SMBlog -- Steve Bellovin's Blog
Pseudo-Random Thoughts on Computers, Society, and Security

• Full Text Feed Coming Soon
  A number of people have asked me if my RSS feed could contain the full text of the postings, rather than just the first few lines. I will do it, but it may not happen until mid-January. The blogging software I use needs several improvements, and I just don't have time to do them during the semester. (I tried a quick-and-dirty fix in October. It didn't work...) ...
• Ask.com's "AskEraser"
  Since I frequently criticize companies that have done something bad about privacy, it's only fair to praise the ones who do good things. Ask.com, a search engine, has introduced the AskEraser, an option to prevent it from retaining any user data, via cookies or any other mechanism. ...
• Western Digital's Crippled Drive
  There's been a lot of discussion about Western Digital's intentionally crippled network drive. Briefly, the device -- a 1 Terabyte storage unit -- can serve up files on the wide-area Internet. This lets you retrieve your files when you're traveling -- except that a great many file types cannot be shared with other users "due to unverifiable media license authentication". ...
• More Tracking Mania: PDFs with Ads
  Another company is getting into the trackable ads game: Adobe. They've announced a new product: PDF files with ads. Publishers can upload PDF files to Adobe's web site; the files will be modified to display ads via Yahoo!'s advertising network. When the PDF file is viewed, "contextual ads are dynamically matched to the content of the document." The ads are displayed in a sidebar; they aren't printed, and don't obscure the content of the document. ...
• Facebook Apologizes
  A couple of weeks ago, I described Facebook's "Beacon" system of apparent user endorsements of various products. Lots of people were upset by it; they've now backed down and apologized for it. ...
• The FBI Denies Tracking Ethnic Foods
  A few weeks ago, I alluded to a reported FBI project to detect Middle Eastern terrorists by looking for spikes in consumption of, say, falafel. The FBI has now cateorically denied that such a plan was ever even contemplated. Good. ...