Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

[If you like what I write, please consider throwing something in the Tip Jar on the right of the page. Alternatively, using The Reading Room portals for shopping on Amazon brings in some advertising revenue and costs you nothing] You can skip to the Visualisation embedded at the end of this post, or go directly to my page on the Tableau Public server [ here ] Introduction As many readers of this blog will be aware (probably painfully), I spend much of my free time on a research project that’s all about collecting radiocarbon determinations and dendrochronological dates. The last publicly released version of the catalogue was in September 2013 (though the most current version has always been freely available to researchers who contact me directly). Back then the catalogue boasted 7015 radiocarbon dates and 260 dendrochronological ones. As of December 2015, the catalogue now holds 8288 radiocarbon and 313 dendro dates. As headline figures go, that’s not bad – respective in...

Introduction In July 2015 a large amount of data was stolen from Ashley Madison , an online business dedicated to facilitating people who sought to have extramarital affairs. The hackers who stole the data, calling themselves ‘The Impact Team’, attempted to use it for blackmail, insisting that Ashley Madison and fellow Avid Life Media site EstablishedMen.com be permanently shut down. On June 22nd, when the company failed to comply, a sample of the data was released publicly. Obviously, negotiations didn’t go as well as might have been hoped and in August the full dataset was made available on the internet. Late in the same month a further data dump was made available that included a number of corporate emails, including a substantial number from CEO Noel Biderman. Since that time, it is believed that a number of enterprising petty criminals have attempted to use the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) to blackmail alleged account holders. Let me be clear. There are tangles ...