A common question on the newsgroups is ''how do you encrypt data in a .NET [or other] client application and then decrypt it on SQL Server [or vice versa]?'' I actually ran down my list of answers to someone who asked this in the newsgroups a few weeks ago. I won’t get into the details, but the answers all pretty much say the same thing -- ...

According to this paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS), social security numbers (SSNs) are pretty easy for hackers, identity thieves, and other miscreants to predict based on publicly available data. I found this interesting partly because I just recently (a few months ago) wrote a chapter for a book ...