in 2006. Service Pack 2 rode off into the sunset last month, on July 13. And Service Pack 3 will be retired along with all editions of Windows XP on Patch Tuesday, April 8, 2014.

By that time, Windows 8 will probably be well past its first birthday, and Microsoft will (at least for a short time) be supporting four separate Windows versions. Here’s a table that summarizes the support policy for all of the current Windows desktop versions:

What, then, can organizations do to optimize UPS availability? As this white paper shows, the conventional answers to that question are often not the best ones. UPS reliability is ultimately less a function of UPS design such as the differences between line-interactive and double-conversion products than of overall power system design. In the end, the surest way to increase UPS availability is to focus on minimizing repair time and maximizing redundancy, both inside your UPSs and across your power protection scheme as a whole.

In addition, this white paper also explains why, contrary to popular belief, modular UPS designs provide superior availability even though they typically contain more parts that could potentially fail.