Tag: IDENTITY

Christopher 'Moot' Poole, founder of 4chan and Canv.as, spoke at SXSW's Sunday keynote, and explored privacy, creativity and the importance of anonymity online. With persistent identities (often tied to our real names) from sites like Facebook, Twitter and Disqus tracking our actions across the Internet, Poole compared the loss of anonymity online to a loss of youth -- a time for experimentation. ...

IP addresses may help identify the source of anonymous and malicious e-mails, but they can only tell authorities where the message originated, without providing many details on the individual who authored them. Using some pretty innovative analytics, researchers at Concordia University have just come up with a new technique that could help investigators determine the precise identity of these ...

Symptoms: Imagine the pit in your stomach: finding charges on your credit cards or bank statements for items you didn't buy; applying for credit or a mortgage and being denied due to delinquencies on accounts you didn't open. The amounts for the previous year's reported income on your annual Social Security statement is incorrect, and for more than you earned. Or you get a letter or call ...

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson has put together a long and fascinating report on the tumultuous recent history of Aaron Barr -- the security expert who successfully infiltrated Anonymous, and then got burned, after running to the FBI with his findings. Based on e-mails he sent before beginning his mission, it's clear that Barr's motives, from the very beginning, were profit-driven. A social media ...

Share Zachary Garcia and Zachery Garcia may have homonymous names, but, as you'd imagine, they're actually very different people. The former is a University of Florida student who works at a sandwich shop. The latter is a teenager accused of murder. Investigators in Polk Country, Florida, however, failed to pick up on the subtle difference in spelling between the two names -- a mistake that came ...

A few months ago, former actress, model and Columbia graduate Carla Franklin took legal action against a mysterious cyberbully who posted defamatory comments about her on YouTube. At the time, Franklin said she had a pretty good idea of who the crude commenter might be, but her lawyers decided to file a court petition for Google to formally reveal his identity. The petition, which was initially ...

Share Men may be from Mars, and women may hail from Venus, but this age-old interplanetary divide may soon be lessening -- and not because of ANTM's Isis King or Chaz Bono's fake stubble. As the Guardian reports, scientists at Barcelona University recently gave male volunteers virtual reality headsets in order to transfer them into women's bodies in an attempt to further examine human ...

A photo is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, but your Facebook photo might be worth more. It is, after all, available to the entire world. Let's face it; we're all vain to varying degrees, and have some sort of self-image that we're constantly trying to project online. A newly released study aims to determine just what it means to project our avatar through the lens of social ...

Whether we're throwing away an old computer, selling it to a friend or just replacing its aging hard drive, many of us are improperly erasing our sensitive personal data, if we're even bothering to erase it at all! These are the findings of a study performed by a multi-national coalition of research teams from U.K. teleco BT, the University of Glamorgan in Wales, the University in Perth in ...