There's some new startup called PollyTrade that wants to make it possible to trade stock with Twitter. And why not? A ticker is only a few characters. That leaves more than 100 characters to specify the number of shares. Whoo hoo.

According to this story and Slashdot discussion , the UK government carefully checks out each RAF officer who might handle sensitive information. They don't want the wrong type of person who might be subject to blackmail. But then they store taped copies of these interviews on hard disks and then the hard disks disappear. (A smarter thief would just make a copy.) Who has them?

Heartland, a company that suffered a massive data hemorrhage, is now looking to split up their data between 50 or more servers. The data won't be encrypted and they won't use any other translucent techniques, but the damage from a break in to a single machine will be limited to 1/50th of the data. Chris Walters at Consumerist has a long interview with Evan Schuman who lays out the limitations forced by Visa and Mastercard.

You can get a free version here .

It was not easy to get this through the Apple iTunes police. Sheesh.

A few weeks ago I started to think about revising my ten-year old book, Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers. Last year, I had a good deal of fun brushing some of the dust off of my book about steganography, Disappearing Cryptography and my book about privacy enhancing technology, Translucent Databases , so I started wondering if there were other books that were worth revitalizing.

The book about compression algorithms hasn't sold many copies lately, but I think the topic is still as useful for someone who needs a quick introduction. I tried to target the high-end programmers and the academics looking for an introduction to the topic and the result was a book that has been used as a textbook in simpler courses but also purchased by people in industry. While my heart has always been in the world of encryption, I've written a number of staples like this and the sales have always been good enough to make it almost worth my time.

When I started mousing around on the Internet, I found a few good reviews, a few negative ones, and what is best described politely as the ultimate complement: the book is a proud member of the pirated ISO "Great Science Textbooks DVD October 2008". Someone loved my book enough to scan it in and steal it.

Forbes has a nice piece on Google's habit of spidering some sites like PirateBay that are devoted to little more than helping people violate copyright laws.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/17/pirate-bay-google-technology-internet-pirate-bay.html"> Click Here

I wonder whether Google will be able to continue arguing that this is all beyond its control.

I've been playing around with CouchDB for several weeks while working on a story for InfoWorld. The tool is little more than a big pile of pairs of data. You put in one value, the key, and back comes the data associated with it. The system is still very much in its alpha stage and the developers are debating how to add more features like security. They've got a good model but I wanted to write up how some of the most basic techniques I wrote about in Translucent Databases can be simpler and a bit more secure.

While much of the filesharing and anti-filesharing world are transfixed by the courtroom games in Sweden, I just noticed that Google seems to be making all of this moot by removing the need for PirateBay. Google seems to be happy to index the Torrent sites and that means there's no need to become a member at Pirate Bay to search for content. Google has found enough trackers that do this for free that it makes it possible to find the content for free.

I just received my first box filled with copies of the second edition of Translucent Databases. To celebrate, I've lowered the price for ordering directly from me. Give it a whirl and I'll also autograph the copy for you.

Here's a mashup for you:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies