Blog

  • Social Network Monitoring

    From article: “New software released by Cisco Systems Inc. on Wednesday makes it much easier for banks, retailers, and other businesses — including your employer — to monitor the mountain of data on social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.”  See full article here.

  • Fantastic, intricate values-in-design study of cookie development

    Since cookies have been kind of a theme recently, it seems appropriate to post this long essay on the history of cookie development (which includes a link to a contrarian argument about cookies and privacy that’s quite thought provoking). It’s quite technical and completely worth it — a step-by-step tour of the RFCs, browser development, and gradual mission creep that made cookies into the weird complicated mess they are today. It’s a great values-in-design study (without coming from an explicit ViD background) that traces a legacy of “rapid deployment of poorly specified features, or leaving essential security considerations as ‘out of scope’” and how it expresses itself in code, corporate practice, and outcomes for us, the users.

  • Industry Insider: Defense of Behavioral Advertising Is Balderdash

    A punchy run-down and send-up of the online advertising industry’s poor response to recent criticism.

  • Firesheep Evolved

    Shorter but not necessarily sweeter: Idiocy

  • Firesheep

    Short and sweet: a Firefox extension that exposes the fact that login cookies are transacted unencrypted for a lot of the biggest social networking sites — meaning that you can sit on an open wi-fi network and harvest all the authentication data you like (known as a sidejacking attack): Firesheep.

  • Facebook Privacy: Gay Users Outed to Advertisers

    Article via Ars Technica in which researchers discovered that Facebook may inadvertently be outing gay users to its advertisers.

    http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/more-privacy-headaches-for-facebook-gay-users-outed-to-advertisers.ars

  • Wall Street Journal contin.

    A new set of stories relating to Facebook and MySpace apps and identifiable information they share: Read about it here.

  • Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t read EULAs either

    In a recent appearance at Canisius College, Chief Justice John Roberts addressed two interesting questions from the floor.  One concerned the issue of televised oral arguments.  Roberts expressed concern about the hesitation some might feel when answering questions on camera for an invisible and potentially limitless audience.  The question here seems to be one that has troubled courts for some time: how much and what type of publicity is appropriate to an open court system?  The other–and the more well reported–question concerned end-user licensing agreements (EULAs) for software and web-based services.  Robert flatly admitted that he does not read the fine print, noting that the sheer amount of information contained in such agreements tends to defeat the purpose of disclosure.  He went on to say that “the legal system obviously is to blame,” and that he had no answer to the problem.  That the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would simply click-through such agreements is but an extreme example of the problem that Yannis Bakos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David R. Trossen have already demonstrated in their excellent paper, “Does Anyone Read the Fine Print?“: that there are nowhere near enough term-conscious users to discipline companies who might employ unfavorable terms.  And as the write-up from TechDirt further notes, Roberts’ admission also casts doubt on the legal standing of such instances of mindless assent.

  • There’s One in Every Crowd

    Right on time for Halloween, a spooky post reminding us that creepy people offline + creepy people online = creepy people across domains. It never hurts to remember to always be careful out there…

  • More on Street View

    So, there has been a fair amount of talk about Google’s Street View faux pas. Apparently, the data breach was more significant than some had anticipated. Apparently, among the bits and pieces of data collected were full emails!.

    Perhaps more interesting is a hack developed by Samy Kamkar that uses MAC address information collected by Google to maliciously (and extremely accurately) determine a user’s geographical coordinates. Kamkar has a video demonstrating this hack (and the extent of information collected by Google’s Street View rovers here.