It is absolutely scary what you can find on google.

[Ecthy]

Audiogalaxy

[Dinner]

I understand that certain types of web cams and networkable security cameras have built in web servers. It turns out a lot of people set these up but did not secure them behind firewalls.

I'm sure the peeping toms are enjoying that one.

[Spiffor]

Only the imprudent can be found through their nickname (Speaking of which, I made one imprudence, which would allow a stalker to find me - I have just corrected it, but Google will take time to update)

[Pekka]

Well of course. If this gets you scared, I have a Hell to sell you . This is just the beginning what's possible and even easy to do. It's just a matter of who really wants to. And then of course, a lot of people do .

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Spiffor
Only the imprudent can be found through their nickname (Speaking of which, I made one imprudence, which would allow a stalker to find me - I have just corrected it, but Google will take time to update)

archive.org knows all.

[Immortal Wombat]

/me wonders whether or not to phone Oerdin *

[ixnay]

Here's a fun use for google:

I'm the admin for another board and we recently had some trouble with a bunch of trolls coming in and trying to invade our board.

We eventually traced it back to some crappy proboards site, where they were plotting to invade and disrupt our board.

Turned out their main admin was one of the people that signed up for our boards. Since I had access to our database, I got his password on our forums out of there (which was MD5 encrypted). Rather than trying to decrypt his password hash, I simply plugged it into google, where it gave me a site that had decrypted md5 hashes, and one of the decrypted ones was his. I then had his password, which as it turned out, was used on all sorts of email and other private accounts.

Fun stuff, though a bit scary. I suppose the moral of the story is "Don't use password that you use elsewhere when you try and go invade another website"

[pchang]

There are a lot of people with the same name as me living in the same area. Google searches turn up lots of things about them, but nothing about me.

[Pekka]

ixnay, you just admitted abusing your admin privilidges?

nasty man!

but I guess the bugger deserved it.

[ixnay]

Hey now, I never said I actually did anything with the info...

[DaShi]

I'm a corporate entity. All the information you may find about me on the web has been constructed and secretly planted there to create the illusion of my identity.

[Ted Striker]

I used to post personal info online but stopped that a long time ago. Too many weirdos.

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by ixnay
Hey now, I never said I actually did anything with the info...

Originally posted by ixnay
I then had his password, which as it turned out, was used on all sorts of email and other private accounts.

I can only think of one way to determine if the same password was used on email and other private accounts.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
Fine, show me what you can find with just my username (This name is used by millions of geeks all over the planet). And even with my real name you couldn't find much.

That's true... I was already wondering what you had to do with getting married in the Dominican Republic .

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Oerdin
By doing an index search you can also search people's hard drives who don't have fire walls so you can check out what's in "my documents" or "my music". I wouldn't want people reading my personal documents and that's why I have a fire wall but lots of people have always on connections but haven't bothered to set up a firewall.

Paranoid bull****. Just for the heck of it, disable your firewall and then try to access you're own pc in a webbrowser (you can do this from your own pc by using 127.0.0.1 as address). You'll only get a 'connection refused' error. The only way to make your harddisk accessible from the Internet is by installing a web server, and all web servers have at least basic security measures and only allow outsiders to access those directories which you expicitly allow to be accessed.

Of course, firewalls have their uses, but stopping Google from 'invading' your PC isn't one of them, that's just not necessary...

However, it *is* true that for many people there's more personal info online than they realise. Basically one should assume that anything you've ever done online can be traced back to you, and sometimes a good portion of your offline life as well (though in my experience this is more true for Americans than for Europeans). If there's anything you don't want the entire world to know (now or in the future), you shouldn't be posting it where the entire world can read it...