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Identity Theft TodayJuly 1

Photography: CarbonNYC

Identity theft marks its 453rd anniversary this summer. In 1556, a man named Arnaud du Tilh arrived in the French village of Artigat claiming to be Martin Guerre, a peasant who had left his wife and child eight years earlier. The man fitted Martin Guerre’s profile. He looked like Martin Guerre. He repeated a number of facts about Martin Guerre. And he was accepted as Martin Guerre by Martin Guerre’s wife with whom he went on to have two children. It wasn’t until the real Martin Guerre turned up in 1560 – minus a leg – that du Tilh confessed. He was hanged in front of Guerre’s house.

Today’s identity thieves have less to fear. They also have much more opportunity and they’re becoming increasingly sophisticated too. They no longer need to rely on an uncanny resemblance to a missing husband to win themselves an easy life, and they don’t even have to rummage around in suburban garbage cans for old bank letters to pick up useful information.

The rise of social networking means that anyone can now gather all sorts of valuable data about almost anyone else and c

Should You Be Selling OFFline?June 30

Photography: Esteban

The Internet is big. Really, really big. And really, really valuable too. Google has indexed over 40 billion pages and counted more than 1 trillion unique URLs. Estimates of regular users have ranged from 500 million to a billion (although no one really knows how to produce accurate user figures)… and retail sales have been estimated at as much as $178 billion in 2008 alone.

Those are huge figures. The revenues are the kind of money that could make a noticeable hole in the national debt, keep a small bank afloat or even repay Bernie Madoff’s victims several times over. It’s no wonder then that so many businesses have built an online presence, hoping to pick up a slice of those online billions – and make sure that their competitors don’t take a chunk of their offline market share too.

Growth figures certainly appear to make that a sensible decision. The top 500 online retailers enjoyed increased sales of almost 12 percent in 2008. Total US retail sales might have grown by as little as 1.4 percent in t

Earning From Your CreativityJune 23

Photography: jef_safi

Ask most people to describe their ideal job and it’s likely to contain a giant salary, of course, but also lots of responsibility and perhaps most importantly, plenty of creativity. Having the freedom to think for yourself – and be rewarded for it – is priceless.

And one of the advantages of a world in which iPhone apps can let cubicle workers give up the day job is that earning from creativity is easier than ever before. If once imaginative thinkers were restricted to the creative departments of large advertising companies – where they were free to think up catchy slogans for airline companies and sketch storyboards for TV slots – today’s creative types have a giant range of options.

Join a Creative Profession

For conventional creatives, the number of artistic professions has exploded. Walt Disney might have been known for having teams of animators whose job was to draw the same character in minutely different ways (or as the company’s historians have pointed out, simply

When Web 2.0 Goes WrongJune 16

Image: Paul Rj Muller

Usually, Web 2.0 just gets it right. Facebook has brought together old friends and keeps connections alive, blogs have given everyone the power to publish without the need to be a media baron first, and Twitter is now letting Iranian demonstrators bring millions onto the streets and send out information that might just change the government.

And yet, those same tools that have proved so useful for communicating, networking and publishing have also been used for more dubious purposes. Here are a number of ways in which Web 2.0 has gone wrong:

Pool Jumping with Google Earth

According to a story published last year in the UK’s Daily Mail, which might not be the most reliable source, groups of young people in Britain are using Google Earth to identify homes with swimming pools then sending invitations through Facebook groups for impromptu pool parties. The sessions specify a meeting place, a time – usually between midnight and 3am – and mobile telephone numbers for contacting the organizers.

While

Valuable Skills You Didn’t Know You Could Learn OnlineJune 10

Photography: michaelsharon

Whenever the going gets tough, tough companies don’t react by getting going. They tell their employees to get going instead. The US economy is said to have already lost some 6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the largest number of layoffs in a downturn since World War II. Some of those fired workers are finding other jobs, perhaps with less pay and sometimes as a stopgap until something better comes along. Others are taking the opportunity to set up their own businesses or, if the last recession is anything to go by, rebranding themselves as “consultants” – the geek version of what actors call “resting.”

Lots of former workers though are neither collecting unemployment benefits nor looking for new niches in the marketplace. Instead, they’re going back to school. Even as endowments are falling and fees are rising, colleges are reporting an increase in applications, including from people hoping to graduate with new skills just as the economy gets going again.

But while education is always a good thing – and learning beats spending your time in front of daytime TV — going back to school isn’t a