Brief Note on Shifu: Checklists for the Lazy
For some, mostly computer illiterate but highly-educated professionals, Atwal Gawade’s The Checklist Manifesto is their first introduction to checkboxes, at least as they relate to …
Category: Social Studies
UK Joins Other EU Members on Google Privacy Legal Action
Last week, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office or ICO revealed that it had asked Google to revise its privacy policy to conform to their Data …
Right to be Forgotten Hits Speed Bump: Google Not a Data Controller
The European Court of Justice ruled today that Google is not obligated to remove links that point to inaccurate or stale content. The case originally …
California Erasin’: State Law Lamely Addresses Right to be Forgotten
While the EU Parliament may approve Right to Be Forgotten regulations this summer, closer to home, US social media companies have a smaller front in …
Open Garden and Google Glass
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stop by and chat with Open Garden at TechCrunch Disrupt two weeks ago. They had interesting news about an enterprise …
Tales from Startup Alley: Mention Shakes Up Content Monitoring
Mention answers the most important question of the moment: “what’s a good alternative to Google Alerts?” There are a bunch of possibilities here, but I’d …
Tales from Startup Alley: AppsBuilder, Bellissimo
There was a small, but significant Italian presence at TechCrunch Disrupt NY this year. I had a chance to meet with Luigi Giglio, CTO and …
Right to be Forgotten on Twitter
The EU’s proposed “Right to be Forgotten” has become a major point of contention for US companies doing business across the Atlantic–more precisely it’s a …
Tabula is great at scraping tables from PDFs
If my hunt for numeric datasets leads me to a PDF file, I raise the white flag of surrender and close up shop for the …
Open Garden 2.0 Arrives
It was good to hear again from Open Garden. Last week they announced version 2.0 of their multi-hop, crowdsourced networking software. Those of us who …
Piktochart: Infographics Made Really Easy
I’m not a designer and my web programming skills are minimal but I was able to make a somewhat informative infographic in just a few …
Microsoft Office’s Last Stand?
My friends over at BetterCloud, which provides Google Apps dashboard and management services, just finished surveying over 18,000 admins. These admins are obviously in a …
EU vs Facebook: Will Internet Content Have an Expiration Date?
Over on another channel, I’ve been writing about some of the grumblings towards the EU’s proposed changes to their landmark Data Protection Directive. The grumbles …
Spotted by New Yorkers: Euro Travel Site Lands in US
Spotted by Locals is one of the many tips-for-travellers sites that have popped up in the last few years. As readers of this blog already …
Noted: just.me to Launch on January 21st
just.me is a mobile media sharing startup that first breached the surface briefly back in July. Just long enough for the tech press to learn …
Interview with NYU-Poly’s Professor Keith Ross
Last month, I had the chance to interview Professor Keith Ross about his paper describing a novel profiling attack against Facebook users. The attack’s goal …
Bounty Hunters Unchained
While I was grappling with privacy issues swirling around data brokers and Facebook’s inadequate protection of minors, along comes a company called BusinessLeads to further …
NYU-Poly Researchers Find Weakness in Facebook’s Protections for Minors
Social media and our too-much-information online culture has brought new life to an old privacy vulnerability. The kind of privacy loophole I’m referring to has …
New York Times Hack Day 2012
I’ve been looking for an excuse to do business in the The New York Times HQ on 8th Avenue in Manhattan for some time. With …
Kim Dotcom Files: Government Turns Cloud Provider into Object Lesson
After spirited discussions in the TvB offices, we’ve decided to introduce a new topic area on online privacy and data protection rights. In this inaugural …