Andy Warhol once said, "The day will come when everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Well, I've just wasted two or three of mine by being written up in Wired.com in a story called BN.com: The Hole Story. It adds to and expands on the BN.com security issues I've been following.

As of this writing I still have not received any official word from Barnes and Noble about this problem, so I guess I shouldn't expect one ever. A funny side effect is that when I tried to log in to BN.com to check on the exact nature of a corporate discount I get there, I almost forgot which e-mail address was the up to date one and nearly forgot how to log in.

See, I was able to create multiple identical accounts by logging in with my old address and changing the e- mail address. This is how I verified the problem to myself repeatedly before I contacted customer service and wrote about it on my website. Each new account would be identical to any other I created in the same manner.

This means that in addition to the original account attached to the old e-mail address and the new main account I use, there are three or four accounts just floating in BN.com's system with my name attached to them.

I guess I could always shop with each of them, thus splintering my identity in their system causing some sort of internet schizophrenia. Since, if they're smart and devious they're tracking my shopping behaviour looking for new marketing activities (like Amazon.com), when I visit their website I'll get up to four different styles of marketing targeted towards me.

Or if I were devious, I could write a macro that would replicate my account hundreds of times on their system to the point where I was the majority of accounts on BN.com. I wonder what that would look like in their logs. "We have 2,000,000 registered users, and 1,000,000 of them are Mark Wieczorek."

Where I work we have very strict policies about revealing client information to the point where if I ever receive a piece of paper with a client's name on it I immediately shred it. The same with anything I receive digitally with client information. I wonder what it's like at BN.com. "Did you see, last month Madonna bought a book on Fondue. Do you think she's putting the Fondue set on the dining room table or next to the bed? (wink, wink)"

I'm just being silly. In truth, I would order from BN.com in a heatbeat if they had something I wanted. My Amazon.com profile probably takes up a few megabytes in their database. Whatever it is I am, I am it openly. Any Google search for "MarkTAW" will turn up all of the several dozen reviews I've written on Amazon.com. Learning about me would be as easy as doing that and reading my website.

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