Gene Spafford’s review of Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel, was posted to the Interesting People mailing list last night. The recent troubles with DoubleClick have further driven home the need for awareness of how information about us is collected and used. Particularly bothersome to me is the idea that companies make money selling information about things that I do. Shouldn’t information about me be my property? Why should someone else be able to make money selling it. Isn’t that fundamentally wrong? (I haven’t yet read the book, so I have no idea if that position is discussed.)
Clearly I need a Register hat.
Wired News has an interview today with Dr. Anita Borg, the president of the Institute for Women and Technology, discussing how more women can be assimilated into computer fields. The lack of women working in the world of programming is indeed shocking and depressing. Certainly we need to look at the environmental factors that dissuade women from pursuing these careers.
Jon Carroll’s column today addresses the malign effect insurance has on our society. I oftentimes used to say that “liability” is the buzzword of the nineties. Of course, now it’s the naughties and things certainly aren’t getting any better.
Here’s a useful link for webmasters: a list of user agent identifiers for email address harvesters used by spammers. The page also explains how to block those harvesters using mod_rewrite and Apache.
Memo to Fox News: hire some real journalists. (This in response to their erroneous reporting of an IRC prank as a “hack”, and then linking it to the DDOS attacks last week.)