The privacy of our email is protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, which requires law-enforcement officials to obtain a warrant to intercept and read private email. However, the law has a critical flaw: it does not require a warrant for emails “left on servers” for more than 180 days. This made… Read More »
For a while now, the web browser vendors and major purveyors of targeted internet advertising have been working on a proposal for allowing users to prevent web sites from tracking their online activity and using it to “customize their web browsing experience,” a.k.a., displaying targeted advertisements which are, theoretically, tailored to the person viewing them.… Read More »
Earlier this year, my wife and two of my daughters attended CELEBR-8 U, a conference for middle school and high school girls organized by Moving Traditions, a wonderful organization for which our family has a great deal of fondness and respect. One of the co-sponsors of the conference was BBYO. Unbeknownst to us, Moving Traditions… Read More »
UPDATE: The Consumerist has posted a template you can use for your opt-out letter. Furthermore, the Consumerist article says that eBay just did the same thing as PayPal, and you need to send a letter to opt out of that one as well. There’s a link in the article to a template for the eBay… Read More »
A recent security breach exposed the plaintext usernames and passwords of almost 100,000 members of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The usernames and passwords were discovered by a researcher in 100GB of log files inadvertently left open to the public on an IEEE FTP server. Leaving aside for the moment how incredible… Read More »
I have several domains on Go Daddy, including my blog and my primary email domain. As a result, both my blog and my email were nonfunctional for much of the day on September 10, due to the Go Daddy outage you’ve probably already heard about. For the record, I first started using Go Daddy simply… Read More »
In June, I wrote about a technique used by spammers to harvest names and email addresses of “live” targets for their spam. In a nutshell: you post an ad to Craigslist; the spammer sends you an automated email which makes you think that maybe the sender is interested in your ad; you send a response,… Read More »
UPDATE [2012-10-03]: RightScale has ongoing issues with the stability of their command-line tools. In particular: rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with a timeout error. You can’t just retry, because sometimes the script you were trying to queue was queued despite the error, and there’s no way to tell. rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with an error “Failed to process… Read More »
Ken at Popehat reports on Pittsfield judge Bethzaida Sanabria-Vega ordering a local blogger not only to stop writing about the daughter of a local public official who was the perpetrator of a hit-and-run accident which nearly killed someone and got off virtually scott-free after the courts “lost” some of the paperwork related to her case,… Read More »
UPDATE [2013-02-13]: According to this article on Craigslist, as of February 10, 2013, they have implemented and are testing the idea I described below for fixing the problem described in this posting. I recently placed a for-sale ad on Craigslist. I anonymized my email address in the ad, which means that the published email address… Read More »