I imagine a lot of people are in agreement with Henry Farrell over on Crooked Timber on which he complains that the new Gmail sucks. He’s absolutely right. Here’s hoping Google take note soon. In the meantime are there any good Greasemonkey scripts that fix Gmail somewhat?
Archive for the ‘Asides’ Category
It’s 11am, do you know where your Credit Card details are?
Last night I got notification from the computer game company Valve that their Steam service, by which you can purchase & update games and play online, has been compromised and that my personal information & credit card details may be stolen. (Story here)
If this sounds like a re-run of the problems Sony encountered that’s because to all intents and purposes, it is. I’m not a gamer, I bought one game using Steam, Half Life 2. There was no reason why I should have left my credit card details with them and yet I’m sure they structured their service so that I did without thinking too hard about it. In fact it makes less sense that I left my credit card details with Valve than if I left them with the staff of my local bookshop where I make many more purchases in a year than I ever will from Valve or even with the butcher up the road.
So this morning I’m sitting down and trying to draw up a list of the sites and services that have my credit card details and I’m a little shocked at myself. Not that these sites aren’t trustworthy, it’s more the case that there is no compelling reason for me to have given these companies permission to keep this information.
So this morning, having been told to monitor my credit cards by a company I made one or two purchases from my advice is to do a personal data census:
Who has your credit card details and why?
Ticketmaster? Amazon? Play.com? Web hosting companies? Cinema websites?
