The credit card technology, used in much of Europe, is supposed to stop fraud by using cryptographic signatures and secret PINs. Which is all well and good, but perhaps the bigger story is how the banking industry in the UK has been able to use the chip and pin rollout to change how credit card fraud is reported, investigated, and compensated, shifting financial responsibility to the consumer or vendor and away from the bank. This is a major policy change that most people are only just now catching on to.

I only saw the first two episodes, but Sophia was instantly my favorite character. Even if you haven’t seen the show there is good stuff here about the reality of reality TV, insight into where they found the kids (hint: SIG and CTY), the community dynamics of the town, and the hilarious social experiments Sophia performed on with the other children.

One of only seven copies of this Potter-inspired and hand-penned book of fairy tales, they bought it at auction at Sotheby’s for around $4 million.

“Do shiksas heckle your schmeckel?”

A good overview of industry buzz. The writers strike has given network executives a lot of time to think about the future of American television, and now they are throwing out a lot of ideas that are a long time coming and would generally be good for television. How much of it they mean, and how much is just attempts to scare the Writers Guild into caving, is unclear.

I was happy to see that Brandeis made #4 (“A modern, contemporary, medival, country college campus.”). Sorta surprised to see Northeastern on the list, though.

Some very important pre-Hanukkah research.

A short book about safe bicycling techniques on public roads and streets.

FEMA is ready to step in and provide support. Oh, great. How about they just sit this one out.

All four creators of dcphonelist.com finally out themselves. And welcome to the blagotubes, Yoni!

Catching up with first daughter Jenna Bush as her father’s term of office comes to a close.

The IETF has spoken, and if you violate their standard and munge your Reply-To headers you’re just creating problems for everybody.

Tim Wu explains the “last mile” problem.