The 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…
Read MoreFile this under “incentives work, so think about them before you unleash the unintended consequences.” Alternatively, simplified mental models fail to capture the richness of actual reality and are therefore all broken in some way. Maybe things like health care, crop subsidies, mortgage interest deductions, and no-doc loans are similar. Can Congress read? Is there…
Read MoreI wrote this back in August 2012. It needed to sit a while to take the edge off. I couldn’t even read it to edit it. -Rick Recognizing it: I just watched the Seattle Children’s Hospital “Stronger” video. It took me a while to recover from the emotion of the first 41 seconds. I…
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