A straight shot west out of Boston on I-90 will carry you, in two hours or less, to Western Massachusetts, where the country still looks like it did twenty or even 40 years ago: college towns, I-91 tracing the same lazy ladder from Springfield up through Holyoke and Northampton, Amherst and Deerfield. Out there it's taken for granted that the houses will be drafty, the winters uniformly long, and that, on any given trip to the local supermarket, one might spot Thurston or Lou or Kim or J, on-and-off locals for more than twenty years. {audio}http://www.archive.org/download/DinosaurJrDrawings/07Drawerings_64kb.mp3{/audio} ... Drawerings Read More ...
By way of decrying a society that left its citizens unbearably restrained, Edith Wharton describes how in New York in the 1870s, women would order dresses from their Paris dressmakers and then leave them in tissue paper at least two years before wearing them in public; the thought of showing them "in advance of the fashion" was unforgivably vulgar. Social life has changed, but cultural life seems just as restricted now – even Animal Collective are held back by trends that seem a couple of years old (and that they helped to invent). When I think back on 2009, I’ll first remember how our impoverished aesthetic generation repeatedly scraped the resin from the cultural trash barrel. Every second person is wearing neon leggings, and the ones who aren’t rock a ‘70s aesthetic, with high-waisted jeans and moccasins. Christmas sweaters are getting impossible to find at the thrift store. Ska revival. Garage rock revival. It never ends. Read More ...
For just over 10 years, London's Guapo has been working in the world of avant and progressive rock. The band's past is a bit hard to track with its numerous lineup changes and guest musicians. The most recent change in roster was the resignation of Matthew Thompson, the founding member of Guapo, which occurred just before the release of 2005's Black Oni. The departure of Thompson has left Guapo with percussionist David Smith and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O'Sullivan. Though O'Sullivan is by no means a founding member of the band, but he was essential in honing the sound on Guapo's last two LPs: Five Suns and Black Oni. These two albums have been pivotal in building Guapo's following of fans, so it's hard not to credit O'Sullivan as an asset to the band.... {audio}http://www.neurotrecordings.com/artists/guapo/audio/Guapo-The%20Selenotrope.mp3 {/audio} ... The Selenotrope Read More ...
Basic Atari Teenage Riot iPhone app philosophy by Alec Empire + London gig+ 4CD, 1DVD free download
The free iPhone app features all ATR albums and songs, all videos, a photo archive, bio, news updates and also a ‘Riotsounds Produce Riots’ audioplayer. This audio player includes all the sounds/WAV files that ATR used at the May 1st 1999 demonstration (very low sub basses, square waves, noise sounds which trigger hysteria and panic within the audience) & would make them available to every political activisit out there. The idea being that you can hook up your iPhone to a speaker system if there is a rally: Apple/iTunes is arguing that they still need to investigate further, because it is legally a grey area and ATR has been indexed in Germany before (censored). Read More ...
The Swans - THIS IS NOT A REUNION - Message From Gira + free discography download (20 CDs)
Michael Gira's re-activated Swans will be undertaking their first U.S. performances in 13 years, celebrating the Fall release of the first new Swans album since Soundtracks For The Blind (1997). The album was recorded by Jason LeFarge at Seizure's Palace in Brooklyn and is currently be remixed by Gira with Bryce Goggin (Antony & The Johnsons, Akron/Family) at Trout Recordings. Read More ...
The Ex are one of those rare bands that, despite being around for 25 years, have neither gone soft nor stagnated. The 23 tracks on this album all date from their first decade of existence (1980-1990), and if you compare it with recent milestones like Starter Alternator and Turn, you’ll see that while many of the Ex’s virtues are long standing, much has changed. The Ex grew out of Amsterdam’s once-fertile squatters’ subculture, and have always been politically conscious; Singles. Period. includes screeds that oppose American cultural hegemony, Dutch apathy, and eugenics. Their most recent album Turn likewise includes protests against globalization, consumerism, and cultural erosion, but its lyrics are quite nuanced and in touch with the grey areas of the issues when compared with the black and white prescription of 1981’s “Weapons For El Salvador”: .............. {audio}http://www.theex.nl/mp3/The%20Ex%20-%20Trash.mp3{/audio} ... Trash Read More ...
Dirty HC Punk explosion - Bristol scene Rise up + Disorder 9 free CDs
From The Cortinas to Lunatic Fringe and Disorder, Bristol had a huge Punk scene that has influenced, affected and stimulated a vast range of artists that operate in the city. Many of these artists produce music that wouldn’t necessarily suggest a Punk heritage but scratch beneath the surface of a lot of the major players in the Bristol milieu and you will find a fondness for the times of `spikey barnets’, limited musical ability, a `F*** You’ attitude and disrespect for the music industry and its poseur hierarchy. Read More ...
A live album can be many things: a candid snapshot, a footnote to a scene, or even just a thrifty alternative to studio time. Antlers, a collection of live Bastro recordings from 1991, is the rarest kind of live album: it illuminates a side of the band that, in turn, casts their previous work in a new light as well.“1991 has been called the year that punk broke. Some of it broke into the mainstream, but some broke into more irregular shards.” David Grubbs’s observation, from the liner notes to Antlers, could also describe the varied musical paths that led from his former band Squirrel Bait to the disparate ’90s groups he and his ex-bandmates went on to found: Slint, Palace Brothers, King Kong, Bitch Magnet, the For Carnation, Tortoise, and of course, Bastro. Read More ...
Japan’s Annual Penis Festival – Celebrates Fertility
KOMAKI, Japan — It's springtime in Japan and that means one thing. Actually, two things. Penis festivals and vagina festivals. It may sound like a sophomoric gag. But these are folk rites going back at least 1,500 years, into Japan's agricultural past. They're held to ensure a good harvest and promote baby-making. Maybe they should hold more such festivals. Japan has one of the world's lowest birthrates (1.37 children per woman), which experts blame on stagnant incomes and changing gender relations. Read More ...
Black-lip Rattail ............ These sorts of rattails feed in the muddy seafloor by gliding along head down and tail up, powered by gentle undulations of a long fin under the tail. The triangular head has sensory cells underneath that help detect animals buried in the mud or sand. The common name comes from the black edges around the mouth. Read More ...
"I forgot to remember to forget," Elvis Presley sang in 1955. I know that it was 1955 because I just Googled the title and clicked on the link to the Wikipedia entry for the song. How cool is that? Not long ago, I would have had to actually remember that Elvis recorded the song as part of his monumental Sun Records sessions that year. Then I would have had to flip through a set of histories of blues and country that sit on the shelf behind me. It might have taken five minutes to do what I did in five seconds. I almost don't need my own memory any more. That strikes many of us as a good thing: the costs low, the benefits high. We can be much more efficient and comprehensive now that a teeming collection of documents sits just a few keystrokes away. Read More ...
All world secret underground bases build for space travelers
The following material comes from people who know the Dulce (underground) base exists. They are people who worked in the labs; abductees taken to the base; people who assisted in the construction; intelligence personal (NSA,CIA,FBI ... ect.) and UFO / inner-earth researchers. This information is meant for those who are seriously interested in the dulce base. for your own protection be advised to “use caution” while investigating this complex.Does a strange world exist beneath our feet? Strange legends have persisted for centuries about the mysterious cavern world and the equally strange beings who inhabit it. More UFOlogists have considered the possibility that UFOs may be emanating from subterranean bases, that UFO aliens have constructed these bases to carry out various missions involving Earth or humans. Read More ...
These days, with all the pundits preaching doom and the impending collapse of society into some kind of Mad Max style wasteland, it's easy for us to imagine that the economy is as unhealthy as it's ever been. But any historian would give you a hard backhanded smack for even saying that out loud. History is full of economic idiocy, and here are five economic collapses that make 2010 feel like the Renaissance. Read More ...
Island of Ghosts: Hashima Island - Japan’s rotting metropolis
Hashima, an island located in Nagasaki Bay, is better known as Warship Island (Gunkanshima). The island was inhabited until the end of the 19th century, when it was discovered that the ground below it held tons of coal. The island soon became a center of a major mining complex owned by Mitsubishi Corporation. As the complex expanded, rock brought out of the shafts was used to artificially expand the island. Seawalls created in this expansion turned Hashima into the monstrous looking Gunkanshima; its artificial appearance makes it looks more like a battleship than an island. Read More ...
Dreamachine - stroboscopic flicker device enter you to a hypnagogic state - try it right here in your browser
The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs's "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain. In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency of between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing. Read More ...
The Peyote Way Church of God - believe that the Holy Sacrament Peyote can lead an individual toward a more spiritual life
The Peyote Way Church of God is a non-sectarian, multicultural, experiential, Peyotist organization located in southeastern Arizona, in the remote Aravaipa wilderness. It is not affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Native American Church, or any other religious organizations, though we do accept people from all faiths. Church membership is open to all races. We encourage individuals to create their own rituals as they become acquainted with the great mystery. We believe that the Holy Sacrament Peyote, when taken according to our sacramental procedure and combined with a holistic lifestyle (see Word of Wisdom), can lead an individual toward a more spiritual life. Peyote is currently listed as a controlled substance and its religious use is protected by Federal law only for Native American members of the Native American Church. Read More ...
The World's First Commercial Brain-Computer Interface + history of BCI
A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain–machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device. BCIs are often aimed at assisting, augmenting or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA. The papers published after this research also mark the first appearance of the expression brain–computer interface in scientific literature. Read More ...
Seven theories of everything that pretend to describe the fundamental nature of the universe
We still don't have a theory that describes the fundamental nature of the universe, but there are plenty of candidates.
The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God". But theologians needn't lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct. Read More ...
The Secrets of Coral Castle and pyramids EXPLAINED by Leedskalnin's Magnetic Current theory
Coral Castle doesn't look much like a castle, but that hasn't discouraged generations of tourists from wanting to see it. That's because it was built by one man, Ed Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant who single-handedly and mysteriously excavated, carved, and erected over 2.2 million pounds of coral rock to build this place, even though he stood only five feet tall and weighed a mere 100 pounds. Ed was as secretive as he was misguided. He never told anyone how he carved and set into place the walls, gates, monoliths, and moon crescents that make up much of his Castle. Some of these blocks weigh as much as 30 tons. Ed often worked at night, by lantern light, so that no one could see him. He used only tools that he fashioned himself from wrecks in an auto junkyard. Read More ...
The T2K Experiment - From Tokai To Kamioka - Where is the anti-matter?
From the beginning of 2010, the T2K experiment will fire a beam of muon-neutrinos from Tokai on Japan's east coast, 300km accross the country to a detector at Kamioka. It hopes to investigate the phenomenon of "neutrino oscillations" by looking for "muon neutrinos" oscillating into "electron neutrinos". A million pound detector has been built at the University of Warwick as part of a vital experiment to investigate fundamental particles - neutrinos. Read More ...
The giant ALICE detector is already underway at CERN, and researchers are scrambling to add an electromagnetic calorimeter to capture jet-quenching, the newest way to look inside the quark-gluon plasma — the hot, dense state of matter that filled the earliest universe, which the Large Hadron Collider will soon recreate by slamming lead nuclei into one another. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known mainly as the accelerator that will soon begin searching for the Higgs particle, and other new physics, in proton collisions at unprecedented energies — up to 14 TeV (14 trillion electron volts) at the center of mass — and with unprecedented beam intensities. But the same machine will also collide massive nuclei, specifically lead ions, to energies never achieved before in the laboratory. Read More ...
Vadim Chernobrov & Russian secrets experiments with time machines
A disturbing story in the March, 2005. 1 issue of Pravda suggests that the U. S. Government is working on the discovery of a mysterious point over the South Pole that may be a passageway backward in time. According to the article, some American and British scientists working in Antarctica on January 27, 1995, noticed a spinning gray fog in the sky over the pole. U. S. physicist Mariann McLein said at first they believed it to be some kind of sandstorm. But after a while they noticed that the fog did not change its form and did not move so they decided to investigate. Read More ...
If you're trying to buy happiness, you'd be better off putting your money toward a tropical island get-away than a new computer, a new study suggests. The results show that people's satisfaction with their life-experience purchases — anything from seeing a movie to going on a vacation — tends to start out high and go up over time. On the other hand, although they might be initially happy with that shiny new iPhone or the latest in fashion, their satisfaction with these items wanes with time. The findings, based on eight separate studies, agree with previous research showing that experience-related buys lead to more happiness for the consumer. But the current work provides some insight into why. Read More ...
It's not just a good idea, it's the law: 186,287 miles per second. The fact that sound waves travel at a finite speed--roughly 330 meters per second--has been known since ancient times. It's obvious, really, when you stand back a ways and observe the falling of a tree or the clapping of a pair of hands, and the sound arrives noticeably later than the sight itself. The fact that light waves also travel at finite speed is much harder to notice, because that speed is almost a million times faster. But by the end of the Renaissance, astronomers--viewing events much more distant than a few hundred meters--had begun to suspect the truth. Read More ...
It was nearly the end of WWII. At that same time, scientist Viktor Schauberger worked on a secret project. Johannes Kepler, whose ideas Schauberger followed, had knowledge of the secret teachings of Pythagoras that had been adopted and kept secret. It was the knowledge of Implosion (in this case the utilization of the potential of the inner worlds in the outer world). Hitler knew - as did the Thule and Vril people - that the divine principle was always constructive. A technology however that is based on explosion and therefore is destructive runs against the divine principle. Thus they wanted to create a technology based on Implosion. Read More ...
The Size Of Our World or How Insignificant the Earth Really Is in the Universe
Compared to you and me, the Earth is really big. But compared to Jupiter and the Sun, the Earth is pretty tiny. There are many ways we can measure the size of the Earth. Let's look at how big the Earth is, and then compare it to other objects in the Solar System. The diameter of the Earth is 12,742 km. In other words, if you dug a hole down into the Earth, passed through the center of the Earth, and came out the other side, you would have dug a hole 12,742 km deep (on average). That's about 4 times longer than the diameter of the Moon. Read More ...
Strange Images from Space - Photos&videos of the Bizarre in Our Universe
Some weird and unusual objects are floating around in the cosmos. Space is always serving up something new, unusual, and unexpected. Here are images and explanations of obejcts that have amazed and delighted astronomers. Read More ...
Mysterious Radio Waves from Unknown Object in M82 Galaxy
There is something strange is lurking in the galactic neighborhood. An unknown object in galaxy M82 12 million light-years away has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before except perhaps by Ford Prefect. M82 is starburst galaxy five times as bright as the Milky Way and one hundred times as bright as our galaxy's center. "We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK. But its apparent sideways velocity is four times the speed of light. This "superluminal" motion occurs usually in high-speed jets of material bursting out by black holes. Read More ...
Unsettled Mechanism of Supernova Detonation Gets a New Twist
Type Ia supernovae, often used to calibrate cosmological measurements, may arise from merging white dwarfs, after all
When stellar cataclysms known as type Ia supernovae flare up far across the universe, their brightness and consistency allow astronomers to use them as so-called standard candles to measure cosmological distances. Just over a decade ago, two teams used the supernovae to show that the universe is accelerating in its expansion due to the influence of dark energy, a shocking discovery that thrust type Ia supernovae into the astrophysical limelight. But how exactly did these cosmic mileposts come to be? Read More ...
Black Prince, alien space probe, orbits Earth watching humans
Alexander Kazantsev, a Soviet author of sci-fi books, once said that a mysterious “unaccounted” satellite called Black Prince was spinning around Earth. The writer believed the object might be an alien probe, a messenger from extraterrestrial civilizations. Some people including scientists paid attention to the writer’s hypothesis.U.S. astrophysicist Ronald Bracewell was the first to take the hypothesis seriously. In 1960, he published a study to back his conclusions with data of practical radio engineering. Read More ...
Secret Robotic Space Plane Launched By US Air Force
The United States Air Force (USAF) has launched a secret space plane into orbit, carried in the nose of an Atlas 5 rocket. The USAF is not calling the X-37B a weapon or anything else, and the classified mission was broadcast live, but only for several minutes into the flight. The plane, built by Boeing, was originally part of a NASA programme but was later abandoned and turned over to a secretive USAF unit. There are no details on how much it costs or when it is coming back to earth, but when it does return the unmanned craft will land itself, using the onboard autopilot. Read More ...
Hubble telescope captures image of mysterious x-shaped object in space
Is that a smashed comet or an X-Wing fighter? Scientists are offering up their own theories as to what created the striking star-inspired image, which was captured by NASA's Hubble telescope in January. "Two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. Read More ...
All Radio music can download from "free music albums"
Homerecent news Find out What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web and see how easily identifiable you are
Find out What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web and see how easily identifiable you are
Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story. When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer's configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?
EFF (Electronic frontier Foundation) is running an experiment to find out. Website Panopticlick will anonymously log the configuration and version information from your operating system, your browser, and your plug-ins, and compare it to our database of five million other configurations. Then, it will give you a uniqueness score — letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web. Adding your information to our database will help EFF evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, who are already using techniques of this sort to record people's online activities. They develop these methods in secret, and don't always tell the world what they've found. But this experiment will give us more insight into the privacy risk posed by browser fingerprinting, and help web users to protect themselves.
What Information is "Personally Identifiable"?
Mr. X lives in ZIP code 02138 and was born July 31, 1945.
These facts about him were included in an anonymized medical record released to the public. Sounds like Mr. X is pretty anonymous, right?
Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population. If you live in the United States, there's an 87% chance that you don't share all three of these attributes with any other U.S. resident. Second, there may be particular data sources available (Sweeney used a Massachusetts voter registration database) that let people do searches to bootstrap what they know about someone in order to learn more -- including traditional identifiers like name and address. In a very concrete sense, "anonymized" or "merely demographic" information about people may be neither. (And a web site that asks "anonymous" users for seemingly trivial information about themselves may be able to use that information to make a unique profile for an individual, or even look up that individual in other databases.)
Many contemporary privacy rules and debates center on the notion of "personally identifiable information" (PII). The PII concept is used by several legal regimes and many organizations' privacy policies; generally, information that identifies a particular person is considered much more sensitive than information that does not. For instance,
Federal telecommunications privacy laws use "individually identifiable information" (about a subscriber) as a basis for the category of protected information called Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI); Federal health privacy regulations use "individually identifiable health information" (about a patient) as a basis for the category called Protected Health Information (PHI); Federal financial privacy laws, the EU Data Protection Directive, and state privacy laws all employ similar terms and concepts;
and, in each case, facts deemed "personally identifiable" or "individually identifiable" may receive dramatically higher protections under these laws and regulations.
But research by Prof. Sweeney and other experts has demonstrated that surprisingly many facts, including those that seem quite innocuous, neutral, or "common", could potentially identify an individual. Privacy law, mainly clinging to a traditional intuitive notion of identifiability, has largely not kept up with the technical reality.
"When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense."
A recent paper by Paul Ohm, "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization", provides a thorough introduction and a useful perspective on this issue. Prof. Ohm's paper is important reading for anyone interested in personal privacy, because it shows how deanonymization results achieved by researchers like Latanya Sweeney and Arvind Narayanan seriously undermine traditional privacy assumptions. In particular, the binary distinction between "personally-identifiable information" and "non-personally-identifiable information" is increasingly difficult to sustain. Our intuition that certain information is "anonymous" is often wrong. Given the proper circumstances and insight, almost any kind of information might tend to identify an individual; information about people is more identifying than has been assumed, and in the long run the whole enterprise of classifying facts as "PII" or "not PII" is questionable.
Statistical inference and clever use of databases has resulted in impressive examples of deanonymization of supposedly anonymous data, the kinds of data that most organizations have not regarded as PII. Apart from combinations of demographic data, some of the sorts of things that may well uniquely identify you include your search terms; your purchase habits; your preferences or opinions about music, books, or movies; and even the structure of your social networks -- in a purely abstract sense, even when shorn of the identities of your friends and contacts. Deanonymization is effective, and it's dramatically easier than our intuitions suggest. Given the number of variables that potentially distinguish us, we are much more different from each other than we expect, and there are more sources of data than we realize that may be used to narrow down exactly who a particular record refers to.
Many of these papers were meant as proofs of concept: they show that people can potentially be re-identified by these kinds of data, not that everyone will be. Not everyone's medical records were as easy to put a name to as Governor Weld's. And Narayanan and Shmatikov's research definitively identified only two Netflix users from their movie ratings -- not every user whose ratings were published by Netflix. Still, many of these research results deliberately do not use all the data available about individuals because their goal is to show the effectiveness of mathematical techniques, not to violate individuals' privacy. Real-world attacks will use many more kinds of available information simultaneously to narrow in on people's identities. As Bruce Schneier has observed, such attacks only get better over time; they never get worse.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal judge today that the government should not be allowed to use the "state secrets privilege" to preempt the class-action lawsuit against AT&T. EFF's suit accuses AT&T of collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in illegally spying on millions of Americans -- handing over customers' telephone and Internet records and communications without any legal authority. Department of Justice lawyers argued today that even if the NSA program is illegal, pursuing the case might expose "state secrets." However, EFF attorneys asked the judge to allow the case to proceed, considering the privilege in regards to specific evidence and situations instead of derailing the suit all together.
Ohm argues that it's more appropriate to think of identifiability as a continuum. The notion of "anonymized" or "sanitized" data is then problematic; researchers habitually share, or even publish, data sets which assign code numbers to individuals. There have already been conspicuous problems with this practice, like when AOL published "anonymized" search logs which turned out to identify some individuals from the content of their search terms alone.
We hope "Broken Promises of Privacy" encourages people who work with personal data to think more critically about their retention and sharing practices and the effectiveness of the anonymization or pseudonymization techniques they're using. We also hope it finds a broad audience and helps start a wider discussion among researchers, technologists, and lawyers about what "privacy protection" should mean in the era of deanonymization.
A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy
If we ask whether a fact about a person identifies that person, it turns out that the answer isn't simply yes or no. If all I know about a person is their ZIP code, I don't know who they are. If all I know is their date of birth, I don't know who they are. If all I know is their gender, I don't know who they are. But it turns out that if I know these three things about a person, I could probably deduce their identity! Each of the facts is partially identifying.
There is a mathematical quantity which allows us to measure how close a fact comes to revealing somebody's identity uniquely. That quantity is called entropy, and it's often measured in bits. Intuitively you can think of entropy being generalization of the number of different possibilities there are for a random variable: if there are two possibilities, there is 1 bit of entropy; if there are four possibilities, there are 2 bits of entropy, etc. Adding one more bit of entropy doubles the number of possibilities.
Because there are around 7 billion humans on the planet, the identity of a random, unknown person contains just under 33 bits of entropy (two to the power of 33 is 8 billion). When we learn a new fact about a person, that fact reduces the entropy of their identity by a certain amount. There is a formula to say how much:
ΔS = - log2 Pr(X=x)
Where ΔS is the reduction in entropy, measured in bits,2 and Pr(X=x) is simply the probability that the fact would be true of a random person. Let's apply the formula to a few facts, just for fun:
Starsign: ΔS = - log2 Pr(STARSIGN=capricorn) = - log2 (1/12) = 3.58 bits of information Birthday: ΔS = - log2 Pr(DOB=2nd of January) = -log2 (1/365) = 8.51 bits of information
Note that if you combine several facts together, you might not learn anything new; for instance, telling me someone's starsign doesn't tell me anything new if I already knew their birthday.
In the examples above, each starsign and birthday was assumed to be equally likely. The calculation can also be applied to facts which have non-uniform likelihoods. For instance, the likelihood that an unknown person's ZIP code is 90210 (Beverley Hills, California) is different to the likelihood that their ZIP code would be 40203 (part of Louisville, Kentucky). As of 2007, there were 21,733 people living in the 90210 area, only 452 in 40203, and around 6.625 billion on the planet.
Knowing my ZIP code is 90210: ΔS = - log2 (21,733/6,625,000,000) = 18.21 bits Knowing my ZIP code is 40203: ΔS = - log2 (452/6,625,000,000) = 23.81 bits Knowing that I live in Moscow: ΔS = -log2 (10524400/6,625,000,000) = 9.30 bits
As of 2007, identifying someone from the entire population of the planet required:
S = log2 (1/6625000000) = 32.6 bits of information.
Conservatively, we can round that up to 33 bits.
So for instance, if we know someone's birthday, and we know their ZIP code is 40203, we have 8.51 + 23.81 = 32.32 bits; that's almost, but perhaps not quite, enough to know who they are: there might be a couple of people who share those characteristics. Add in their gender, that's 33.32 bits, and we can probably say exactly who the person is.
Now, how would this paradigm apply to web browsers? It turns out that, in addition to the commonly discussed "identifying" characteristics of web browsers, like IP addresses and tracking cookies, there are more subtle differences between browsers that can be used to tell them apart.
One significant example is the User-Agent string, which contains the name, operating system and precise version number of the browser, and which is sent every web server you visit. A typical User Agent string looks something like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
As you can see, there's quite a lot of "stuff" in there. It turns out that that "stuff" is quite useful for telling different people apart on the net. In another post, we report that on average, User Agent strings contain about 10.5 bits of identifying information, meaning that if you pick a random person's browser, only one in 1,500 other Internet users will share their User Agent string.
EFF's Panopticlick project is a privacy research effort to measure how much identifying information is being conveyed by other browser characteristics. Visit Panopticlick to see how identifying your browser is, and to help us in our research.
recent news 
Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story. When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer's configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?
