Mottoes matter. Long before soundbites and tweets, they encapsulated the priorities of their adopters. Long before the Internet, the most famous claimed world wide reach. Compared to the revolutionary “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” my motto may seem a modest mimic. Do not confuse the modesty of its author with its intrinsic value. “Privacy, identity, responsibility” must…
Category: Misc
Privacy Requires Security, Not Abstinence
Simson Garfinkel has written a commentary on the state of privacy and security in Technology Review. Here’s a bit from his conclusion: For more than 100 years, American jurisprudence has recognized privacy as a requirement for democracy, social relations, and human dignity. For nearly 50, we’ve understood that protecting privacy takes more than just controlling…
FTC obtains $1.7 million judgment against InterBill
A federal court has ordered a payment processor that debited consumers’ bank accounts without their authorization to pay $1,779,000 in consumer redress and to end the illegal practice. Payment processors serve as middlemen between merchants and banks or credit card companies. In 2006, the Federal Trade Commission charged the defendants with unfairly debiting thousands of…
SYSTEM NOTICE: About the RSS feeds
Due to a problem with the database, we had to dump the database and start again. As a result, the category numbers assigned to different topics changed and the corresponding RSS feeds changed. Those of you who first registered for the site today should also have received emails about your registration and passwords needing to…