society
False Expense Service Reveals the Trouble With Documents
There’s been some news coverage lately about FalseExpense.com, a service that produces fake receipts to order “for novelty use only.” The obvious purpose of this is to help people scam their companies’ expense reporting system by “padding” receipts. People who are reimbursed for hotel, meals, etc. can create receipts for slightly more than they actually [...]
Charter Communications Using Ad Replacer
A story in the New York Times tells us that Charter Communications (the United States’s fourth-largest cable company) is going to start tracking user behavior and using it to sell ads. They spin this as a potential problem because of privacy implications — it means that the cable company is watching your web surfing so [...]
Ad Replacers Let Dan Kaminsky RickRoll the Entire Web
I’ve talked before about ad replacers, where ISPs dynamically edit the contents of web traffic for their customers, replacing ads on web sites with ads of their own. This is a threat to the business model of the internet, as if done on a wide scale it would render small, advertiser-supported websites unable to support [...]
Surveillance and Ubiquity
HexView has an article about tracking vehicles with RFID tire pressure monitors. The devices are found in tires and transmit tire pressure to the engine control module, which sounds innocuous enough, but to prevent modules from reading neighboring cars’ tires by accident, they also transmit a unique ID. Thus, you can follow a car around [...]
Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone!
The Today Show has a cover story today entitled “Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone.” The controversy over this — that is, the fact that there is any — is a wonderful example of how poorly people assess risk in modern society. What this woman, Lenore Skenazy, has done to stir up trouble is [...]
