Somebody seems to be using my email address in a weird, ongoing way that doesn’t seem to be benefiting them in any way. The fact that I can’t figure out why they’re doing it concerns me, because I have to suspect that there is some benefit to them, which I just haven’t been able to… Read More »
I try to make a habit of giving out “tagged” email addresses to web sites when I sign up for accounts / mailing lists / whatever. For example, when creating an account at widgets.com, instead of just signing up as “jik@kamens.us”, I might sign up as “jik+widgets@kamens.us”. It ends up in the same mailbox regardless,… Read More »
An interesting comment showed up a few hours ago on an earlier blog posting of mine about Barack Obama: “Just wanted to say that I am eployed at a large Pharmaceutical company in Clayton NC and I support Barack Obama with all my heart. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect… Read More »
I just tried to visit Facebook but typed the URL wrong and typed “faceobook.com” (note the extra ‘o’). Here’s where I ended up: Devious, eh? Needless to say, I did not participate in the “anonymous survey.”
You’ve probably heard by now (the party line from Gawker, an a much more comprehensive analysis from Forbes) that a huge database of Gawker Media usernames and (poorly) encrypted passwords was recently stolen, and that the thieves published the stolen data for anyone in the world to download, and that the thieves managed to crack… Read More »
The parental controls built into the Mac OS X Mail client can be easily bypassed by anyone who knows the email address of the child and his/her parent. The Mail client can be fooled into adding any address to the child’s whitelist (i.e., the list of addresses with whom the child is allowed to correspond),… Read More »
Yesterday, I decided I wanted to unsubscribe from one of the e-newsletters published by SANS, which bills itself as, “the most trusted source for computer security training, certification and research.” There were no instructions in the e-newsletter for how to unsubscribe, so I went to their Web site. It told me that I had to… Read More »
I share my home office with my kids, an unfortunate necessity in a house with five bedrooms, five children, and no dedicated office space (the “office” is actually one of the bedrooms). All the kids are fully aware of the “never, ever touch anything on Daddy’s desk” rule, but apparently the stuff on my desk… Read More »
I recently received a letter from American Express confirming that I’d enrolled in online bill payment. I received the letter on paper, in an envelope, with a stamp on it, in the mailbox on my porch. The final sentence of the letter, all the way at the bottom, below the signature, reads as follows: You… Read More »
As I previously wrote, I recently had to change my password on over 300 Web sites because my default “medium-security password” was compromised. The compromise was caused by a bug in the WordPress blogging platform which can result in inadvertent disclosure of information when content is pasted into the WYSIWYG text editor built into WordPress.… Read More »