The British Library suffered a major cyber attack in October 2023 that encrypted and destroyed servers, exfiltrated 600GB of data, and has had an ongoing disruption of library services after four months. Yesterday, the Library published an 18-page report on the lessons they are learning. (There are also some community …

Yesterday Bobbi Newman posted Thinking Out Loud About Patron Privacy and Libraries on her blog. Both of us are on the NISO committee to develop a Consensus Framework to Support Patron Privacy in Digital Library and Information Systems, and her article sounded a note of discouragement that I hope to …

Three threads this week: how mapping technologies have come such a long way in the past few years, and why explaining digital rights management is bad for your sanity, a cautionary tale for those trying to be more conscious about security their …

Are you paranoid yet? Are you worried that the secret you shared anonymously might come right back to you? Or wondering why advertisements seem to follow you around from web page to web page? Or just creeped out by internet-enabled services tracking your every move? Or angry that mobile carriers …

Someone out there on the internet is repeatedly hitting this blog's /xmlrpc.php service, probably looking to enumerate the user accounts on the blog as a precursor to a password scan (as described in Huge increase in WordPress xmlrpc.php POST requests at Sysadmins of the North). My access logs …

Two weeks in a row! This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at how Twitter changed its timeline functionality to include things that it thinks you'll find interesting. Next, for the academic libraries in the audience, is a report from the New Media Consortium on trends and technologies that will libraries …

Welcome to the revival of DLTJ Thursday Threads. With the summer over and the feeling of renewal towards this blog and its topics, I'm happy to be back sharing tidbits of technology that I hope you will find interesting. Today's set of threads covers the gnarly security issues behind the …

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 …

Two phishing ((I think these would be classified as spear phishing as defined by Webopedia: "A type of phishing attack that focuses on a single user or department within an organization, addressed from someone within the company in a position of trust and requesting information such as login IDs and …

Part experimental, part disruption, and part heads-up in this week's edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The first story is a proof-of-concept demonstration of a way to browse an "infinite" bookshelf of virtual items. Next is the announcement of how a content producer (Pearson) is trying to disrupt a deeply embedded …

Wandering into public or semi-public wireless networks makes me nervous because I know how my network traffic can be easily watched, and because I'm a geek with control issues I'm even more nervous when using devices that I can't get to the insides of (like phones and tablets). One way …

"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 …

Two entries on big data lead this week's edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The first is at the grandest scale possible: a calculation of the amount of information in the world. Add up all the digital memory (in cell phones, computers, and other devices) and analog media (for instance, paper …

This week's Thursday Threads looks at a big hole in the security model of most internet sites that require you to log into them with a username and password plus a pair of stories about "big media" battles.

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You are using lockdown security cables to protect your PCs, but your accessories -- keyboards, mice, and other cables -- are still vulnerable to theft. You can use one of these specially built products to lock down the cables, or you can use a 20¢ flat washer from the hardware store to …

Week #2 of this new project to highlight interesting tidbits from the previous seven days. Well, things that were interesting to me that I hope will be interesting to DLTJ readers. Time will tell.

Technical Debt: A Perspective for Managers

What is Technical Debt? It’s all “those internal things …

Most e-mail messages I send are digitally signed using a process called "Pretty Good Privacy", or PGP. In e-mail applications that don't understand PGP, this digital signature will show up either as an attachment called "PGP.sig" or as a part of the message starting with "BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE" at …

It is the start of a new year ((Some have even said it is the start of a new decade, but of course that isn't true. We won't start a new decade until 2011, just like we didn't actually start a new millennium until 2001.)), and it seems like a …