There’s a new book by Susan Shapiro Barash asserting that women are better liars than men. (I haven’t read it.)

True enough, any woman with a wee bit of guile knows how to tell a proper lie. But basing your thesis on the data collected from a test pool of women who responded to Craigslist ads? Please. That’s begging for skewed results.

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These days it’s nearly impossible to go an entire day without being caught on video, whether you’re a celebrity or not. The UK is saturated with cameras, boasting more than four million CCTV connected cameras.

Most people are not even safe from prying eyes at work. I was able to catch a co-worker on video once with a well-placed phone camera, and the results were stunning.

This relatively unknown individual has now been transformed into a YouTube celebrity of sorts, all without his knowledge or consent. I think the moral of the story is clear: if you’re camera shy, it’s best to just stay home under the covers.

I won’t argue that it’s OK to break the law. But I would also say it’s not OK to break the law in order to catch people breaking the law. The RIAA, everyone’s favorite association (racketeering group), has gone to great lengths in the past to prosecute copyright violators.

Lately, however, they are stooping to unheard of depths, even pushing legislation that would pull funding from colleges who don’t comply with their strong arm tactics. This would mean schools that decide not to get in bed with the RIAA would lose federal funding, and important grants that often help pay for low income kids to attend higher education.

If this legislation becomes law, and rampant copyright violations continue, what will RIAA do then? Maybe build some sort of P2P downloader-zapping death star.

Net neutrality, the concept of treating all Internet traffic the same, has been a hot topic of late. Even our esteemed statesmen in Washington have mulled over the subject. Traditional ISPs have stayed out of the debate, letting other players squabble over the politics of packets and pipes.

But now a major ISP is taking matters into their own hands, and causing headaches for many of its users. The ISP is Comcast, and the users are music enthusiasts (illegal file traders). Specifically, Comcast is disrupting the popular Bittorrent file sharing protocol by mangling its data packets.

Unfortunately the problems don’t stop with Bittorrent. Other applications, like Lotus Notes, are also experiencing strange behavior when connecting through Comcast. This is a very scary situation.

When ISPs decide what customers can and can’t do with the bandwidth they pay for we all lose, and lose big. So much for net neutrality.

I haven’t thought about reputation much since high school, and that was primarily other people’s reputations, not my own. Return Path resurrected this term during their webinar Thursday afternoon titled “Reputation 101: Five Things You Need to Know to Get on the Good Side with ISPs”.

The presentation discussed the importance of monitoring your IP address reputation to better understand and manage your email deliverability rates. Reviewing your email bounce rates is one thing, but understanding why your email subscribers are unsubscribing, or not even receiving your messages is another.

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