The peculiar popularity of social media is giving rise to a new class of phishing and security risks. Another digital variant of Gresham’s Law, the legitimate is being driven out by the fake. The best protection is to Just Say No, without saying anything.
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Visitors are increasingly concerned about securing their personal information when online. They are more likely to provide an email optin when given in a safe context. Not requiring extraneous information, like CAPTCHAs, also increases optin rates. Distributed by Free Press Release (more…)

Oil companies don’t want to be in the credit card business, which they farm out to financial companies on various consignment basis. Here’s a good example of bad things that happen when the two companies’ customer information gets out of sync. Bogus late charges are bad enough; wanting to verify SSNs without any verifiable security is beyond the pale. (more…)

Jim Rapoza wrote an interesting article (SaaS Access in the 5 May 08 eWeek magazine pp35-43), that describes the next browser architecture as something very much like a remake of (IBM) 327x technology, with an additional  overhead layer. This, along with the adjacent article by Ryan Naraine on the Opus Palladium browser project at UI-Urbana-Champaign, suggests to me that one lock-in may be exchanged for another. Perhaps the devil we know isin’t so bad after all.