AOL have got themselves into some deep water – they have released a heap of search queries which their users have made. Google used to return the results in real time and show what other people were searching for. But AOL provided several months search data for hundreds of thousands of users. Sure, they removed the screen name, and replaced it by a random number. But the number still allowed people to line up all the queries from one person and put them together. And given that people often search for the names of friends, family and even themselves, a huge amount of information was leaked.

Yahoo is reporting about a woman in the USA who had her house attacked by teenagers using toilet paper, dog food and the like, causing a heap of damage. So she decided to do the detective work, finding out which local store had a run on toilet paper, and then getting access to their video surveilance to get photos on the purchasers. She then used the schools yearbook to identify the names of the people, which was possible since they were wearing highschool jackets. The teenagers have since been convicted in this case.

I have also been doing a bit of reading with what to expect i Bangkok when I visit there next month. I found a site with heaps of information called Bangkok Bob and contains a heap of useful information…