onfocus

John Battelle has a great idea about storing data in info-privacy friendly countries. But I'd go a step further and say that big data stores should also store data in an encrypted format, so only someone with a key can make the data useful.

put in some text, and see if this script can guess the author's gender based on word usage. (I was looking for a Perl module that does this, but no luck.)

Easy-to-install version of GPG for Mac folk.

I just tried Enigmail again after a couple years, and it actually works well. This plugin handles encrypting/decrypting email on the fly. (If you have GnuPG installed.)

"Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old." [via sterling]

rael and michael's startup has a blog now.

Valid criticism of the official Google Blog's headlines, and good advice for any weblog author. Headlines are insanely important in the age of aggregation.

free VPN application [thanks, mathowie]

now you can talk like Mr. Burns! [via kottke]

Sounds like you can add some Google Homepage modules to any web page now

This talk at Google by Dan Frankowski shows you can identify people based on anonymous movie ratings if you have another non-anonymous set of related data. [via O'Reilly Radar]

"A 2005 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project called 'Teens and Technology' found that teenagers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friends and use e-mail to communicate with 'old people.'" [via cameron]

a story about the dark side of ubiquitous computing by Bruce Sterling. "If 'religion is the opiate of the people', then immersive multiplayer 3D virtual worlds are hard-core Afghani heroin."

tips for tuning your site for Google, culled from googler Matt Cutts' blog.

I hadn't thought of the "visited" CSS class as a security problem before, but this phishing technique is pretty clever (and evil). (via joshua)