Instapaper’s (anti-)social network Ben Brooks noticed and blogged about how Instapaper’s social features, introduced earlier this year, are minimal: There’s just a list of articles that people you chose to follow decided that they liked. All without knowing who, or if, anybody will ever see that they liked that article. That was exactly the idea, and I’m very happy to see it perceived that way. Social features are tricky. Social networks also need to address difficult issues with identity, privacy, harassment, spam, and information overload. These systems require a lot of time and money to develop, maintain, and support. With Instapaper’s following system, I wanted to deal with as little of the difficult baggage as possible, even if it meant omitting some of the “sticky” social dynamics that can significantly boost user counts and engagement. There are no public usernames, avatars, or profile pages. There are no notifications whatsoever for following and unfollowing.
Multi-tenancy in the cloud: Why it matters Whether an IT organization is going with public or private clouds, it's important to understand the nuances of multi-tenant architecture. For public clouds, IT managers need to understand the degree of multi-tenancy supported by whichever vendor they are looking at. For private clouds, the entire responsibility of designing a multi-tenant architecture rests with the IT managers. Enterprise cloud adoption has gone beyond the levels of intellectual pursuits and casual experimentation. None of that is to say that there aren't nagging issues, including but not limited to how different enterprise workloads match up against different types of clouds and responsible ways to plan and implement the necessary migrations. Based on the characteristics of the workload, cloud adoption will swing between public and private clouds. Besides appropriate workload distribution, architectural considerations are also key. Multi-tenancy defined Degrees of multi-tenancy How to choose your multi-tenancy degree
A Case for Pseudonyms pseu·do·nym [sood-n-im] –noun a fictitious name used by an author to conceal his or her identity; pen name. There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with. They may be concerned about threats to their lives or livelihoods, or they may risk political or economic retribution. They may wish to prevent discrimination or they may use a name that’s easier to pronounce or spell in a given culture. Online, the reasons multiply. Pseudonymous speech has played a critical role throughout history as well. A new debate around pseudonymity on online platforms has arisen as a result of the identification policy of Google+, which requires users to identify by "the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you". While these arguments are not entirely without merit, they misframe the problem. There are myriad reasons why an individual may feel safer identifying under a name other than their birth name.
‘Decoding the Renaissance,’ at the Folger Shakespeare Photo WASHINGTON — The Sigaba encryption machine squats in the Folger Shakespeare Library here like a thuggish interloper. Used by the American military in the 1940s and 1950s to send coded messages, it looks like an oversize, boxy typewriter with rotors rising above the lid like a mechanical brain. No object could seem less Elizabethan, yet appearances deceive. “Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers,” an exhibition that runs through Feb. 26, draws a straight line from the cipher discs devised by the humanist polymath Leon Battista Alberti in the 1460s and Francis Bacon’s discovery of bilateral ciphers — a way of writing coded messages with just two letters — to Sigaba, the American answer to the German Enigma machine. It’s a rather fashionable subject at the moment. Together, the Folger Library and the Library of Congress, a major lender to the exhibition, hold one of the world’s deepest collections of works on cryptography. Mr. Mr. Mr.
Sexual Activity Tracked By Fitbit Shows Up In Google Search Results Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable. You can click here to access these results. As you may know, the Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures, through accelerometer technology, information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. So why are Fitbit users’ profiles able to be searchable in Google? So these users may be unwittingly sharing their most intimate details (i.e. kissing, hugging and more) when recording their sexual activity to calculate how many calories they have burned in a given period of time. Thanks to Andy Baio for the tip.
Pablos Holman – Top Hacker Shows Us How It’s Done » TEDx Midwest - Riveting Talks by Remarkable People Pablos Holman – Top Hacker Shows Us How It’s Done Year: 2010Type: tedx You think your wireless and other technology is safe? From Blue Tooth to automobile remotes, PCs, and "secure" credit cards, Hacker extraordinaire shows how nearly every secure system is vulnerable. Speakers TEDxMidwest is known for its world class speakers, including inventor Dean Kamen, psychologist Phil Zimbardo, hacker Pablos Holman and National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen. See the TEDx Speakers Attendees There will be over 600 amazing attendees including 400 CEOs and Presidents, 150 artists and performance professionals, heads of major cultural institutions, 50 top high school students, and dozens of MacArthur, Pulitzer, Polk, Peabody, and Nobel prize winners. Volunteers Interested in helping make TEDxMidwest great or helping with TEDxYouth@Midwest?
TigerText Disposes Of ‘Sender’s Remorse’ With New Privacy And Control Features For SMS TigerText, a company that adds a bevy of privacy settings and controls to SMS, is today launching a new app for iOS that aims to preserve the social nature of group messaging while giving the sender complete control over their messages both in group and one-to-one conversations. A prized feature of TigerText’s service has been the fact that it allows a sender to recall a message they’ve sent at any time. Bad for TextsFromLastNight. Other features of its new app include allowing the user to determine who receives the message, augmented privacy by using a TigerText specific user name (not based on a phone number), as well as confirmation of message delivery. TigerText’s core belief is that social sharing should be possible without sacrificing privacy, and that individual control should be key to the text messaging experience. The new TigerText iOS app is compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPad and iPod Touch and is available free on the app store and at TigerText.com.
Policy Announcement: Strengthen... by Marc Bodnick - Quora We are publishing today a revised and simplified policy on individuals that strengthens the policy's protections. The new policy reaffirms the two core protections that Quora has offered individuals since we published the original policy in June 2010: Questions about people that are clearly hurtful or mean-spirited, or are likely to make the person uncomfortable, aren't allowed.For all Quora users, if there is a question about you on the site, then you have control over that question. This means that with regard to that question, you can privately ask Quora moderation to delete the question or individual answers or comments that you don't like. And you can have final say over the contents of the answer summary wiki.Our revised policy makes it clear that these protections apply to all Quora users, regardless of whether or not they are public figures. This policy change means that Quora moderation will no longer have to make distinctions about who is and who isn't a "public figure."
Why you can't really anonymize your data One of the joys of the last few years has been the flood of real-world datasets being released by all sorts of organizations. These usually involve some record of individuals’ activities, so to assuage privacy fears, the distributors will claim that any personally-identifying information (PII) has been stripped. The idea is that this makes it impossible to match any record with the person it’s recording. Something that my friend Arvind Narayanan has taught me, both with theoretical papers and repeated practical demonstrations, is that this anonymization process is an illusion. All the known examples of this type of identification are from the research world — no commercial or malicious uses have yet come to light — but they prove that anonymization is not an absolute protection. So, what should we do? Keep the anonymization Just because it’s not totally reliable, don’t stop stripping out PII. Acknowledge there’s a risk of de-anonymization Limit the detail Learn from the experts Related: