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Can the US government can subpoena a person’s location history from their cell phone company?

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I came across this article by Mark D. Rasch, J.D., a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit, who now serves as a lawyer specializing in computer crime, computer security, and privacy matters. He explains how it is easy for the US government to subpoena a person's location history from their cell phone company:

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/376

…I had long wished that somebody from the legal community would weigh in on this– thanks Mark!

The value of investing in HCI: a practical example from the world of NCAA football

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I'm interested in ways to communicate the value of investing in HCI to business leaders. Here's a nice story that the non-technical person can relate to, it shows how the failure to consider HCI factors led to some regrettable calls in last year's NCAA championship football game:

http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaaf/news?slug=jo-replay111006&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

K-Fed, Milk, and The Hoff

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Amazon reviews and tags don't always get used "seriously" — the Kevin Federline album Dan linked to is a great example. It's been somewhat of a Amazon tradition to target certain products with irreverent and funny reviews. Sometimes, they're removed by Amazon since they're pretty inappropriate, but others, such as reviews for David Hasselhoff's album, whole milk, or recreational tanks (…interesting cross-sells!) have been left alone.

Now, the point of writing these reviews is probably not to shill for the products and make more sales, but their existence has undoubtedly driven disproportionate amounts of traffic to the product pages since people find them funny and send the links to their friends. How does phenomena like this fit in with recommender system security? Is Amazon benefiting from it?

Multiple uses for tags ..

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Shilad Sen of GroupLens published a paper exploring, among other things, the different uses of tags. We came up with three broad categories: factual, subjective, personal, which were used in a variety of ways: self-expression, organization, and so on.

A Reddit entry shows the Amazon community abusing Kevin Federline with tags.

-Dan