I was Googling for something completely different today, using four terms and a “quoted phrase,” and had pared down the jillions to only 38 results. At the bottom of the first page of results was an oddity: My Favorite Books. I happened to notice the url: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/booklist.html And thought: Stanford, Sergey…. and clicked on it. [...]

Recently, Netflix released some anonymized usage data in order to seed a technical challenge (on recommending algorithms). Bruce Schneier, a well known security expert, reports that a team of University of Texas researchers successfully de-anonymized a subset of the data through correlation with public IMDb (internet movie database) entries. Bruce extends this by analogy to [...]