[LINK] faux-privacy ?

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 01:47 PM 20/05/2011, eric scheid wrote:
> 
>> For starters, is Facebook on shaky ground by saying they're protecting your
>> privacy but then making all your private stuff so publicly available? Are
>> they promising something they are failing to deliver on?
> 
> The brute force access on this case reminded me of a similar 
> situation a few years ago (probably discussed on Link at the time) of 
> a person guessing URLs for bank accounts or some other similar type 
> of 'secure' system. Does anyone recall what that was? If the URL is 
> guessable, then it's not really secure, is it? Patterns are 
> guessable. It wouldn't surprise me if that approach wasn't used a lot 
> for just mucking about by bored high school/middle school/uni students.
> 

Not to mention, Google et al indexing it.

But if you think you are safe, try googling your own name sometime and 
check the last, rather than first pages returned.

I have just signed up to Flickr (apparently owned by Yahoo), so had to get 
a yahoo account. First they suggest that you tell them your date of birth, 
so that they can send you helpful stuff. But when you try to setup the 
account, without a date of birth, they won't let you.

I went through this to submit my Libraryhack2011 Mashup. THough after all 
the effort, Flickr reduced the image to an invisible 1024x40. There are 
2551 x 100 and 5101x200 pixels (194.5k) versions of Sydney 1788 to 1938 
available at <http://ramin.com.au/travel/sydney-1788-1938.shtml>

Marghanita
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://ramin.com.au
Tel: 0414-869202