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Back to the 80’s with Snoop, bitches.

Here’s a great hack of the Nintendo Wiimote that enables you to use your projected computer screen a whiteboard.

Online DVD rental company Netflix may suffer a cut into its profits if the USPS imposes extra postage for those cute, red envelops. 

The US Postal Service’s Inspector General has prepared an audit that recommends charing a company an extra 17 cents per envelop to cover labor costs.  If this “unidentifed” company is Netflix analysts project that their profits would drop from $1.05 per subscriber to 35 cents.

Could that company be Blockbuster?  The short answer is no.  Netflix’s competitor handles their online rentals a different way in the mail.

The IG said that a majority of the “unidentified company’s” envelopes have a floppy edge which means that the mailers must be handled manually, increasing the cost to ship.  Over the next two years the estimated cost of the manual handling will rise about $20 million.

Can this cause a big spike for Blockbuster’s stock?  Let’s look at some numbers.Netflix sends out about 1.6 million DVDs a day.  They save about $100 million a year by using first class postage even as they pick up the cost of the return postage. A spokesman for the company doubts that Netflix will add a surcharge to the price of shipping the DVDs.

As news of this hit the markets Netflix’s shares rose 18 cents.

A flawed security setup could make access to the personal data of Canadians easily attained. 

Last week a man from Ontario, Canada, stumbled upon a way to find data of other users applying for passports.  While filling out his information online he discovered that by altering one number in the URL of his web browser he could view other people’s data.

The data that could be obatianed in the flaw includes social insurance numbers, birth dates, driver’s license numbers and other personal data of people applying for Canadian passports online.

Last Friday the website was taken down for repair.  Earlier this week it was back up, but on Tuesday it went down again.  The second suspension was “of a different nature” said a spokesperson for the agency.  Indeed it was, as of Tuesday afternoon the site was back up, with the security flaw still accessible.

You can view a screen shot of the flaw here.

Last year Netflix offered a prize of $1 million to anyone to improve their recommendations to user by 10% or better. Now it seems the gave out more than expected.

When the online DVD service Netflix offered its $1 million prize gave out real data from its users to help improve its recommendation feature on its site. When a user rates a DVD the feature offers other movies that user may like depending on genre, actor, director, etc.

To make sure the contestants’ algorithm would work in the real world data Netflix provided data over 100 million movie ratings made by 500,000 users. To be careful Netflix first asked users if it was OK to use their data for this project than anonymized the personal details of the user.

Now it turns out that two men from the University of Texas at Austin have de-anonymized the data. By cross-referencing data from sources other sites and the Netflix data they were able to identify the anonymous Netflix user.
Aside from popular movies people have unique tastes and tend to share them on sites like IMDB, Amazon, and others that have a similar ratings systems. Sometimes those users rated and review films on similar dates, narrowing the fields.

The duo from Texas explained:

“Given a user’s public IMDb ratings, which the user posted voluntarily to selectively reveal some of his (or her; but we’ll use the male pronoun without loss of generality) movie likes and dislikes, we discover all the ratings that he entered privately into the Netflix system, presumably expecting that they will remain private.”

Be aware that when you share something online you are not just sharing it with “friends” on not just on that site. Your data can be cross-referenced then your anonymity will no longer be as strong as you thought.