Special Interest Group on CRAP

I’ll take the opportunity to recommend the recent book by Susan Landau on wiretapping. Privacy is increasing in importance over time, and I’m noticing a lot of fuzzy thinking about how to respect privacy. One incident that recently came up is the fact that my car reports latitude, longitude, position, and speed whenever it downloads [...]

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A few years ago I worked on a coupons project at Google, and I ended up getting on a mailing list from the Food Marketing Institute in order to understand manufacturer’s coupons. The email they still send me is pretty funny.

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I suppose they are related…

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When I first set up my blog at sigcrap I enabled comments on the site. This quickly became a pain in the ass, so I ended up disabling the feature. The whole point of social media is to encourage discussion, but it was simply too annoying to moderate comments. Later on I imported the RSS [...]

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If I rank my activity in social networking sites, it probably is proportional to the number of friends that I have on these accounts. In decreasing order this would be: my corp buzz friends on my google.com account my facebook friends my public buzz friends on my gmail account my twitter account. my quora account [...]

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Here are two 512-bit inputs whose MD5 hashes are identical. The 512-bit inputs differ in only two bits. Nice work mentioned in http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/643 MD5(6165300E87A79A55F7C60BD034FEBD0B6503CF04854F709EFB0FC034874C9C65 2F94CC4015A12DEB5C15F4A3490786BB6D658673A4341F7D8FD75920EFD18D5A) = CEE9A457E790CF20D4BDAA6D69F01E41 MD5(6165300E87A79A55F7C60BD034FEBD0B6503CF04854F749EFB0FC034874C9C65 2F94CC4015A12DEBDC15F4A3490786BB6D658673A4341F7D8FD75920EFD18D5A) = CEE9A457E790CF20D4BDAA6D69F01E41 xor 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000004000000000000000000 0000000000000000800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000

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I decided to create a convenient link to the rss feed of facebook postings by my friends. Thanks to jwz for pointing out how to do this.

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I took the plunge today and ordered a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. This is the second car that I have bought online, but the process this time was pretty weird. Once I got an offer I was willing to take, I clicked on “Place order” and got the following disclaimer. I never thought that there [...]

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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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For the last few months I have been carrying two smart phones: Motorola Droid on Verizon HTC Nexus One on T-Mobile I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two phones, and it’s a close call. The Droid has a few advantages. The physical keyboard is very welcome, but I find myself [...]

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