Yes, have you noticed? It has changed from My Security Box to Virtual Shadows. I realised this morning that my blog is more about privacy than anything else, and ‘Virtual Shadows’ is the name of my first book going to print this week, and besides that I have also bought the domain www.virtualshadows.com that has a redirect here 🙂
Month: November 2008
Snow and no water!
Well Winter is going to be fun! You know how it feels that everything that can go wrong does…. well first it was the electric when my husband was away, and now he is away again and it’s the water!
I went for a walk, as usual, today. It’s been snowing an awful lot, so is very beautiful, however it is getting very windy, they are promising 20km metre tonight, so I cut my walk short. It was -3 degrees and with the wind I needed to get home to ensure that the boat was securely anchored, and the chopped wood was in a dry place. Then I took the snow spade. You know there are snow spades? I didn’t. First time I shovelled snow from our balcony I used a normal spade that scratched the balcony, umm my man wasn’t so pleased with my efforts when he got home 😉 That was my first winter on the island often alone as he was in Thailand helping Swedish victims’ families following the Tsunami disaster.
So let’s get back to the water again. After all this effort I jumped into the sauna, beautiful! Took a shower, washed my hair, well I almost succeeded when the water stopped. Just like that, me in the shower naked, hair and face covered in shampoo bubbles and no water!
First I tried to understand the cause of the problem, and I failed. It can’t be frozen, it’s only -3 degrees outside, and the pipewarmer is on anyhow, must be the pump, now I’m clueless. So I rinsed my hair as much as I could in the fluffy powder snow outside. Tried to ring my husband….busy… ummm ok so there’s loads of snow and the good thing is that the electric is working so I can cook snow so I have water, at least until my dear husband is home again tomorrow afternoon. For now I just open up a bottle of cold white wine with my dinner whilst I study (you know that MBA I started in September?). Nice wine….
We have business guests for dinner tomorrow night, not sure how we manage that, maybe a restaurant will have to do this time 😉
Privacy is in the Eye of the Beholder
This is a very nice article from 2003 “Privacy is in the Eye of the Beholder“. A bit old I know, but it gives a really nice description of the privacy landscape in the U.S. Apart from that the author is a very well respected colleague of mine in HP Tari Schreider who have had the pleasure of working quite closely with for around 18 months now.
U.S. vs. Lori Drew MySpace suicide
This case is pretty interesting and sad. It is viewed in legal circles as a landmark in Internet law as it is said to be the first time the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. This is a case of a 49-year-old Missouri woman who is accused of taunting a 13-year-old girl on the Internet to the point where she committed suicide. Although the case is about whether Drew violated the terms of service of the MySpace social networking site, not about whether she caused the suicide of Megan Meier.
On MySpace you can be who you wish, and this is what Drew did, she used a pseudonym of a teenage boy to lure Megan into an online romance driven by not so friendly motives that ended in suicide.
Information Security Survey by Ernest & Young
A nice survey on information security by Ernest and Young – Moving Beyond Compliance.
Speeding dog
The other day I was stopped when driving my car by the police, I was speeding. I thought that I could talk my way out of it until I looked at my dog on my back seat.
ROFL 🙂
Hot air and management
The following joke was posted on the BCSWoman forum, which is actually quite funny 🙂 Thanks to this linked site for the fine picture!
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He spotted a woman below and called, “Excuse me, can you help? I promised a friend I would meet him, but I’m lost.”
The woman replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon 30 feet above this field.”“You must be in IT,” said the balloonist. “I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”“Well, everything you told me is technically correct, but it’s of no use to me.”
The woman responded, “You must be in Management.” “I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you’ve no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”
We collectively have the power!
After 8 long years of Bush – a fresh start. Visit AVAAZ.org the World in Action. People around the world are seizing this historic and hopeful moment to send a flood of global messages to Obama for peace, concern for the climate and for collaboration. The voices of the many have potentially the power to influence policy makers around the world.
In fact “we each of us have a voice irrespective of gender, geography, creed, education etc. and in the information society these voices can influence policy makers in our world, and help them to make decisions that favour the majority as opposed to the minority.”
Keep your house keys in your pocket!
Don’t let anyone take a photo of your house keys it is possible to make a copy from them as proven by computer science researchers……
“We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret,” said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. “Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone’s keys from a distance without them even noticing.”
no hot water
Yes it’s true, if you’ve been reading my unusual activity of posting over the last few days “Winter has come 😉“, and “still no heating” that is concerning my malfunctioning heating. Now the water is cold, you know really cold…the water heating has stopped working.
Solution was easy, can’t fix the water heater, my dear husband is not here and he is the man of the house, so I took to the sauna again followed by a refreshing cold shower. Now I’m nice and clean, ready for work tomorrow, which means that I can skip the cold shower before I leave in the morning 😉