RIP IM Smarter

My imsmarter proxy stopped working last week, and I just got around to going to their site to see what was up. Looks like they've shut down. A bit of a pity; I thought it was a useful service. I use IM on four different machines and it made finding something from a past conversation a lot easier. Actually, though, what I used most often was its reminder feature. I could send it an IM saying "Remind me in 2 hours to check the car" and it would do just that, saving me many parking tickets. I imagine there are other services like that out there; I should check around. Actually, that would be a pretty trival thing to implement myself. Hmmm.

Your Dwindling Privacy

Your phone records are for sale
"The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts."

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

Although this raises some serious privacy concerns, what I found more interesting about this article was how relatively easy it is now to take data from all kinds of publicly available sources and use them to produce something like a map showing the locations of all the readers (or in this case, desire-ers) of a particular book.

(Both of these links via Bruce Schneier's Blog.)



Technorati Tags: privacy, security

Business Blogging

Chris Anderson of Wired / The Long Tail has started a wiki page to track public blogs by Fortune 500 companies. The list isn't terribly long yet, but I'm sure it will be growing, both as more people discover existing company blogs and as more companies jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking of which, we've jumped on the bandwagon ourselves at Triporama. The Triporama Blog isn't yet linked in from the main site (it will be soon), but Wendell has already posted a great piece about the origins of Triporama.

Happy New Year!