Who is Hahleq?

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment May 27th:

• New Modern Warfare 2 Trailer Finally Premieres – Oh Yeah! This will definitely cause me to set aside my WoW for a bit of playtime with this. I'm sure my FPS playing brother-in-law will be ready to go to war on this one!
• Identify: A Firefox Add-on For Researching People – Cool idea. I need to experiment with this across my various "identity" sites.
• Stop Trolling Craigslist & eBay, Try Easy E-Commerce at Woya – Very interesting. I'll definitely be checking this out.
• Do people care about data correlation? – Good stuff, particularly since this discussion does include the last point, which rounds out the various reasons quite well. Imagine how the results would skew for the general population which includes people like me that studiously avoid any "fill out this questionnaire and get cool stuff" pop-ups or mailings from even legitimate sites.
• World of Warcraft Getting Updated Druid Forms – Phormtaiqr says, "Hurray!"

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment May 20th:

• Web 3.0 or Not, There's Something Different About 2009 – Yes, I know Web 3.0 is even more lame than Web 2.0 or the phrase "hope and change" to describe anything meaningful. However, this article and more importantly the 5 linked at the bottom do make some interesting reading. Definitely has the create-something-new-n-cool part of my brain engaged. After all tech is just tech, but what you do with it is where the impact is realized, for good or ill.
• The Freemium Model And A Desktop App Get The Thumbs Up With Pandora One (MG Siegler/TechCrunch) – I use the Blackberry app and am quite happy with it. I don't personally have any need for Pandora other than as a mobile filler when I'm on the move and want to listen to music, but my iPod isn't handy. So no interest in the web or desktop application, but I hope Pandora continues to do well and get this stupic internet radio royalty nonsense over and done with.

These are my links for May 18th:

• Is Facebook Working on a Recommendation Technology? – The heck with "if you like that, you'll like this" service. What about, if "you trust so-and-so, I might want to know / trust so-and-so too"? The socialnet needs a reputation system.
• Privacy Risks Get Real – California Privacy Laws, Octomom, and Kaiser Permanente – Not a surprise, really. I remember a scary discussion I had with a consultant with Kaiser Permanente (emperor forever? really? seriously stupid name, sorry I digress). We were discussing their implementation of PKI and he joked at how terribly they had implemented "securing" of the private keys. They were stored in LDAP… wait for it… in the clear! I of course have no way to verify if this was true, but enough of the other details of their implementation rang true to indicate the consultant and his sidekick knew of what they spoke.

  Remember, you can implement great security all day long, do it badly and be even worse off than when you started because others will act on the belief that it IS more secure, when it isn't.

• Facebook hit by phishers again – Yup. FB and all other socialnet sites need to step up to a strong authentication model.
• Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care – Related to my post: "Tim Berners-Lee next big thing?" Interesting stuff, but just like HTTP, without any security or access control infrastructure.
• Are Your "Secret Questions" Too Easily Answered? (Robert Lemos/Technology Review) – OK, so good to see that this issue is finally getting a bit more coverage. Certainly, chatting with real world implementers of Q&A reveals that this is a hot topic and Q&A is a big problem both for protecting against compromise and in not driving end-users nuts when they forget their answers.

  I have ideas of course for those implementing Q&A, but that'll cost you a live sales conversation to get those . For those of us on the end-user side, I recommend getting some type of field filling / remembering product (I use RoboForm) and use it to generate and remember 1) strong passwords and 2) answers to questions. Heck, I just reuse RoboForm's "Generate Password" feature to generate the answers. No one is ever going to guess the answer to "Your favorite baseball team?" is: i%2q5$SN4$AG. RoboForm or your equivalent software tool of choice will.

  Oh, and be sure to encrypt your "password remembering" files with something other than a password (I recommend TrueCrypt). Also never, never, ever use the built-in password remembering functions of your browser.

These are my links for May 14th:

• Microsoft Working On Motion-Sensing Camera For the Xbox 360 – Uh, don't hold your breath. The Wii can barely do this with a special bar and controllers, imagine how wonky this will be with software trying to guess with any accuracy what your hands, legs or head are doing with any accuracy or responsiveness.
• FYI: Encryption is “not necessary” – Having worked both for service providers providing online services and holding tons of multi-tennant data, I find these "cloud computing security" discussions a bit funny. I mean, come on people, just because we call it Cloud or SAAS doesn't mean it hasn't been and isn't already being done. It apparently means that its about to be done by rank amateurs if the kinds of things Kim heard in this story are indicative. Beware whom you choose as a service provider. Do solid, in-depth audits of your own. Insist on their being up to date on regulatory and best-practice certifications. i.e. look hard before you jump on that cloud.
• Sony Earnings Fall From Ugly Tree, Hit Every Branch on the Way Down – I'm not sure why as I have no personal stake in Sony whatsoever, but I'm really kinda enjoying their decline. Probably mostly as I've long seen them to be incredibly arrogant in recent years as their dominance across the board continually slipped and slipped and they did nothing about it. Perhaps Stringer can turn things around. I know I'd love to see someone come out and provide me the iPod / iTunes replacement I want (speaking of unbelievably arrogant companies), so if Sony can do that… Go, Stringer, Go!

These are my links for May 11th:

• Botnet master hits the kill switch, takes down 100,000 PCs (Jacqui Cheng/Ars Technica) – Updated your AV lately? Get to it!