Forget Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and Stephen Glass. What happens when you can’t even trust the words of a food critic? Bart Ripp, restaurant critic of the Tacoma News Tribune, has quit ”after 32 years in the newspaper business, 15 of them here as a features writer, historian, postcard savant and restaurant critic.” Now, according to … Read more
Here’s a great example of why you can never really entrust your information to anyone but yourself. The Register’s John Leyden reports that Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a data security company, has obtained via eBay a hard disk apparently owned by ”one of Europe’s largest financial services groups”. On the hard disk were, in the words of … Read more
Further to some postings a few weeks back about bluetooth dating (here and here), seems we defined the field too narrowly. We should have been talking about ‘personal smart presence devices’ and perhaps we’re not seeing a fad here, but a different way of regarding social interaction. (All these services reside on Bluetooth devices — … Read more
Here’s a new kind of cellphone scam (via Mike Masnick of Techdirt, writing in TheFeature): WAPjacking (well that’s what he calls it, and I like it): Taking a page from the still popular redialer scam on PCs – where a secretive trojan tries to disconnect your modem (assuming you’re using dialup) and reconnect you secretly … Read more
Here’s some good news about spam: Unsubscribe really works. At least, that’s according to anti-spam product manufacturer Lashback which according to thespamweblog says in a recent study that ”85% or more of unsubscribe links actually work”. But does this mean, as Anne Mitchell of spamweblog puts it, that ”given that eight-five percent or more of the links … Read more