Browse public Instagram accounts anonymously

October 23, 2020GeneralEdward Kiledjian

I wrote an article on how to browse Twitter anonymously using Nitter. I talk about the issues and dangers of tracking by Twitter, the Facebook owned Instagram takes all those risks and pumps them up 10 times.

Nitter is a consumption service for Twitter posts, well bibliogram.art is a consumption service for public Instagram posts.

Bibliogram is a website that scrapes Instagram public profiles and then displays it in a cleaner, faster loading interface that stops trackers, removes ads, generates an RSS feed and doesn’t require an account.

Obviously, because you are not logged in, you cannot post, comment, follow or perform other functions that require an account.

Here is the profile of vegan artisanal cheese maker Vegcheese on IG which consumes 1.81MB to load.

Here is the Vegcheese IG profile via bibliogram and it consumes 748KB to load (less than half the size of the original IG page.

You can browse bibliogram from any web browser. Here are some instances for you to try:

There are many more instances around the world but I wanted to give you some examples. For me the fastest is the ENDL hosted site from Canada.

If you use Android, you can install the UnTrackMe app and force all Instagram links to open in bibliogram as well.

Snapchat usage grows among teens

June 5, 2018GeneralEdward Kiledjian

Pew Research publishes interesting surveys, and they recently shared results about what teens use most. Contrary to public opinion, Snapchat is still king with teens, followed by Youtube. Facebook usage amongst teens is down 71% compared to the 2014-2015 Pew report.

45% of teens admitted to being online "almost constantly."
24% of teens admitted to being online "several times a day."

Girls are more likely to be "almost constantly" online (50%) compared to boys (39%).

Instagram is still going strong and 72% of teens now use it (up from 52% in 2015). 70% of teens use Snapchat (up from 41% in 2015).

Most platforms have an equal amount of creation and consumption except Youtube, where the most significant proportion is consumption.

You will notice that Snapchat and Instagram have higher usage than Facebook. Interestingly you will note:

Instagram/Snapchat are designed to post pictures, whereas Facebook supports photos but videos, links, text updates, etc.
Instagram/Snapchat are designed to be used on a smartphone, whereas Facebook is multiplatform. This is confirmed when the stats show that 95% of teens have or have access to a smartphone (88% of teens have access to a computer at home).

31% of teens believe social media has a positive impact on their lives while 24% think it has a negative one. 45% believe it has a neutral effect on their lives.

It's time to secure your social networks

December 9, 2012InfoSecEdward Kiledjian

Most social media users don't realize how much of their information they allow 3rd party apps to access. It is such a problem that I use IFTTT to send me a monthly reminder to check my social media security settings.

My recommendation is to use MyPermissions and I recommend you read my write-up here. It takes 5 minutes each time and it is time well spent.

If there are any accounts you want to close, take a look at AccountKiller, a neat site that shows you (step by step) how to delete your account from the most popular sites on the internet.

Instagram on iPhone makes you vulnerable to hacking

December 4, 2012InfoSecEdward Kiledjian

A recently discovered vulnerability on Instagram for iPhone makes your account vulenrable to hacking. This vulnerability was discovered by Carlos Reventlov and he explains how a hacker can seize control of a victim's account.

The description he provides is:

The Instagram app communicates with the Instagram API via HTTP and HTTPs connections.

Highly sensitive activities, such as login and editing profile data, are sent through a secure channel. However, some other request are sent through plain HTTP without a signature, those request could be exploited by an attacker connected to the same LAN of the victim’s iPhone.

The only authentication method for some HTTP calls is an standard cookie that is sent without encryption when the user starts the Instagram app.

An attacker on the same LAN of the victim could launch a simple arpspoofing attack to trick the iPhones into passing port 80 traffic through the attackers machine. When the victim starts the Instagram app a plain text cookie is sent to the Instagram server, once the attacker gets the cookie he is able to craft special HTTP requests for getting data and deleting photos.

The important note is that Secunia has validated the attach and released a customer advisory. There is nothing you can do as a customer to fix this issue, it has to be corrected by the manufacturer

Take 2 minutes to secure your social media information

June 27, 2012SecurityEdward Kiledjian

If you are like most social media users, you grant [app] access to your account way too easily and probably have dozens, even hundreds of apps with read and write access to your accounts. Take a second and think about what this means for your online privacy (or lack thereof).

The tool

Tech entrepreneur, Avi Charkham, faced the same dilemma and was frustrated by how much time it took him to locate the account permissions pages for the 8 most popular social media sites (often taking 5 clicks or more ). But unlike most users, he decided to do something about it and create a cool and useful site called Mypermissions.org. His site links directly to the privacy pages of the popular social media sites which means you can review and secure your pages within minutes (instead of hours).

The site currently supports:

Facebook
Twitter
Google
Yahoo
Linkedin
Dropbox
Instagram
Foursquare
Microsoft Windows Live
AOL
Flickr
Familio

New Tools

The site now has two more ways to get and stay secure:

MyPermissions Cleaner, the site describes as “Automatically scan your apps permissions, Get alerts when apps access your private info and remove them all in one click.”
MyPermissions mobile app for iPhone which helps you while on the go.

Conclusion

I use IFTTT to automate some of my social media tasks and have configured the service to email me a monthly reminder to check my permissions. I can’t stress how important it is to keep your permissions clean and updated. I will write an article shortly about a site that mines status updates from public facebook profiles and publishes their embarrassing content on its site for all to see.

Link: Mypermissions.org