recent posts
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04/29/12Sam Walton’s Ghost Is Watching You
Wal-Mart maintains a near-impregnable 125,000-square-foot facility in Arkansas that likely houses every slice of information about every purchase in the store’s history. Terabytes upon terabytes of data live here in this super-secretive, tornado-resistant warehouse.
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04/15/12Privacy and YOU: The Interconnected Menace
Be careful, boys and girls, what information you put on the internet. You never know who might see it.
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04/02/12A Truly Secure Password Should Be as Long as This Post
That’s kind of how I feel about the fellow who makes twenty-character passwords complete with $s, ^s, and }s. Why are you spending all this time and effort to protect yourself against something that A) is unlikely to happen and B) can be dealt with if it does?
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03/30/12Passwords, Passwords, Passwords
I have different usernames and passwords for my personal email, bank account, cable company, electric company, water company, cell-phone provider, Twitter, Facebook, and the various other games and services I use on the web. People wonder whether we’re getting dumber because we no longer have to memorize phone numbers.
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03/19/12Who Are You, and Who Am I to Ask?
An important aspect of personal autonomy is the right to shape one’s public and private persona by choosing when to tell the truth about oneself, when to conceal and when to deceive.
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03/13/12That's Nothing -- K-Mart Told Me I'd Have a Son Named Stanley in 2024
It isn't that most people are particularly embarrassed about buying milk or beer; they just don't like the idea of being watched without their knowledge.
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03/05/12A Polite Introduction
Greetings, Nymbus readers. You probably don't know me. If you have access to the thousands of searches, credit-card purchases, and blog posts I've made online, you could have a pretty good idea of who I am. Even still, I feel the need to introduce myself. I'm Darrell Johnson, a blogger for this venture known as Nymbus.
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02/25/12The Horrible Equilibrium that is Facebook Connect
Our reliance on for-profit entities means we often find ourselves stuck in a horrible equilibrium where each individual transaction seems to be worth making, for both parties, but the real net cost far outweighs the benefit.
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02/19/12This Stuff Matters: Google's New Privacy Policy (with a few edits)
... We may also use various technologies to determine location, such as sensor data from your device that may, for example, provide information on nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers so that we know who uses our services while on the toilet and how often.
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02/12/12