Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Small Bits: ID Angel, Books and Garbage

  • Latanya Sweeney has announced a new tool, Identity Angel, to crawl the web and discover if there’s enough information to steal an identity.
  • Stefan Brands has made the first four chapters of a book on Electronic Money available. This will be a great reference for people wanting to think about privacy and payments. I’d like to encourage Stefan to make the file available as HTML as well as PDF. (I’m fond of tth for this.)
  • The New York Times has a review of The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping
  • Dutch ISP XS4All is suing the Dutch government to recover the costs of the wiretapping equipment they’ve installed.
  • In a stunning example of trusting the computer over reality, a Guardian story on computerized garbage cans ends:

    He said the microchips would help the council fend off unwarranted criticism. “We will have a confident response to customers who claim their bin may not have been emptied,” he added.

(Many of these are via Dave Farber’s Interesting People list.)