I was recently in a Starbucks, fand my phone was perched [a little] too precariously. It fell. Into water. I was right there, of course, and snatched it out in less than a second. (Of course, this is purely hypothetical.) My luck was not all bad. There was an enormous high-speed dryer there (Dylan calls…
Read MoreEverything you do as a business speaks to your customers. I got an email from Quicken the other day saying that they were shutting off certain services, including downloading info from banks. (How and why that should affect my desktop software, which I thought connected directly, is another version of the message in this post…
Read MoreThe NYT headline, “Web Hunt for DNA Sequences Leaves Privacy Compromised,” blows this out of proportion. Wired’s article “Scientists Discover How to Identify People From ‘Anonymous’ Genomes” is only slightly more helpful. The key issue here is not that the DNA sequence of the participants itself was itself a magic fingerprint, but that when that information…
Read MoreIf you want people to comment, say on a lifehacker post about going paperless, and you require sign-ins for commenting, don’t trash their comments when they forget a password. Among the least interesting passwords I remember is my lifehacker account for commenting. I don’t use it every day and it’s of zero value to a hacker…
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