Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Reflections on the AOL Data Breach

While I was preparing to leave town for a family gathering, AOL managed to 'lose' a few gigs of their customers' search records. Well, not really lose, since unlike most data breaches, this file wasn't on a purloined laptop or obtained via some exploit. Instead, some less than clueful researcher at AOL put it out there as a 'data collection'. To be fair, the user screen names were 'anonymized', replaced with a consistent number to represent the user. AOL's rapidly shrinking dial-up ISP business still gives them a stronger identity model than Yahoo and GMail's databases of sock puppets du jour. AOL did its best to protect its own interests in those identities.

Aphorisms for the Bloody Minded

Via CDR Salamander, the wisdom and wit of Napoleon Bonaparte, including my own long standing favorite:

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.