Slashback: Walmart and Wiki, Alan Ralsky

Slashback, as always, provides updates and clarifications to previous Slashdot stories. Tonight we bring you updates on Australian Smart ID Cards, the security danger that USB memory sticks pose, Wal-Mart's Wikipedia War, Lego Mindstorms, LiveJournal's stance on Ad-Blocking software, and news about 'Spam King' Alan Ralsky. Read on for more. Update on Australian Smart ID Card. CaptainDefragged writes "According to an article at Australian IT News, the data from Smart Card that our government is introducing is going to be used for a lot more than just health care and welfare fraud prevention. From the article: 'Intelligence agencies and police will be given access to a vast database of biometric photographs of Australians to be created for the new health and welfare smart card to fight terrorism and more general crime. ASIO and the Federal Police will be allowed routine access to the smart card database on national security issues, while state police will have restricted access for general crime investigations.'"

USB sticks as a security threat. martijnd writes "The BBC follows up on the risks of USB sticks as a threat to business by looking at data theft and virus-spreading-as-from-a-floppy infiltration."

More On Wal-Mart's Wikipedia War. An anonymous reader writes "Past the media coverage of their article 'Wal-marts Wikipedia War', Whitedust has apparently received an interesting email from Mike Krempasky (representing Edelman Public Affairs in Washington, DC). While maintaining that Whitedust has no actual specific issue with Wal-Mart - the article was published on the simple premise that Wikepedia's important neutrality was apparently being compromised - and in the interests of a more balanced argument, Whitedust have published the email in full to their readership along with some other interesting notes."

Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?. Since the announcement of Mindstorms NXT; many people believe that my earlier article was completely off target. My latest article, Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?, attempts to complete the analysis. It concludes that Mindstorms NXT does not represent any change of direction for Lego; and unless forced by competition to act otherwise, Lego will continue to market Mindstorms as a niche product line."

Spam King Alan Ralsky NOT Jailed. narzy writes "DailyTech.com is reporting that contrary to reports last week, spam king Alan Ralsky was in fact not picked up by the Feds. Inquires put in to the DoJ and Detroit FBI field office resulted in puzzling dead ends as both agencies had no information as to having Mr. Ralsky in custody. Early Monday morning the original source recanted the story of Mr. Ralsky's arrest."

LiveJournal Explains Ban on Ad-Blocking Software. An anonymous user writes "LJ Founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, blames the change to the Terms of Service on boilerplate language put into the document by 'some lawyers'." From the article: "This is a pre-announcement that a more user-friendly TOS change is on its way. (After all, we can't even detect that you're even using ad blockers to begin with, so there's no point in us saying you can't. Plus you might not even have control over what's installed on your computer, etc.) So, yeah, sorry: we messed up."

Comments

Livejournal Incompetent?

[drinkypoo]

After all, we can't even detect that you're even using ad blockers to begin with, so there's no point in us saying you can't.

Exactly how can you not detect this? User hasn't visited in a while and so probably doesn't have page cached, user downloaded page, user didn't download ads, user is using an ad blocker.

It's not foolproof, you'll need to turn this kind of detection off for anyone surfing through a proxy/accelerator, but you can detect this kind of behavior from anyone else, which means pretty much anyone on broadband (for example google web accelerator slows down broadband users, or at least, always has for me) and anyone who doesn't pay a premium to have their images degraded.

OT: Claiming posts across multiple accounts

[Kadin2048]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I just wondered whether if someone was in a similar situation as yours in the future, it wouldn't be a bad idea to link your comments in some way; actually I was thinking about this when reading some AC posts that resembled posts of a registered user ... sometimes you want to post something anonymously or pseudonymously, but leave open the possibility of claiming the comment later.

I was thinking that maybe the way to do it would just be to end one comment (the one from your alternate account, AC, whatever) with a MD5 hash of some secret phrase, and then if you later wanted to claim the post you could publish the secret using your main account. Not quite as effort intensive as actually signing the posts cryptographically (plus it's deniable, sort of) but it'd let you claim an anonymous body of work later on if you wanted.

Anyone have any immediate thoughts or criticisms?

It just seems like it's getting to the point where few people have just one account on one site anymore; most people have a bunch of accounts, sometimes using the same nickname and sometimes using different ones. Sometimes you don't want to link all the identities together, but there are definitely reasons why you'd want to be able to retroactively, if circumstances dictated. Has anyone put any serious thought into the problem, in a way that preserved psuedonymity until a user chose to reveal themselves?