Rate My Credit

The Equifax hack(s?) are highlighting more than the security of the institutions that are asking us to trust them with our personal information.  It is bringing into question the entirety of how these institutions identify us and thereby assign us credit.

Even the cursory, headline-scanning research that most of us do will show that the requirements for obtaining a new line of credit are ludicrous.  All you need is a Photo ID, Social Security Number (doesn't need to be yours), a matching birth date and address.  That's it.  And with the SSN and a little work, you can get the Photo ID.

Walk into most retailers (car dealerships, furniture stores, WalMart, Target, etc.), spend fifteen minutes filling out an application and then go to town.

This needs to change.  Even the White House agrees.  For what that's worth.

What The Actual Gun?

WARNING: This post will most likely have little to do with the internet or the Internet of Things or technology or any of the usual nonsense that I spout.

Instead, I feel the need to get something off my chest:

Why The F@#K haven't we done something about the access to guns in the US?

In the wake of this latest (and only unique in the details) gun related tragedy, why do these events keep happening and why aren't people doing something about them?  Why is the US less than 5% of the world population, but has more than 30% of the mass shootings?  I'm sure that it has something to do with having nearly 50% of the civilian owned guns.

I know that I'm not really qualified to discuss the deep legal issues involved here, much less the psychological side, but I do like to think that, as a compassionate human living in a supposedly enlightened society, I can feel for the victims.  From that perspective, the only conclusion is:

This S@#T has got to stop.

So why hasn't it? I'll answer my own question: the Second Amendment and the NRA.

Mining, Not Ads

Last week, the internet changed dramatically and you probably did not notice.  This has nothing to do with Net Neutrality, though that is a big thing that may change the internet in ways that are hard to imagine.  Instead, it has to do with how websites make money.

The news story that you probably heard was that the CBS and Showtime websites were set up so that when you browsed their sites, your browser ran a script that 'mined' a crypto-currency.  It turns out that, in this particular case, the code to do this was not authorized by CBS and that some programmer did this in the dark for their own Superman III/Office Space style scam.

What you did not hear was that the mechanism that this back office Richmond used to do all of this is actually legitimate.  Just not approved by CBS.  And it can help monetize web content AND minimize advertising.  How does all of this work?  Read on.

That's What She Said

There were a few news items that caught my eye this last week.  A couple that are entry-worthy are:

• "Uncle" Joe Biden came down against Universal Basic Income as "selling the American Worker short."
• Amazon was rumored to be considering Bitcoin as a payment option.  And then wasn't.

But both of those were overshadowed by this:

Sex robots are here!  (The full article from The Mirror UK here.)  Of these three news articles, this one has the greatest potential social impact, so that's what I want to dissect.

Sonic Siri

A Chinese research firm has discovered that all our our various voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, OK Google and Cortana) listen to frequencies well beyond the range of human hearing.  Therefore, if a malicious command is pitch-shifted above that range, our devices will hear it and execute it without any of us knowing about it.

Here's the video of it in action:



On the surface, this looks a bit scary: the parts are cheap, there are apps that will shift the frequency of any input (though it may need to be washed through the app a few times, but that's not hard, just time consuming).  And maybe it is scary, but there are some things that you can do about it.  Read on.

Equi-Fu**ed

I've written about on-line privacy before and the utter helplessness surrounding it for the individual citizen.  The Equifax hack highlights this again and takes it to new and more horrifying heights.

Equifax, one of the three credit reporting agencies used by every US entity that needs to decide if any one person is trustworthy, had 143 million records stolen out of their supposedly secure database.  That is roughly two-thirds of the population with a credit report (approximately 246 million people aged fifteen and up).  Bottom line: your information has been exposed.

There have been many data hacks in the past, from Target to Sony to G-Mail and on.  This one is worse.  While those others have had some information, often including social security numbers and credit card information, Equifax makes its business collecting all of that information: credit card payment histories, utility payment histories, mortgages, employment, bank accounts and more.  On everyone who has ever opened any of those.  They collect all of this so that they can help banks and employers and others decide if you will pay your bills on time.  If you are someone who is responsible.

But how can any of that be trusted if the company collecting it proves not to be responsible?

Voice Cliques

The big news from this last week in the Internet of Things is that Amazon and Microsoft are talking to each other.  At least, they are through their digital assistants.  You can now 'summon' Cortana through Alexa and vice-versa.

The big idea that helped these two Seattle area volcanoes of tech to work together is that their two assistants are good at different things.  Cortana integrates well with Microsoft Office and the Bing search engine.  Alexa is good at almost everything else.  This means that you will soon be able to say natural sounding phrases like, "Alexa, open Cortana. [pause] Hey Cortana, what's on my Outlook calendar for today?"  All from the same speaker thingy sitting on some shelf in whatever room you are in.

Not clunky at all.