Actually, some of the features sound pretty useful to me. The claimed improvement (we will have to see, but it seems plausible) is that they do a better job integrating real office documents.

From a security standpoint, I have often wanted to be able to generate something like a one time password when logging in through a public computer.

Dear Sir or Madaam:

My name is John Waledac. I am the designer and owner of a profitable spam company. Recently, my company has fallen upon hard times as several of our servers have broken down. We have the funds to replace these servers, but it will take several weeks to transfer the funds from our bank in Nigeria. This delay could cost our company thousands of dollars. This is where you come in. I am seeking investors to loan up to $100,000 for the purchase of new servers. When the funds from Nigeria arrive you will be reembursed with 20% interest. This whole process should be fully accomplished within 25-30 working days, further information will be given to you as soon as I receive your positive response via e-mail or telephone. If you are interest urgently reach me through the above stated email,telephone numbers to enable me give you the full details of this transaction and how it is going to work out. If you decide to invest I need you to send me

1. Your Name and Address
2. Your Telephone Number
3. The Amount You Wish to Invest
4. Your bank account number

Sincerely,

John Waledac

Tel:011234-8035647626.

NB: Kindly send further correspondence to jwaledac@fastermail.com

FROM: MUYIWA IGE

ATTN.: sir,
I got your contact through email business directory and decided to send my proposal to you. I am MUYIWA IGE the first son of the late chief BOLA IGE,the attorney general of th e fedeal rebulic of Nigeria who was killed by hired assasin on the 23rd of december 2001 by an unidentified gun men believed to be link to our government of which it is a daily case going on in my country;s dailies now.

Two months ago he was attempted to be murdered but unfortunately God speared his life for us.It was then he had to reveal some vital informations as regards his life to me before he was finally killed in december. All accounts belonging to my father both local and abroad had been frozen and his investments seized by the government believing in thier false allegation that he made away of $2 billion dollars of (NEPA)national electricity power authority of which i know is just a ploy to eliminate him by the people in power that he is fustrating thier evil intentions through the human right pubic hearing for violation of right and cruelsome killings during the military regime to carry out thier traits to suffer the mases for thier selfish interest instead of the interest of the nation.We are now in a dileman as ou live are in danger till after the investigations.

Two weeks to the christmas holiday in 2001 being on the 4th of december,my dad spoke to me at lenght about life and it realities .He told me he deposited a trunk box containing us$25.5m with a security in EAUROPE(UK) all in the aim of retrieving it himself before he was finally killed before the christmas. According to him the content of the box was registered as government classified papers with his influence and was moved out of my country through diplomatic courrier.He wanted to safeguard the funds for foriegn investment after his retirement before he was killed.

In the light of this as the next of kin i am now contacting you a foreigner to assist ME in retrieving the boxes and depositing of the fund into your foreign account hence the need to contact you. I and my mother had agreed to give you 30% of the fund for your assistance and 10% for any expenses you might incur in the course of this transaction, we want to believe that you will not sit on the money when paid into your account. I want you to understand that there is no risk involve as we have worked out modalities for the smooth actualization of this goal. The boxes presently is in a security vault of this company in their offshore office in SPAIN.i will require the following for effecting the documents of claim and identification.:

1] Your driving license to assure us of your person

2] Your private telephone and fax numbers.

I will send the following:
3] The receipt of the ware bill used in sending the boxes
4] The deposit certificate

All these will be send through YOUR FAX NUMBER then you will proceed for claim after due schedule with them.you

I wish to state here that we are left with nothing as we survive by the grace of God. I hope you understand our predicament so as to save me and my family from hopeless future (S.O.S.)

All contacts for now should be through my personal email address for security reasons.

Waiting your urgent response.

Best regards,

MUYIWA IGE.

MY PERSONAL EMAIL
ADDRESS(muyiige@mail.com)ALTERNATIVE RESPONSE

How can technology replace it so easily? Has human nature changed that much? I don't buy it. Technology may have advanced dramatically since "primitive" times, but people are still as selfish and prone to corruption as ever.

In the last few centuries, we have seen the printing press, great scientific advancement (calculus, physics, chemistry etc...), the computer, the internet, space travel etc. Technology has enabled massive increases in terms of food production, but the problem of poverty remains. Human trafficking is still a problem (and yes it still happens in developed countries). In the last few centuries we have also seen the atom bomb, several wars much larger than any recorded war from more "primitive" times, the holocaust etc.

Have we become so technologically advanced that we have outgrown our need for God? I think the opposite is true. In our technologically advanced age we need God more than ever.

I am not arguing the technology is a bad thing, it can certainly help us enforce basic laws. However, it is no replacement for God, morality or religion.

In the original netflix competition the data they did not release birthdays, zip codes or gender. Every movie and user was given a unique (presumably random) id. Essentially the data you had to work with was a bunch of tuples:

(movie id, user id, rating (1-5), date)

Netflix claims they even added some random noise (changing the dates/ratings a little bit) to preserve anonymity. Turns out even this isn't enough to guarantee anonymity...you can cross reference this data with IMDB to look for similar date/ratings patterns and re-identify a lot of the people.

See the paper: How to break the Anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset

See the paper "How to Break the Privacy of the Netflix Prize Dataset"

I disagree that Netflix did it right. We live in a day and age where there are many sources of auxiliary information publicly available (IMDB, voter registration, etc...). Any attempt to preserve anonymity must take this into account. All to often companies leave out specific pieces of information (name, DOB, Zip Code etc...) and hope that what remains is anonymous. No one could ever identify me based on just a couple of movie ratings, right?