Good piece by my WSJ colleage Joe Pereira on the TJX debacle, the biggest known theft of credit-card numbers. It all came down to lax Wi-Fi security on the part of the retail chain’s stores. A good read: clipped from online.wsj.com The $17.4-billion retailer’s wireless network had less security than many people have on their … Read more
Nick Carr’s interesting take on Twitters: does their brevity make them meaningful or just another channel of crap? Three quick points: + Twitters, like blogs, run the gamut from poetry to drivel + One person’s drivel is another person’s poetry: It usually depends on whether you know them or not + This has more to … Read more
Fascinating discussion on Freakonomics blog about lining up and how it varies from culture to culture. I must confess, after 20 years in Asia I’m still British and somewhat obsessed by queuing, and get very upset when it’s not followed. One commenter explains it thus: clipped from www.freakonomics.com There is a simple explanation for this. … Read more
British Telecom (BT) is working on software that picks out the best bits of a soccer game and puts it together as a presentation. The software – developed over four years – views a football match and produces a graph assessing each passage of play, saving only what it considers to be the most interesting … Read more
Following football these days feels more like Kremlinology — trying to read into the minds of managers, players defecting like scientists and ‘agents’ cutting deals in exotic locales via dead letter boxes. As usual, in such games, information is power, which is why I liked this throwaway line from a Guardian report about this weekend’s … Read more