AllThingsD » Zachary M. Seward

The Surveillance Catalog

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:00:30 +0000

Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and “massive intercept” gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country.

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Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To)

Zachary M. Seward — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:57:17 +0000

This image is my New York. More precisely, it’s a heatmap of where I spent my time in 2010 as documented by my activity on Foursquare, a location-based social network. Perhaps you can guess where I live, where I work and which baseball team I prefer.

But I never intended to create this map. I just used Foursquare normally, checking in 1,491 times over the course of the year, and ended up with this wealth of data. Generating the map was easy, thanks to a tool by programmer Steven Lehrburger.

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The Top 50 Gawker Media Passwords

Zachary M. Seward and Albert Sun — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:00:27 +0000

Readers of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and other Gawker Media sites may be among the savviest on the Web, but the most common password for logging into those sites is embarrassingly easy to guess: “123456.” So is the runner-up: “password.”

On Sunday night, hackers posted online a trove of data from Gawker Media’s servers, including the usernames, email addresses and passwords of more than one million registered users. The passwords were originally encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made public as part of the hack. Using that dataset, we found the 50 most-popular Gawker Media passwords.

How do Gawker Media users express themselves when no one is watching? While many of their passwords are common phrases like “qwerty,” others appear distinctive to the Gawker community. Where else would “f—you,” “blahblah” and “whatever” rank among the most popular passwords? And why, oh why, is “monkey” in the top 10?

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The Inbox of an Accidental Facebook Voyeur

Zachary M. Seward — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:01:53 +0000

“Just wanted to let you know it seems like your always on my mind these days,” someone wrote to me last night on Facebook. “Sorry if thats creepy but what can I say.” It was creepy, but mostly because the message wasn’t intended for me, and its sender is an Iowa high-school student whom I’ve never met.

An as-yet-unexplained Facebook glitch flooded my inbox last night and this morning with 128 private messages written by complete strangers to their friends–or, in the case of the person who wrote, “I might kill you for this,” their enemies. The misdirected missives range from mundane logistics (“hey whats ur adress so i can send u my bat mitzvah invites?”) to family squabbles (“Until I start hearing some thank yous from you, I will be unable to give you rides home after dance”) to love triangles (“I am EXTREMELY jealous of you”) to unrequited-love notes in foreign languages (“léger nuage de malaise hé oui, entre nous deux”).

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