Disposable Phone Numbers
For years I offered my fax number when asked to give a phone number to a credit card company, bank, merchant, politician, or other organization that I knew was going to turn around and sell it...
View ArticleWhy Law Enforcement Needs Probable Cause
This quote from today’s Washington Post explain really clearly why probable cause is necessary for competent, effective law enforcement: Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S....
View ArticleDynamic IPs and Anonymous Surfing: an Open Letter to my ISP
Dear Speakeasy folks, I’m sure you’ve heard about AOL’s recent release of search engine data. I’m sure you also know that various other search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN store their search...
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Changing Search Engines
I’ve become increasingly concerned about Google’s storing of search data. I use various cookie blockers, page rewriters, and other tools to limit the information Google gets about me. Nonetheless I...
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Block Third Party Cookies in Firefox 2
In Firefox 1.5, there was a simple preference to tell Firefox to accept cookies for the main site but not for web bugs and advertisers on the site. This was a nice compromise that blocked a lot of...
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Ad-blocking Yahoo Groups
Recently Yahoo Groups mailing lists seemed to all start sending out obnoxious image ads in various messages: Needless to say, this makes me a lot less likely to subscribe to yahoogroups mailing lists....
View ArticleDo Not Upgrade to CookieSafe 2.0
CookieSafe 2.0 (a Firefox add-on) is seriously broken, It no longer allows you to manually enable or disable cookies for a site from its popup menu. I am not the only one having the problem. Stay with...
View ArticleThunderbird Security Hole: Wrong E-Mail Quoted
I’m not sure how widespread this problem is. However in the last week or two I vaguely noticed extra text at the bottom of some messages I was replying to. At first I thought it was more of that...
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Removing a Sears Antitheft Device
I’ve been running short on dress pants, so Sunday I stopped at Sears to take advantage of their Memorial Day sale and upgrade my wardrobe. I bought about a dozen assorted items, and when I left the...
View ArticleReligion is like Sausage (The Only Thing I Ever Wrote on Facebook Worth Saving)
Today is Quit Facebook Day, and I have deleted my account. Bottom line: Facebook’s culture, beliefs and attitude all seem to indicate that they want everything to be shared with everyone. Nothing they...
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