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 [...]
Entries Tagged as 'security'
The facebook privacy problem
May 18th, 2010 ·
Tags: The internet · security
Contextual advertising giggles
April 29th, 2010 ·
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 [...]
Tags: Amusements · Research · security
Ah the irony
December 1st, 2009 ·
Tags: The internet · security
allofmp3.com rears their ugly head
August 13th, 2009 ·
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 [...]
Tags: The internet · security
You may have already won
July 2nd, 2009 ·
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 [...]
Tags: Economics · Rants · The internet · security
It’s about trust
October 8th, 2008 ·
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 [...]
Tags: Politics · Research · security
Thoughts from the Crypto conference
August 28th, 2008 ·
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 [...]
The Annual Pilgrimage
August 15th, 2008 ·
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 [...]
The birthday of spam
May 2nd, 2008 ·
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 [...]
Tags: The internet · security
When hackers have offspring
March 27th, 2008 · 1 Comment
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 [...]
Tags: Amusements · security