Category: news

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.)

Warren Ellis – a useful quote

I find myself collecting little quotes from Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter, as I read through the backlog that I’ve allowed to pile up in my email. Here’s a good one, from July 2016:

Remember – your internet has an off button, and so does your news.  It’s okay to turn the volume down, and even to turn it off. There’s no shame in self care and pausing to take a breath before you re-immerse yourself in the world and its velocity.

…Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t skip work to watch the James Comey testimony today, if you want to.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

 

Philip Roth on Trump

Coincidentally, after reading a fairly old New Yorker article about Philip Roth over the weekend, and blogging about it, I saw today that the New Yorker reached out to Roth for comment on Trump, and any similarity between the Trump administration and the fictional Lindbergh administration from his novel “The Plot Against America.” He has a few interesting things to say, though nothing particularly unexpected.

I’m still curious about “The Plot Against America.” I’m going to have to pick it up and read it at some point.

Inauguration Day

I took a half-day off work today. I’m going to be heading into New York City in a little bit. I don’t have any real specific plans, but I’m going to try to follow Patton Oswalt’s advice from his Facebook post yesterday. I’m probably going to go to a couple of museums. And I might check out the Science Fiction Film Festival tonight.

Harvesting Government History

Here’s an interesting article about a group of librarians archiving pages from federal websites, prior to the start of the new administration:

The ritual has taken on greater urgency this year, Mr. Phillips said, out of concern that certain pages may be more vulnerable than usual because they contain scientific data for which Mr. Trump and some of his allies have expressed hostility or contempt.

Source: Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time

I would have assumed that something like this would just be done as a matter of course by archive.org, but I guess it is a big enough job that it needs some human guidance and curation, beyond just pointing a web crawler at *.gov and calling it a day. The Times article doesn’t mention archive.org, but they are involved:

…the Internet Archive, along with partners from the Library of Congress, University of North Texas, George Washington University, Stanford University, California Digital Library, and other public and private libraries, are hard at work on the End of Term Web Archive, a wide-ranging effort to preserve the entirety of the federal government web presence, especially the .gov and .mil domains, along with federal websites on other domains and official government social media accounts.

As a cynic, I want to say that this is largely pointless, but I guess I do still have some hope for the future, since I’m actually kind of enthusiastic about this. It seems like the kind of thing my brother Patrick (who was a librarian) would have been interested in. (Though he, too, was a bit of a cynic at times.)

Healthcare in America right now

Here’s an interesting article on Obamacare, which unfortunately turns out to be largely a waste of time to read, due to a couple of key sentences near the end:

There’s one significant problem with all these ideas, of course: They’d need to pass the Republican Congress and be signed into law by Mr. Trump.

Source: Politics Aside, We Know How to Fix Obamacare

So, it’s a good thought exercise, but it isn’t going to happen.

And here’s another article that doesn’t leave me feeling good about the current state of the healthcare system in America:

To put it in very, very blunt terms: This is the health equivalent of a carjacking.

Source: Surprise! Insurance Paid the E.R. but Not the Doctor – The New York Times

I already knew about this one, of course. I’ve read about it before, and was actually a bit worried about it, when I went in for hernia surgery last year.

Reinventing Local News

Here’s an interesting effort to help “reinvent” local news. The gist of it seems to be that we should put aside a certain amount of money from FCC auctions of local TV licenses to help set up new “cutting edge” local news sources. I’m not too optimistic that this will happen, or that it would result in quality, long-term, local news for New Jersey if it does. But, hey, it’s worth a shot. The local news situation in NJ is pretty weak.

We’re focusing first on New Jersey. Sandwiched between the New York and Philadelphia media markets, New Jersey receives little to no coverage of its state and local governments. New Jersey owns four public TV licenses, which the FCC estimates could fetch as much as $2.3 billion at auction.

Source: Our Last, Best Chance to Reinvent Local News

Paying for Pluralsight, and other subscriptions

Pluralsight extended their Black Friday sale by a few days, so I gave in and paid for a year last night. Part of my reason for that is that I noticed that there’s a series on SharePoint 2013 programming with JavaScript by David Mann that looks like it might be useful. (Now I just have to convince myself to watch it.)

I was happy to see that they added the paid subscription to the end of my free period, rather than just start it immediately, so it will last until January 2018. I paid for the subscription with a virtual card number, so it won’t auto-renew, so that will give me a chance to think about whether or not I want to continue with it in 2018.

I’m in the middle of listening to a Mac Power Users episode on managing subscriptions, and there’s a few good ideas in there. For stuff that renews annually, my approach is generally to pay for them with a virtual card number or (where possible) a personal check, so they don’t auto-renew. Then, I have to make a conscious decision to evaluate and renew (or not) each year. I also try to keep track of them in Evernote, and set reminders so I know when they’re coming up for renewal.

I tend to review subscriptions at the end of each year, so I might as well do that now. Looking at a few of the big ones, I see that my Office 365 subscription is good until December 2018, so I don’t have to worry about that one for a long time. But my Evernote subscription is set to renew next month, at the $70 “premium” level. I’m still not happy about their increase from $50 to $70, but I do get quite a lot of use out of Evernote, so I’m pretty sure that I’m going to let that one renew. (Though maybe I should read up some more on their iOS app redesign, before I commit to that.)

And I just checked my NY Times subscription. I originally subscribed at a promotional rate of $10.50 every four weeks, for a year. That was in January, so that promotional rate will be over soon. I don’t mind paying that, but I expect that the renewal will be done at whatever the current “regular” rate is. The Times is kind of sketchy about pricing. My account page doesn’t say at what rate the subscription will renew, so I’m not sure if it’ll still be $10.50, or something else. Looking at their current rates (by going to their site in a private browsing window), I think it would be $15 every 4 weeks. And looking at the cost of subscribing through their iOS app, I think I could get a subscription for $130 per year, which comes out to $10 every 4 weeks. So, to get a good rate, I may need to cancel my existing subscription and resubscribe through iOS.

I could choose to look at supporting the Times as being a little like a charitable donation though. I think we’re going to need a robust, independent, (relatively) unbiased press over the next four years. And the Times seems to have gotten under the president-elect’s skin more than any other media outlet. So they’re worth supporting, for that reason, at very least.

Giving Tuesday (a bit late)

Since I posted about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I figure I should write a Giving Tuesday post too. I’ve been really indecisive about giving to charity, since the election results came in. I think there are a lot of charities that will need help over the next few years, and it’s hard to choose which ones to support.

A friend forwarded me an article from NPR about choosing charities to support this year. It’s somewhat helpful. And there’s Nick Kristof’s annual column about holiday season charitable giving at the NY Times site.