Month: September 2008
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Preparing for a natural disaster
As Tinker readers may know, I live in Houston, Texas, and we’ve got Hurricane Ike bearing down on us. Twenty-four hours ago, I was busy with everything else and hadn’t even stopped to think about it. Earlier this week, the forecasts had Ike going far south of here. That all changed and now it appears…
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A curious phone scam
My phone at work rings. The caller ID has a weird number (“50622961841” – yes, it’s got an extra digit in it). I answer. It’s a recording telling me I can get lower rates on my card (what card?) if I just hit one to connect me to a representative. Umm, okay. “1”. Recorded voiced:…
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It can be rational to sell your private information cheaply, even if you value privacy
One of the standard claims about privacy is that people say they value their privacy but behave as if they don’t value it. The standard example involves people trading away private information for something of relatively little value. This argument is often put forth to rebut the notion that privacy is an important policy value.…
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Come Join Us Next Spring
It’s been an exciting summer here at the Center for Information Technology Policy. On Friday, we’ll be moving into a brand new building. We’ll be roughly doubling our level of campus activity—lectures, symposia and other events—from last year. You’ll also see some changes to our online activities, including a new, expanded Freedom to Tinker that…
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Cheap CAPTCHA Solving Changes the Security Game
ZDNet’s “Zero Day” blog has an interesting post on the gray-market economy in solving CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are those online tests that ask you to type in a sequence of characters from a hard-to-read image. By doing this, you prove that you’re a real person and not an automated bot – the assumption being that bots…