AN AMAZON SELLER TRIED TO BRIBE ME
I bought a suitcase from Amazon, partly because of its good reviews. The suitcase is alright. It's not the best I've ever seen, but the price was decent and it seems like it should last a while. A couple of weeks later, I got a postcard from the seller offering a bribe. If I sent them proof that I posted a 5-star review, they'd pay me $15. I followed Amazon's instructions to report the bribe.
Read moreMACOS 14 SONOMA IS OUT, AND MOSTLY OK
Apple release macOS 14 Sonoma today. I always install the major OS beta versions on my work Mac when they're first released, to see if anything critical breaks before it affects my coworkers. That happens sometimes, like when macOS 11 Big Sur deprecated kernel extensions and affected some software we used. Sonoma and its 1st-party apps were in good shape from the start. I stumbled across a few glitches with 3rd-party software:
Read moreNEWSOM VETOED SELF-DRIVING TRUCK BILL
California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required self-driving vehicles to have a human driver. "Considering the longstanding commitment of my administration to addressing the present and future challenges for work and workers in California, and the existing regulatory framework that presently and sufficiently governs this particular technology, this bill is not needed at this time," Newsom wrote. "For these reasons, I cannot sign this bill.""
Read moreTRINET SHARES EMPLOYEE PII WITHOUT CONTROLS
My employer's HR department asked me to validate a coworker's identification documents and attest that they're legitimate, for government tax form purposes. I got an email from our payroll vendor, TriNet, with a link to attest to those documents' authenticity. Clicking it took me to a page with scans of my friend's driver's license and Social Security card without requiring me to log in first. My coworker hadn't entered their driver's license number into the form, so I used the scanned image to enter it for them.
Read moreVEILID IN THE WASHINGTON POST
I've been helping on a fun project with some incredibly brilliant friends. I found myself talking about it to a reporter at The Washington Post. The story just came out. My part was crucial, insightful, and far, far down the page: Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won’t keep hold of users’ personal data.
Read moreSIMPLY SABOTAGING AN OFFICE
The US Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of today's CIA, wrote the Simple Sabotage Field Manual in 1944. Its goal was clear: The purpose of this paper is to characterize simple sabotage, to outline its possible effects, and to present suggestions for inciting and executing it. The target audience was people living in countries occupied by foreign armies, and it aimed to give them tools to surreptitiously fight back against the invaders.
Read moreHAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY, HONEYPOT.NET!
In times of yore, my friends gave their computers cool cyberpunky names so that they sounded cool at LAN parties: "Hey, can you toss me an Ethernet cable for suntzu?" "Sure. Here's the switch I'm using for chaosium." My Amiga had a few hard drives to store all the, ahem, public domain music files that we traded around. I don't know what prompted me to think of it as the honeypot full of music, but it stuck, and I christened it honeypot to be one of the cool kids.
Read moreTWITTER WENT DARK. NOW WHAT?
Twitter is in a race with Reddit to see who can ruin their service more quickly. That's the simplest explanation I have for Twitter's change today that hides all of their users' posts behind a login page. Until today, you could still view a favorite company's messages, or a sport team's highlights, or an interesting author's opinions, without logging on to the site. If you wanted to interact with that page by liking a post or replying to it, you needed an account.
Read moreQUITTING REDDIT
I've spent way more time on Reddit than I should have. I justified it to myself by saying it was a great way to stay current on news and technology trends. Really, it was just a slow drip of tiny endorphin hits that felt good but ultimately didn't make my life better. Thanks to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's ham-fisted community management and the resulting moderator and user boycott, I deleted its apps off my devices and stopped visiting the site altogether.
Read moreFAKE LANDLORD TRIED TO SCAM MY KID
My kid and their friend are looking for a house to rent. They found a perfect match, with a nice house in a pretty neighborhood and accommodating landlords, but there were a few red flags. The last was when the landlords wanted kid and friend to send them money, supposedly because they live in a different state, and then they'd mail the house keys. The landlord also sent the kids a signed lease to sign and return.
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