✩ Want You To Know: Here Comes The Summer School

canoe.gif
Ron Swanson, not in Glenties

We’re back, because there’s just too much excitement. Everything has been hacked! Gawker is tearing it self apart from within! The MacGill Summer School is in full swing! (Wait, that last one isn’t remotely exciting, or important, or even funny.)

First up, hackers got hold of lots and lots of user data from Ashley Madison, the Internet’s number one destination for people who want to have extramarital affairs. The site boasted how secure it was last year, and if that isn’t a red rag to a bull then I don’t know what is. Puerile giggling aside, this has the potential to cause real damage to users of the site who may have naively believed Ashley Madison’s claim that it could fully scrub all their details. For a fee, of course. Privacy is privacy, no matter what, and protesting Ashley Madison’s poor handling of it’s privacy promises by breaching user’s privacy isn’t a justification.

Yet another example of how, for most firms, security is expensive and at best an afterthought. Here’s a depressing 1999 hot take on it from the then CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy anyway”.

Onwards to the good ship Gawker. It’s the old, old story here – put a sleazy post up, take the post down, lose your managing editor and editor-in-chief amidst a lot of handwaving about Chinese walls and publishing of the Gawker brand book. But does anybody outside US online media really care?

Worth Pondering

cereal-cookies.png

Eye Candy

bee4.jpg
Bee-utiful bees

Totally Confused

Peak juice, against subwoofers, flying for free, harassers are literally losers and Richard meets J.

Finally, this mildly dystopian vision of the future of office software is well worth a read. Includes a cameo from Jack Lemmon as a spreadsheet cell.

Yours etc., @loughlin


 

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below.

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.