Comme une trainée de poudre, la semaine passée, s’est propagée l’idée qu’Internet est un monde dangereux où il ne fait pas bon mettre une souris dehors. Partout, une information, assez nébuleuse, s’est dissiminée faisant état d’études décrivant l’horreur du décor: La Presse, La Gazette, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, CTV, juste pour identifier les coupures que j’ai eu l’occasion de lire.

Michel Leblanc, un de mes anciens étudiants, mais je pense qu’il est plus juste de l’identifier comme un des gourous de la blogosphère québécoise, a eut un coup de sang pour ce qu’il considère . . . [more]

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

From Google Labs for those of you with two computers and Firefox on both. For more info see the FAQ. . . . [more]

One of the more difficult sets of issues in both offline and online worlds involves identity: how do I know who you are? how do you tell me who you are? who are you willing to be when you’re dealing with me? and so forth.

As Canadians know at the moment, proof of citizens’ identity has become a critical matter in our dealings with the United States. Must we have, are we prepared to submit, fingerprints, or iris scans in order to travel across the border? And then there is the near regression to absurdity of identity itself: identity with . . . [more]

Is it just me, or does there seem to be an increase in fraudulent activities these days? I have seen increased evidence of activities such as phishing, spoofing, faux lottery schemes, and calls asking for renewals of directories never previously purchased, as well as the ever popular grabbing of company logos from websites and using them on letters to defraud people out of money in their bank accounts.

And as if phishing weren’t enough, there is something even more targeted called “spear phishing“:

How spear phishing scams work
Spear phishing describes any highly targeted phishing attack. Spear phishers

. . . [more]

Ever since the creation of the Canadian online corporate filings system SEDAR in 1997, the race has been on to develop a commercially viable service to provide more sophisticated search capabilities than allowed by the free website. First to bring itself forward to law firms was

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a browser extension that:

transparently converts a user’s password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself.
Web Password Hashing

 
This is aimed at those of us — most of us, perhaps — who use one . . . [more]

You may have wondered what exactly Lexis is.  Here is a found poem on the subject

Here is the explanation that Googlism provides at http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=lexis&type=1:

 Googlism for: lexis

lexis is our professional content management
lexis is the study of vocabulary in
lexis is no more available
lexis is an online service that provides a wide range of full
lexis is focus
lexis is available to all law students
lexis is closed or phone line is bad
lexis is a library with newspaper
lexis is available via the web for students at www
lexis is http
lexis is a . . . [more]