1. Cookies, Supercookies and Ubercookies: Stealing the Identity of Web Visitors
This is a two part post by Arvind Narayanan on identifying the identity of a person using a variety of techniques. The first part is here and second part is here . The techniques include using a more sophisticated version of cookies, using browser history in a more intelligent fashion , using data from social networks and social bookmarking . There were some interesting observations in this post like the set of Facebook groups that you are member of is more or less unique. He also talks about federated identities which are convenient but makes it easy to track.
He also gives two useful links – One which uses browser history to find the Wikipedia topics you are interested in. The page is here. Beware, once you visit the page it starts analyzing your history – so visit it only if you really want to. That said, I felt I got a lot of interesting info from my previous pages ! The second useful link is a page where if you give your email id , it tells which of your online identities are linked – Check it out here . I have to say , I was pretty impressed with the results.
2. Please Rob Me !
This was my favorite site of this week. It uses information from Twitter and with some simple processing tells if the house is empty ! I am sure no robber is going to take its word but still it was a fun project and hopefully serve to raise awareness ! A BBC article is here.
3. Some Fun Stuff
I got some positive comments about including comics in the post. So here are the comics that impressed me this week. XKCD talks about tautology , Abstruse Goose on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and probably the most relevant to us is from Calvin and Hobbes.
4. E-mail Provides Interesting Insights Into Social Networks
An interesting article . Has some discussion on triadic and focal closures.
5. Facebook directs more online users than Google
What happens next ? They are already one of the largest link or image sharing site and now they are becoming a bigger referrer. I am not sure how it is going to impact the users but I only hope it doesn’t increase the number of crappy ads they show ! (at least don’t show the ads i have actively rejected earlier !)
6. A 50-Watt Cellular Network
Hmm interesting. I think (i have not cross checked) Times rated the CEO of this company as one of the top 8 people to watch out.
7. Mirror symmetry broken at 4 trillion degrees
I don’t really know the significance of it. But the fact that we can generate temperature of up to 4 trillion degrees is mind boggling. I was naturally curious how they measured the temperature , which is detailed in this post titled Hottest Soup in Universe . "Technology has improved so much" !
8. Bloodied By Warner, Redbox Also Damns New Releases To Piracy
After the Amazon-McMillan row comes Warner Vs Netflix/Redbox. Basically, both of them will hold off on the release of new Warner Brothers DVD and Blu-ray movies until after they’ve been on sale for 28 days. Bad time for consumers !
9. Forbes India: Why CEOs want Govt job
Nice read !
No comments:
Post a Comment