Glass orb with reflection of the landscape in it

ALT-C 2009 (2)

One of the sessions I attended was the Online Identity workshop run by Frances Bell, Josie Fraser, James Clay & Helen Keegan. As usual from that crowd it was interactive, thought provoking & they’d set up an accompanying Wiki. They started off by asking us to write our names on a postit. Trustingly we all…

Just one ID?

OpenID crops up quite often in the blogosphere. While I can see the point to a certain degree, there are also issues of merging upmteen accounts into one. Stephen Downes is a strong advocate, though I can see the points that Langhoff raises in the comments regarding security (particularly after the news of the loss…

Why Phishing works.

A recent study (Rachna Dhamija, J. D. Tygar and Marti Hearst) has shown how frequently people were fooled into thinking that sites were legitimate, where in fact they were spoofs. Research had previously indicated that upto 5% of webusers have at some point given details to “phishing” sites. This particular study used 22 volunteers and…

Adware targets kids

Security Pipeline have an article that looks at how sites that are aimed at children are particuarly infested with Adware. From their findings they’ve found that children’s sites particularly have Adware, rather than spyware – which, they assume is because children don’t tend to have credit cards, so it’s not worth spying on what they…

Interview with a link spammer

The Register has an interview with a “link Spammer”. A link spammer is someone who trawls a variety of sources, (including blogs) to put links to assorted sites (generally selling things that I’ve no interest in buying)…So the link spammers – who prefer to call themselves “search engine optimisers”, but get upset when search engines…