Damn right. Most people, no matter what precautions they take or where in the world they live, can be found for a few thousand dollars and most Americans can be found for much, much less. It's much more practical to muddy the information they already have about you by mixing plausible lies in with the truth. If they have nothing then sure, go ahead and lie completely but if they already know part of the story, make sure that you fill in the rest with false or misleading information.
I must confess that I'm not up on current retail prices, but surely there are resellers who have volume accounts and can run queries on your behalf while passing on at least some of their volume savings to you. Private Investigators probably fall into that category for example. Even so, as others have pointed out, that information is also likely available from other sources if you've ever made a purchase online using your credit card.
Couldn't hurt. Although I always use completely fake details when they don't already have at least some information on me already. A good source for fake ID information that will pass most sanity checks like zip code and address combinations or state and area codes is Fake Name Generator. As for the debt collectors, ask them to provide information concerning the debt, such as when it was first incurred, without giving out or confirming any information about yourself. If they refuse then tell them that the person they're looking for cannot be reached at your number or address, which is the truth in your case right? If they disclose the age of the debt and it's beyond the statute of limitations for collection you wouldn't be obligated to pay even if it was your debt and it can be a violation of law for them to continue calling depending upon where you live. Finally, you should note the number that they're calling from so that you can add it to your blocked call list on your phone account. The caller id number might be spoofed, but it couldn't hurt. While your at it you should also set your phone account to 'unblock or I won't take your call'. That way, you don't get 'private call' in the caller ID if they actually want to ring through.
That's a good point. Browser fingerprinting can definitely improve the value of whatever other information they think that they have. However, even that can be defended against if one installs the proper extensions. My personal favorites, in addition to the usual trifecta of AdBlock, NoScript and Ghostery are FireGloves (randomizes information that could otherwise be used to generate a browser fingerprint) and Secret Agent (rotates your user agent string randomly using a customizable list ala the rotating license plates on the bond cars).
No, what they really seem to want is to collect your name, email, home address, DOB and last four digits of your SSN.
Do you honestly believe that they don't already have a database with that information on every American that has ever applied for credit, filed a tax return, paid property taxes or had anything delivered to their home ever? If you think that that information is private, you've got another thing coming. It's all for sale from the likes of Lexis Nexis, Choicepoint or any number of others in the data business.
For extra confusion, try and find people in the same general geographic region with the same or similar name to yours and use bits and pieces of that information when filling out non-essential forms and such. The goal is to trick their databases into confusing you with somebody else when all they have is the name and not the SSN so that your profile becomes a confused jumble of inaccurate, false, misleading and cross pollinated information from many other real and fake people with the same or similar names. Obviously, this works better if your surname and first name are relatively more common.
why the hell would I give it to the exact people I don't want to have it?
They already have the minimum biographical info that they're asking for, that's public information unless you're in the witness protection program. What they don't have is the other related data which they're asking you to update for them. Now of course you wouldn't want to correct their inaccurate records of your other data, but it's nice to see that all of the disinformation and database poisoning is having its intended effects.
And in order to see the data they have about me, I have to give them my name, home address, last four digits of my SSN? Seriously?
If you think that the data brokers like Lexis Nexis, Choicepoint and these guys don't already have all of that information and more, you're sadly misinformed. Would it shock to know that all of that information is readily available to just about any business owner or attorney for $50 or less and nothing more than a promise (by them to the data broker) that you said that you wanted to do business with them or are a client of theirs?
Government does not have the money or expertise to do it themselves.
Does not have the money? Are you daft? The US Government controls the supply of the world's reserve currency. You know, the stuff that everyone on the planet wants. If they want to create more money to pay for something they can simply promise the Fed that they will pay them back and the Fed will credit their bank account with however much they want to spend. For now at least, there's hardly a bank on Earth that wouldn't accept electronic wire from the Fed or through a US bank that will for payment or transfer.
It's only an international crisis because the anointed one left his ass hanging out.
You'll get no argument from me in favor of President Obama. The man is arrogant, insincere and naive with a marvelous ability to speak glibly while in fact saying little or nothing. This is what happens when you put a smart young Harvard lawyer in charge of actually making important decisions on important matters in a timely fashion. Right or wrong the President must decide and that is the one thing that this President refuses to do: D-E-C-I-D-E. He waits for input from everyone, dragging out the decision out for months or even years, and by the time he does make a half baked response it's too late and the consequences of inaction are already upon us. President Bush the younger, love him or hate him, was at least able to decide and that's no small part of what it means to be President. We the People elect the President to make tough decisions, not to endlessly evade them with flowery language and inaction bordering on impotence.
Some people don't like Joel (probably the J2EE guys) but he really does have some good things to say about software development. The project framework factory sounds like something that only the Architecture Astronauts could love.
If the MLP innitiatives are successful in moving China ahead of the US in the targeted areas of research, it will be the end of the hands-off approach of the US government.
The Chinese are known for stealing the ideas and intellectual efforts of others, not so much for creating their own. They are followers, not leaders in tech. So far they've managed to close the gap by shamelessly stealing every technology that they can get their hands on, but what have they done themselves that's innovative and wasn't done first in the US or Europe? Nothing that I can remember and that's why they're still second fiddle to the US in research and development.
But that was already built in Los Angeles last turn, so the great project was converted to 300 shields instead and promptly lost to corruption because Beijing had neglected to build a courthouse earlier in the game.
Okay, from what I'm reading here, this sounds like a gross over-reaction and a lot of rich old people taking shit way, way, way too seriously
Seriously, who gives a shit about yacht racing? It's an aristocratic hobby for east coast snobs with too much money and not enough good sense. Meanwhile the world is just a few steps away from military action in the middle east that could easily escalate into another massive war and possibly even a world war if it draws in Russia, Iran and Syria on the one side and the United States, Israel and NATO on the other. Ellison and his friends sure do have a fucked up sense of priorities racing their damned yachts in the midst of an international crisis. A pox on all their houses I say.
If this disease isn't stopped soon, the profession is going to be worthless except as a feeding pit for lawyers.
Not unlike those in the medical profession who have long been the target of these lawyers and people wonder why the cost of living is going up faster than their declining wages?
This is the same 'US intel' which missed the collapse of the USSR, 9/11, the Boston Bombers, and were totally sure Saddam Hussein had WMDs
From the standpoint of the politicians who make the decisions, intelligence analysts are like economists. The often say on the one hand and then in the same breath say but on the other hand. Politicians hate that kind of reasoning because it doesn't provide the simple sound bite answers that they crave and can dole out to the public like so much rhetorical candy. So, the politicians pick and choose the bits that they like from their intelligence analysts (and economists) and leave the rest on the plate. Do the intelligence agencies miss things? Of course they do, nobody is omniscient after all, but more often than not it's the politicians who suffer from selective listening bias when communicating with their intelligence analysts or economists because they (the politicians) tend to shoot the messenger when they don't like the message or as President Truman once said, "give me a one armed economist".
I've always wondered why airplanes and MRI machines can have "mission critical" OSs and software while we all have to deal with crashes and uncertainty.
The mission critical embedded systems use a much simpler OS than your desktop or server on a fixed hardware and software platform with certified drivers. You have to deal with crashes and uncertainty because you want unlimited choice of hardware and software with lots of servers and other arbitrarily selected apps running. The MRI machine or the Aircraft control system are purpose built for a single job which they do well, they're not general purpose computing devices or at least they're not configured to serve as such even though they might share some commodity chips with them.
Have you considered the possibility that factions within Syrian Rebel forces did it to make it look like Assad had done it? I'm not defending Assad, but ask yourself who has the most to gain from a foreign intervention? I would say that it's very clearly the Syrian Rebels who have the most to gain from foreign involvement. They're being pounded day by day with artillery and airstrikes and they're unable to operate outside of the cities in force without risking attack from Assad's mechanized forces, including helicopters, tanks and armored personnel carriers. The rebels know that they're unlikely to dislodge Assad, at least in the near term, without European or American airstrikes to destroy Assad's air force and heavy weapons as happened in Libya with Gaddafi. It's very convenient that a small chemical attack(s) occured in the very same city where the international inspectors are looking for signs of chemical weapon use? Isn't it? The rebels aren't stupid after all and they know that Obama has identified the use of chemical weapons as a "red line" which would trigger consequences which they interpret to mean US involvement. Whether or not they're right remains to be seen, but Obama may have just been bluffing with that "red line" talk. Indeed, the Syrian Rebels may have made the same mistake that many of us Americans have, trusting that Obama will do what he says he will do. In any case, it seems likely that the Syrian Rebels will soon be reduced to an armed insurgency in an occupied country if the US or Europeans don't do something to stop Assad. Of course, US or European involvement would likely escalate the civil war and increase the chance of the conflict spilling over into a regional war, possibly involving Iran and Israel.
What is the difference between minor league and college?
Plenty. The sports program ads to the prestige of the institution and attracts more paying undergrads, more alumni donations and involvement, more corporate sponsorship and a greater amount of goodwill from all of the students and their families who go on to become successful citizens and contributing alumni and the cycle repeats. People don't have the same sorts of connections to minor league sports that they do to the colleges they attended as undergrads. The taxpayers are very definitely footing the bill for sports, especially at public institutions where tuition is subsidized, but why would the NFL or the NBA spend money on a minor league when the colleges do it for them for free and are better at it? That I think is the answer to your question.
Where, in Europe, the quality of the school a kid goes to isn't as dependent on how much money the parents make. Where, in Europe, kids don't have homelessness, hunger, or getting swept up in the drug war to give them more pressing concerns than what grade they get in English that semester.
A typical liberal response, always making excuses and tolerating laziness in both themselves and others instead of taking charge of their own lives, working hard and creating their own success. Those who can do and those who won't complain. Which one are you?
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Bob was going to call, but that pesky Chuck keeps listening in. He must be working for the NSA.
You just keep right on telling yourself that.
Damn right. Most people, no matter what precautions they take or where in the world they live, can be found for a few thousand dollars and most Americans can be found for much, much less. It's much more practical to muddy the information they already have about you by mixing plausible lies in with the truth. If they have nothing then sure, go ahead and lie completely but if they already know part of the story, make sure that you fill in the rest with false or misleading information.
I must confess that I'm not up on current retail prices, but surely there are resellers who have volume accounts and can run queries on your behalf while passing on at least some of their volume savings to you. Private Investigators probably fall into that category for example. Even so, as others have pointed out, that information is also likely available from other sources if you've ever made a purchase online using your credit card.
Maybe I just need to poison the data some more.
Couldn't hurt. Although I always use completely fake details when they don't already have at least some information on me already. A good source for fake ID information that will pass most sanity checks like zip code and address combinations or state and area codes is Fake Name Generator. As for the debt collectors, ask them to provide information concerning the debt, such as when it was first incurred, without giving out or confirming any information about yourself. If they refuse then tell them that the person they're looking for cannot be reached at your number or address, which is the truth in your case right? If they disclose the age of the debt and it's beyond the statute of limitations for collection you wouldn't be obligated to pay even if it was your debt and it can be a violation of law for them to continue calling depending upon where you live. Finally, you should note the number that they're calling from so that you can add it to your blocked call list on your phone account. The caller id number might be spoofed, but it couldn't hurt. While your at it you should also set your phone account to 'unblock or I won't take your call'. That way, you don't get 'private call' in the caller ID if they actually want to ring through.
That's a good point. Browser fingerprinting can definitely improve the value of whatever other information they think that they have. However, even that can be defended against if one installs the proper extensions. My personal favorites, in addition to the usual trifecta of AdBlock, NoScript and Ghostery are FireGloves (randomizes information that could otherwise be used to generate a browser fingerprint) and Secret Agent (rotates your user agent string randomly using a customizable list ala the rotating license plates on the bond cars).
No, what they really seem to want is to collect your name, email, home address, DOB and last four digits of your SSN.
Do you honestly believe that they don't already have a database with that information on every American that has ever applied for credit, filed a tax return, paid property taxes or had anything delivered to their home ever? If you think that that information is private, you've got another thing coming. It's all for sale from the likes of Lexis Nexis, Choicepoint or any number of others in the data business.
For extra confusion, try and find people in the same general geographic region with the same or similar name to yours and use bits and pieces of that information when filling out non-essential forms and such. The goal is to trick their databases into confusing you with somebody else when all they have is the name and not the SSN so that your profile becomes a confused jumble of inaccurate, false, misleading and cross pollinated information from many other real and fake people with the same or similar names. Obviously, this works better if your surname and first name are relatively more common.
why the hell would I give it to the exact people I don't want to have it?
They already have the minimum biographical info that they're asking for, that's public information unless you're in the witness protection program. What they don't have is the other related data which they're asking you to update for them. Now of course you wouldn't want to correct their inaccurate records of your other data, but it's nice to see that all of the disinformation and database poisoning is having its intended effects.
And in order to see the data they have about me, I have to give them my name, home address, last four digits of my SSN? Seriously?
If you think that the data brokers like Lexis Nexis, Choicepoint and these guys don't already have all of that information and more, you're sadly misinformed. Would it shock to know that all of that information is readily available to just about any business owner or attorney for $50 or less and nothing more than a promise (by them to the data broker) that you said that you wanted to do business with them or are a client of theirs?
Government does not have the money or expertise to do it themselves.
Does not have the money? Are you daft? The US Government controls the supply of the world's reserve currency. You know, the stuff that everyone on the planet wants. If they want to create more money to pay for something they can simply promise the Fed that they will pay them back and the Fed will credit their bank account with however much they want to spend. For now at least, there's hardly a bank on Earth that wouldn't accept electronic wire from the Fed or through a US bank that will for payment or transfer.
It's only an international crisis because the anointed one left his ass hanging out.
You'll get no argument from me in favor of President Obama. The man is arrogant, insincere and naive with a marvelous ability to speak glibly while in fact saying little or nothing. This is what happens when you put a smart young Harvard lawyer in charge of actually making important decisions on important matters in a timely fashion. Right or wrong the President must decide and that is the one thing that this President refuses to do: D-E-C-I-D-E. He waits for input from everyone, dragging out the decision out for months or even years, and by the time he does make a half baked response it's too late and the consequences of inaction are already upon us. President Bush the younger, love him or hate him, was at least able to decide and that's no small part of what it means to be President. We the People elect the President to make tough decisions, not to endlessly evade them with flowery language and inaction bordering on impotence.
I'm curious to hear what you think Ellison should do about the Syria situation.
How about avoiding conspicuously costly and indulgent hobbies in public while the world burns?
I thought they fired all of them and replaced them with robots.
Some people don't like Joel (probably the J2EE guys) but he really does have some good things to say about software development. The project framework factory sounds like something that only the Architecture Astronauts could love.
If the MLP innitiatives are successful in moving China ahead of the US in the targeted areas of research, it will be the end of the hands-off approach of the US government.
The Chinese are known for stealing the ideas and intellectual efforts of others, not so much for creating their own. They are followers, not leaders in tech. So far they've managed to close the gap by shamelessly stealing every technology that they can get their hands on, but what have they done themselves that's innovative and wasn't done first in the US or Europe? Nothing that I can remember and that's why they're still second fiddle to the US in research and development.
Clean energy might help a bit with the "toxic environment" angle of things. At least it would help reduce further pollution.
Yeah, but fusion power costs too much to research and we have plenty of engineers to clean up the polluted tiles whenever they pop up.
But that was already built in Los Angeles last turn, so the great project was converted to 300 shields instead and promptly lost to corruption because Beijing had neglected to build a courthouse earlier in the game.
Okay, from what I'm reading here, this sounds like a gross over-reaction and a lot of rich old people taking shit way, way, way too seriously
Seriously, who gives a shit about yacht racing? It's an aristocratic hobby for east coast snobs with too much money and not enough good sense. Meanwhile the world is just a few steps away from military action in the middle east that could easily escalate into another massive war and possibly even a world war if it draws in Russia, Iran and Syria on the one side and the United States, Israel and NATO on the other. Ellison and his friends sure do have a fucked up sense of priorities racing their damned yachts in the midst of an international crisis. A pox on all their houses I say.
If this disease isn't stopped soon, the profession is going to be worthless except as a feeding pit for lawyers.
Not unlike those in the medical profession who have long been the target of these lawyers and people wonder why the cost of living is going up faster than their declining wages?
This is the same 'US intel' which missed the collapse of the USSR, 9/11, the Boston Bombers, and were totally sure Saddam Hussein had WMDs
From the standpoint of the politicians who make the decisions, intelligence analysts are like economists. The often say on the one hand and then in the same breath say but on the other hand. Politicians hate that kind of reasoning because it doesn't provide the simple sound bite answers that they crave and can dole out to the public like so much rhetorical candy. So, the politicians pick and choose the bits that they like from their intelligence analysts (and economists) and leave the rest on the plate. Do the intelligence agencies miss things? Of course they do, nobody is omniscient after all, but more often than not it's the politicians who suffer from selective listening bias when communicating with their intelligence analysts or economists because they (the politicians) tend to shoot the messenger when they don't like the message or as President Truman once said, "give me a one armed economist".
I've always wondered why airplanes and MRI machines can have "mission critical" OSs and software while we all have to deal with crashes and uncertainty.
The mission critical embedded systems use a much simpler OS than your desktop or server on a fixed hardware and software platform with certified drivers. You have to deal with crashes and uncertainty because you want unlimited choice of hardware and software with lots of servers and other arbitrarily selected apps running. The MRI machine or the Aircraft control system are purpose built for a single job which they do well, they're not general purpose computing devices or at least they're not configured to serve as such even though they might share some commodity chips with them.
Spying is an act of WAR.
Oh noes! Run and hide from the terrible military might of the UN! Maybe we'll all die laughing?
Have you considered the possibility that factions within Syrian Rebel forces did it to make it look like Assad had done it? I'm not defending Assad, but ask yourself who has the most to gain from a foreign intervention? I would say that it's very clearly the Syrian Rebels who have the most to gain from foreign involvement. They're being pounded day by day with artillery and airstrikes and they're unable to operate outside of the cities in force without risking attack from Assad's mechanized forces, including helicopters, tanks and armored personnel carriers. The rebels know that they're unlikely to dislodge Assad, at least in the near term, without European or American airstrikes to destroy Assad's air force and heavy weapons as happened in Libya with Gaddafi. It's very convenient that a small chemical attack(s) occured in the very same city where the international inspectors are looking for signs of chemical weapon use? Isn't it? The rebels aren't stupid after all and they know that Obama has identified the use of chemical weapons as a "red line" which would trigger consequences which they interpret to mean US involvement. Whether or not they're right remains to be seen, but Obama may have just been bluffing with that "red line" talk. Indeed, the Syrian Rebels may have made the same mistake that many of us Americans have, trusting that Obama will do what he says he will do. In any case, it seems likely that the Syrian Rebels will soon be reduced to an armed insurgency in an occupied country if the US or Europeans don't do something to stop Assad. Of course, US or European involvement would likely escalate the civil war and increase the chance of the conflict spilling over into a regional war, possibly involving Iran and Israel.
What is the difference between minor league and college?
Plenty. The sports program ads to the prestige of the institution and attracts more paying undergrads, more alumni donations and involvement, more corporate sponsorship and a greater amount of goodwill from all of the students and their families who go on to become successful citizens and contributing alumni and the cycle repeats. People don't have the same sorts of connections to minor league sports that they do to the colleges they attended as undergrads. The taxpayers are very definitely footing the bill for sports, especially at public institutions where tuition is subsidized, but why would the NFL or the NBA spend money on a minor league when the colleges do it for them for free and are better at it? That I think is the answer to your question.
Where, in Europe, the quality of the school a kid goes to isn't as dependent on how much money the parents make. Where, in Europe, kids don't have homelessness, hunger, or getting swept up in the drug war to give them more pressing concerns than what grade they get in English that semester.
A typical liberal response, always making excuses and tolerating laziness in both themselves and others instead of taking charge of their own lives, working hard and creating their own success. Those who can do and those who won't complain. Which one are you?