Equifax breach

This week’s Equifax breach is big news, with a few “SMH” moments (as the kids say).

The first SMH moment is the execs who sold a bunch of stock just before the company disclosed the breach: “Three Equifax executives sold a combined $1.8 million in stock just days after the company discovered a major breach of its data system, but well before it disclosed the hack publicly.” — from an AP story in the NYT. Supposedly, these guys weren’t aware of the breach at the time, but it’s still pretty darn fishy.

The second SMH issue is the web site that Equifax has set up to supposedly let people know if they’ve been affected by the breach. As multiple people have figured out, it’s pretty sketchy. At first, it kind of looked like maybe they were completely ignoring the user input and giving everyone the same opaque response. Now, that’s a little less clear, but I’m not sure if they’re actually giving useful responses or just randomizing them.

The third SMH data point is the free year of credit monitoring they’re offering. It looks like you’ll need to enter a credit card number to sign up for it, and it will convert to a paid credit monitoring plan after the first year, unless you proactively cancel before the end of the year. So they’ll likely end up making money off this breach (though not until a year from now, when all those free accounts quietly bill for year two).

The NY Times has some advice, which is all probably good, and similar to advice I’ve seen elsewhere. First is to put a “permanent” credit freeze on your info at all three credit bureaus. That can cost a few bucks, but you can leave it in place for however long you want. Then, you can also put a “fraud alert” on your info, which is free but only lasts for 90 days. (And supposedly you only need to do that with one credit bureau, and it will apply to all three.) And you should also check your credit report at www.annualcreditreport.com. (But you were already doing that, right?)

If you’re looking to read up on this, there are a lot of places to do so. Consumerist has a good, clear, general write-up. If you want a deeper dive, Brian Krebs has a good blog post about it. And if you just want to wade into the muck, there’s a mega-thread at the personal finance sub-reddit that’s everything a reddit mega-thread tends to be: a fair amount of useful information, mixed with a lot of nonsense. (But it’s fun to read.)

What am I personally going to do? Well, I already check my credit report on a fairly regular basis. I last checked it in December 2016, so I’ll try to remember to check it again at the end of this year. If there’s any short-term fallout from the breach, it’ll probably be visible on the reports by year-end. And I know I should do that credit freeze thing, but honestly I’m probably not going to. I’ll see if I can talk myself into it.

And I was initially going to sign up for the free year of credit monitoring through Equifax, but now that I’m thinking about the auto-renew thing, I think I should skip that. I’m betting that Equifax will make the process of canceling before the auto-renew fairly annoying and onerous. And I’ll probably forget to do it anyway. I can get free credit monitoring through my AAA membership, so maybe I should sign up for that. (They appear to be using Experian’s service.)

Batman: The Animated Series

The one random thing I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post is the 25th anniversary of Batman: The Animated Series. I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about it, many of which are pretty pointless, but here are a few good ones.

B:TAS is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, and one of my favorite takes on Batman (and his supporting characters). This all reminds me that I only ever bought the first season on DVD. I should really buy (and watch) the rest. Or I could just re-watch them all on Amazon Prime.

 

Stuff I wanted to mention

There are a number of things I kind of wanted to mention on this blog, but that I probably don’t have enough to say about to warrant a full post. And they’re piling up in my brain, so I want to jot them all down, then maybe I can relax a bit.

First, today is the 80th birthday of Sergio Aragonés. I’m having a hard time accepting that he’s 80. I know he’s older than me, but the last time I saw him, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was over 60 yet, and that wasn’t that long ago. (OK, maybe it was five or ten years ago, but still…) Anyway, I have a bunch of his comics in my “to be read” pile right now, including a Groo mini-series, some of the Sergio Aragonés Funnies series, and a few issues of Bat Lash. I should really read some of those.

Next, I have started getting into Pere Ubu again for some reason. Probably because they have a new studio album coming out, so I must have seem something about that, which triggered me to start thinking about them again. I spent a little time tonight digging up my old Pere Ubu CDs are ripping them to MP3. I have five of their CDs, which is a decent sample of their output, but not nearly everything. (They’ve been around since the 70s.) Their web site is a lot of fun to browse through. It’s mostly text, not the usual graphics-heavy band site. The organization is somewhat idiosyncratic, but there’s a lot there.

And a couple of recent deaths: First, John Ashbery. I first read him back in college, as assigned reading for a creative writing class (I think). He’s one of the few poets I’ve read who has stuck with me. I’ve been thinking that I should read more poetry. And there’s certainly a lot of Ashbery poems out there that I haven’t read yet, so maybe I should start with some of those.

Second, Holger Czukay. I’m not sure where I first learned about him, but it was probably in a Matt Howarth comic book. I don’t actually own much (or any?) of his recorded output, as part of Can or elsewhere. I should fix that.

Labor Day

Things I did this weekend:

  1. Watched four bad movies, with RiffTrax commentary.
  2. Finished reading a very nerdy Star Trek novel.
  3. Read a few random comic books.
  4. Backed up my desktop PC with Macrium and my Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner.

And that’s really about it. I didn’t go anywhere, or do anything particularly productive or useful. I’d been running a number of vaguely interesting and variously ambitious plans through my head over the last few weeks, ranging from NYC museum visits to flying to Atlanta for Dragon Con, but I decided to punt and just relax. I made one half-hearted stab at watching a Pluralsight video, but I couldn’t get into it. I feel a little guilty about that, but at least I didn’t just give up completely and binge-watch NCIS all weekend. (That has happened. But not recently…) And I did manage to hit my Apple Watch activity goals every day, I think, so there’s that.

NYCC badge activation

I got my badges for NYCC in the mail this week. These things are getting very complicated. They sent me two badges, one for Thursday and one for Friday, and they needed to be activated online, similar to what you need to do with a new credit card. They’re RFID badges, and you need to tap them against… something… as you go in and out of the con. I guess I’ll figure it out when I get there. I had to give them my mobile phone number as part of the activation, and I’m hoping they don’t abuse that. (I think I probably gave that to them already for the “fan verification” thing you need to do to buy tickets, so I guess it’s fine.)

I guess the days of having a simple paper badge are long gone. The badges do look pretty nice, and they have photos of people from The Walking Dead TV show on them, so I’d probably think that was cool, if I actually watched The Walking Dead. (I’d much rather have, say, people from the Flash and Supergirl TV shows on them, but oh well.)

I do have a list of grievances about badge activation. I should probably just keep that to myself, but what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t use it to post a list of grievances?

  1. The activation number is printed on the badge in pale yellow on a white background.
  2. Each badge needs to be activated separately.
  3. There is no option at the end of the badge activation process to activate another badge under the same name. You have to start over again from scratch.
  4. There is no option to log in to your NYCC account and just pick up your name, email, and phone # from that. You have to type them in.
  5. There’s a sticker on each badge telling you to activate it. The sticker does not use the easy-to-remove adhesive that’s typically used for these things. I had to use a razor blade and rubbing alcohol to get the stickers off.
  6. Seriously, why do I have to activate these at all? They were bought online, under an account that’s already associated with my ID.

So that’s my list of grievances. I feel slightly better having written them down. (Insert old man yells at cloud image here.)