PC Repair Horror Stories

Recently, Sky News in the UK ran a sting to investigate local PC repair shops. They disabled a honeypot machine by loosening one of the RAM chips and took it to various repair shops for service. The machine had “private” data on it, including photos, documents, the usual stuff, and it also had spyware on it, not… Read More

Tweet with Care

This post features 95% more obvious than your average post, and as usual, insert Twitter disclaimer here. Obvious Point 1: Twitter is growing fast. According to Mashable (data from Compete), Twitter grew 752% in 2008 in terms of daily unique visitors, rising from about 500,000 uniques in January 2008 to 4.43 million in December. And… Read More

Street View Makes Immortals

Google Maps rolled out the infamous Street View for six new cities this week: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson. In typical Google fashion, they are touting this as more cities to explore, ignoring the creepy factor. Having lived in and knowing people who currently live in several of these cities, I spent some… Read More

Bigger Big Brother, Part 2

Thanks to Eddie and Steve for weighing in on the discussion I started yesterday. I think fundamentally, we disagree about who has more damaging information. I say Amazon does. Eddie and Steve say Google. My argument is that purchase history (even without exposing credit cards) can be more damaging than search/email/feed reading/documents. I say that… Read More