| You might want to think twice the next time a stranger asks to befriend you on a social networking site. If this IT World article is to be believed, that stranger might want to use innocuous personal information to create a convincing clone of your identity on another social network. Why clone your identity? To use it in nefarious . . .
| A California-based company took millions of dollars from infertile couples, matched the couples with surrogate mothers, and agreed to use the money to pay the surrogates until their children came to term. Only now the company has vanished, along with the money, and the surrogate mothers are no longer being paid. What will happen to the children they carry? . . .
The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Canada’s do-not-call registry is being sold for next to nothing to international scammers who are barraging these households with phone calls, but are largely beyond the reach of Canadian law.
Among a certain type of criminal — think mafia, think crack gang — there is no greater dishonor than to snitch. Giving information to the police is a betrayal of the worst sort, often punishable by death. Which is why this article from the British magazine New Statesman is so interesting. The article, by Martin Bright, is about the recent . . .
My spam filter is so good that I barely ever get to see all the Nigerian oil-scam spams any more. But this one poked its way through today. It is always nice to see people thinking creatively. My name is Sgt Kenny Baker, Jr. I am in the Engineering military unit here in Ba’qubah in Iraq, we have about $10, . . .
The March 11, 2007, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine asks this question: Who really cares about identity theft? Dubner and Levitt clear up some misconceptions about the subject and get a guided tour of a hacker chat room where credit-card numbers, passwords, and PIN’s are bought and sold. This blog post supplies additional research material.