It is a security/privacy edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads this week. First a link to a 3-page PDF that talks about the use of password managers to keep all of your internet passwords unique and strong. Next a story about how the W3C standards body is looking at standardizing …

Three groups of stories in this long-in-coming DLTJ Thursday Threads. First, we look at the pent-up risks of running Windows XP systems given that support for that operating system is scheduled to end in April 2014. Second, a pair of articles that look at the ups and downs of open …

One of the great things about the Shibboleth inter-institution single sign-on software package is the ability for the Identity Provider to limit how much a Service Provider knows about a user's request for service. (Not familiar with those capitalized terms? Read on for definitions.) But with this capability comes great …

"How much effort do you want to spend securing your computer systems? Well, how much do you not want to be in front of a reporter's microphone if a security breach happens?" I don't remember the exact words, but that quote strongly resembles something I said to a boss at …

Almost a decade ago while at the University of Connecticut I conducted a survey of ARL libraries on their patron privacy practices. The full text of that survey and ARL member responses are available from Google Books and from HathiTrust. Lee Anne George of ARL confirmed via e-mail that permission …

Within the span of a recent week we've had two views of the OCLC cooperative. In one we have a proposition that OCLC has gone astray from its core roots and in the other a celebration of what OCLC can do. One proposes a new mode of cooperation while the …

A few weeks ago, a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed Adam Smith, Google's director of product management, about the Google Book Search settlement and posted the interview in audio form. The page isn't dated, but guessing from metadata in the URL it was somewhere around the publication …

Last month, Clay Shirky gave a presentation with the title "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure" at the Web 2.0 Expo. ((Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O'Reilly Media, "is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next …

The title of this post is the same as the report it describes, Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide [PDF]. It was announced by Ronald Deibert last week on his blog at Citizen Lab. The one sentence synopsis goes like this: "This guide is meant to introduce …

Published in The New Yorker July 5, 1993.
Image from The Cartoon Bank

As the saying, now a part of Internet lore, goes: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." That may be true, but now we must add: "But we do know if you are from a major …