Special Interest Group on CRAP

The furor over facebook’s privacy problems has recently escalated. There are several parts to this: If you are logged into Facebook but then surf around the web, you will be transmitting personal details from your facebook presence to the other web sites When other people surf the web, they will be transmitting data about their [...]

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I saw a photo posted on Facebook that was tagged with Andrei Broder and Prabhakar Raghavan (both of Yahoo research). It’s ironic that both have worked on algorithms for contextual advertising, but the ads on Facebook next to the photos were hilarious. One of the ads is for “rich dads”. I’m not sure if that [...]

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Today I got a piece of spam sent to the email address that was only used for communication with allofmp3.com. In case you have forgotten, that was a shady music seller who sold MP3 music files by the megabyte, but was eventually shut down through pressure by the US trade representative. The spam had a [...]

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Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an airmail letter [...]

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As I look around at what is happening in the world today, I keep seeing evidence that it all comes down to trust. As someone who spent a great deal of time working on information security, the subject of trust is one that I tried to design for, but I always regarded trust as a [...]

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I was having a hard time summarizing my thoughts from the Crypto conference. As always it was nice to see old friends and engage in discussions about the state of the art in crypto, but in retrospect I think the field of mathematical cryptography has dug itself into a hole and has a hard time [...]

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I started working on cryptography as a way to do something more practical than pure mathematics. Waaaaaaay back in 1985 I discovered the Crypto conference in Santa Barbara at UCSB, and I was enthralled because I could interact with computer scientists, electrical engineers, business people, and other mathematicians on a subject that seemed to make [...]

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Sadly, today is the 30th birthday of spam. I seem to remember that you should never trust anyone over 30. Email providers are largely distinguished today by their ability to accurately filter out spam. There is a huge of amount of absolute crap that is sent, but most of this is easy to handle. The [...]

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Disclaimer: this is unrelated to my own child (I think) I recently came across the following cartoon, which is a joke that is so obscure that few people will get it (you need to know what sql injection attacks are). Still, if Frank Zappa could name his daughter “Moon Unit” (sister of Dweezil), and David [...]

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