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Tag Archives: identity
The War Mask and the Black Ops Civilian
On January 8, 2007, I wrote an article — Wearing Your Death Mask in Life — that concerned the masks we wear to protect us from who and what we’ve become:
We all wear masks. Once you’ve lived long enough, you begin to recognize and read people via the mask of their face before any words are spoken. There are few original masks in the world and once you’ve reacted and interacted with one face you quickly begin to learn all masks of that sort behave and express in the same way. What happens when the faces of the dead are resurrected into masks of the living?
Bristol Palin Becomes Her Mother
Poor Bristol Palin. She’s the keeper of her mother’s secrets. She won Dancing with the Stars. Now she’s morphing into her mother under the direction of a surgeon’s knife. Can you believe the changes in her face? She was once, bright, shining and full of hope, and now she’s been sliced and diced to mirror her mother. What a sad circumstance for the formerly pregnant teen — now paid anti-pregnancy teen spokesmodel — who suckled over $262,000.00USD from the Candies foundation alone in 2009.
Do You Know About.Me?
Do you know About.me? I didn’t. I do know. About.me is a new website/social aggregator/homepage you create to connect things “About You.” I guess. I’m always sort of late to these burgeoning online enterprises, so when I read yesterday that About.me was sold to AOL for tons of money after only being live four days, I decided to hurry on over and grab a username and root around a bit to see what about the fuss was about and – http://about.me/boles — is now mine, along with all a bundled bucket of obnoxious TypeKit Fonts that still take forever to propagate and load on a page:
Michael Jackson Steals from Bob Fosse
Despite the best efforts at YouTube take down notices, we all know Beyonce grave robbed Bob Fosse, because We Who Know, saw the video evidence with our own eyes before it was removed. Beyonce even, eventually, gave Bob Fosse credit for her choreography theft. This morning, I was delighted to receive an email from Alisa, asking if I knew Michael Jackson had also stolen Bob Fosse’s choreography.
Criminals Wear a Mask for a Reason
What’s in a fake name? Do you ever occlude your identity online and have you ever generated a random identity to fool the cyberworld? If yes, why? If not, why not?
Unwrapping the Mystery of Jandek
Shortly after the passing of author JD Salinger, I asked my coworkers in the office if they could think of any modern day artist that went out of their way to shun media attention while continuing to release material. One of my coworkers quickly piped up with the name Jandek. He replied so quickly that I thought that he was joking so I asked him to spell it out for me — it was not a joke at all.
Now We Really Know Who You Are
Blackboard teamed up with Acxiom Identify-X to verify students in an online course:
Acxiom Identify-X
periodically and randomly presents challenge questions to students
before launching a course assessment. Questions are based only on
public information and institutions choose the courses and assessments
where identity verification is required. This fully hosted, Web-based
solution prompts a student to enter only their name and address.
Institutions set randomization and pass/fail thresholds, and
instructors receive notifications when student identity cannot be
verified.
My Two Brains
Are you a left-brain learner or a right-brain learner? Does it matter any longer? Should we be “whole lobe” learners — or do lateralized brains, instead of mirrored ones, better serve us?
Careless Government vs. Malicious Agents
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
The e-governance initiatives that Anderson et al deplored in their Database State report are not, as I’ve argued previously here in Panopticonic, malicious works of a totalitarian state – they are about deploying information in a timely and accurate manner, about citizens in need of healthcare or social care. The true risk to information security and privacy comes from individuals working to intrude illegitimately into these databases and caches of personal data. I term these individuals, rather abstractly, ‘malicious agents.’
We Know Who You Are
There really isn’t any hiding on the internets anymore. There never was any ability to hide, really, but many people tried anyway to hide behind fake names, forged email accounts and IP-spoofing surf sites. Why would someone try to hard to so fruitlessly hide their identity? The simple answer is: They’re up to no good. The more complex question is: Why Are You Hiding When We Already Know Who You Are?
Term Life for Murder
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching the Investigation Discovery network’s programming it’s that you should never buy term life insurance unless you want to end up dead!
Playing Microsoft Tag
You can see the new, tiled, background image for my Twitter account. The multicolored bonanza of triangles and primary colors is mesmerizing and aesthetically pleasing, right? Or is the image effect sort of eye numbing and hard on the retinas? Did you notice the twitter logo shares the same color blue as my background image? There’s nothing to that shared hue of blue except that “it is the color that it is” — which is a complicated way of saying, “it’s a popular primary blue.”
Blood of the Land in Biometric Tech
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
It be should acknowledged that the concept of property, and the related concept of ownership, is central to Western society. Property is always a common denominator of value – and as such our legal system is devoted to protecting property ownership – both of objects and of land. Land then, is to be fought over – even in the courts. The aim of this article is to refute the notion that a DNA- or biometric-driven land registry system is desirable for reasons of not practicality but of justice, and the avoidance of harm.
