I'm pretty much in the same boat, but I signed up directly with the MyFICO service, which was eventually sold to Equifax. I run a wildcard email forward on a throwaway domain for all my vendor contact stuff, and I'm not getting hits like this for other domain stuff as other comments suggest. I receive obvious finance related phishing crap, related to this financial information transaction, at this specific email address. In my case, the email address was dormant for 4+ years with zero traffic before it got hit.
Of course, I could be wrong, but it's unsettling to say the least. Trying to explain it to an elected official to get some sort of action (specifically, official letter requesting more information) is less entertaining than rope pushing. Direct calls to Equifax have been completely unproductive.
Easy 99% fix for the states: require credit card processors to collect sales tax, and pay them for the privilege. Then there is no preference between Internet and local sales.
Hell, the parts are CHEAP, even for the astronaut's titanium hammer. The certification paperwork and the personnel time to execute certification testing and report generation for materials origin, handling, intermediate/final assembly, and shipping is the big money. When I worked at rockyworld, we shipped our FAQT radio for about $2M and barely broke even, parts were about $75K of that number.
I'd suggest that burden go to VISA/Mastercard?AmEx, et al. They already perform 99% of the digital money move, and they know the source and destination of the transaction. I have a hard time understanding why they aren't required to collect taxes on cross-border purchases (hell, even *local* purchases) as a cost of doing business in any state. All vendors would be required to do is ask V/M/A to establish electronic codes for exempt goods/status. What am I missing here? I know this isn't a trivial effort, but why ask anyone other than the financial clearinghouses to aggregate the data and money?
Effexor is generally considered to be a 'crisis' drug for the whacko set, not something to stay with if there are other options. It is addictive in my experience, and some withdrawal symptoms (or discontinuation syndrome or wtf ever they're labeling it today) and side effects do not go away. Ever. If you can find a way off it, I suggest it, it's wicked nasty to your liver, have your serum levels checked if you haven't. It's not unheard of for a psych 'doc' to disbelieve a patient. Keep a detailed journal, find another doc, and show them the journal.
Off label scrips are not unheard of, some BP reducers are used as sleep aids, there are many others out there
+1 Perhaps some poor soldier might leave his magic device behind, now the bad guys can pick it up and see where the rest of his unit is... of course, it might be interesting to leave one behind to see if the bad guys would pick it up and take it home to their secret lair.
You can make WiFi unusable, however.
Or you could alter the classroom so RF cannot enter through the walls or ceiling.
And turn off the wireless AP in the room during exam time.
I suppose convincing the university to alter the classroom in this manner could be difficult, but they could also see the value in having some exam rooms that are essentially faraday cages
Making WiFi is not impossible or even terribly difficult. Use a netstumbler box to send continuous deauthenticate and disassociate messages. Cellular is a different story.
+1 Sage advice. Lose *everything* to burglars a couple times and your ability to trust folks diminishes rapidly, especially when you discover much later the perps were so-called friends of yours that oddly stopped talking to you about the same time... If someone needs to know where I am, I'll go out of my way to tell them, otherwise, it's none of their damned business.
The nasty detail that seems to just whiz past most folks about biometrics: they are not revocable, unless you're willing to cut off your finger(s), or disfigure yourself in some other way. There are procedures for getting new SSNs, driver's license numbers, and so forth, revoking or rendering useless the old information as part of the process.
Ethernet using cat5 cabling was specifically designed such that the cheapest hubs would just be RJ45 jacks wired together passively. So one could make a "hub cable" in theory.
Citation please. Cat5 maybe all on it's own hijacked for phone purposes, maybe. I've been installing ethernet and phones for 20 years, and from what I know of Ethernet over twisted pair, there is no electrical provision for this anywhere.
Interestingly another instructable linked to the one he showed, was about how to use 1 cat5 cable to every jack in the house to support both phone and Ethernet data.
This person was apparently unaware of the fact that a phone cords 6P4C or 6P2C cable will happily fit into the wider 8P jack. (That is to say that phone cable will plug into Ethernet jacks by design).
Again, citation please. Every Ethernet jack I've ever used gets the 1-8 pins bent or broken when some fool does this. You can put a one inch round peg in a one inch square hole, but to say that they mate correctly is a bit misleading.
Further the Ethernet wiring standard deliberately has pins 3-6 (which correspond to pins 2-5 in a phone style jack, which are the 4 that are normally connected in a phone jack) connected identically to standard phone cord. Further Pins 4 and 5 are deliberately unused in 100Mbs Ethernet, which is the one pair necessary for a single phone line.
Thus if you have a house wired for Ethernet but not phone, adding support for phones to all the jacks is as simple as using Ethernet switches that connect pin 4 of all jacks together and pin 5 of all jacks together, and then plug a pone line into one of the jacks in the switch. (I would actually be surprised if there were not Ethernet switches specially designed for that).
One more time! Citation please. I don't recall T568A or T568B mentioning anything about cohabitation of analog phone and data in any one cable sheath. I'd hazard a guess that the reason you don't know about any Ethernet switches off the top of your head that merge analog phone and data is because there probably aren't any. Find just one, please, even just one made 20 years ago. Another SWAG about why you won't find any: 100V ring voltage would probably smoke most of the components intended for voltages lower than 5V.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean that it was intended by the design engineers that created a product.
Unfortunately (or not), Windoze based. My experience with it started out unstable and feature poor at version 4, but it kept the relatively inexpensive (core, support, and add-on) price tags, and features kept getting better, and stability continues to improve at version 7.1. Remote windows and java consoles, remote pollers, SNMPv3, easy custom MIB compiles, functional dependencies, device grouping, custom alarms, restricted console views, packaged third party paging and email, custom tool integration, easy maps, acceptable (to me) TCP service monitoring and third party script support. Reporting is also integrated, or use the up-featured SQL add-on. I'm using it for just shy of a couple thousand devices on a single modest server. It's been able to accommodate every NMS feature I need, and a great many wants. My only real gripes are: console authentication still doesn't have a RADIUS, LDAP, or AD hook, and I'd like a Linux port for the backend. Other than that, it's shamefully simple to get new staff up and running, and it requires very little care and feeding. Good luck with your search.
Nuclear, or for that matter any power source that requires a steam driven turbine, has a major issue that is now starting to show itself: the availability of fresh water. Water vapor is considered to be a greenhouse gas, just in case anyone forgot.
Some vehicles require little compromise. Take the VW GX3: High performance (~6 second 0-60 mph, ~1g skidpad). Good fuel economy (45 mpg, OK, it's not 100 mpg). Reasonable cost ($17K sticker). Good emissions (it's a VW Polo drivetrain). Shamefully killed by VW lawyers frightened by GX3 vs. Hummer cage matches. Indeed, a reasonable concern with all the behemoths on the road today, but we're going to have to make some compromises somewhere to make some progress in getting lighter weight, lower profile vehicles on the road. Perhaps put an off the shelf Polo diesel in the thing and boost fuel economy some more?
You know what? You can't get really good live opera or chinese food out in most rural communities either.
You are correct. Not that the rural community as a whole really cares about it though. The fact that most prison facilities have better access to digital information resources than rural areas is more than a bit bothersome.
Part of moving out into the sticks is making the choice of giving up certain big-city advantages to live out among the cows and trees.
Most members of the communities in the rural areas I refer to were born and raised there, they didn't move there. In addition, the cost of moving out of the 'sticks' is higher than they can bear on sub-poverty level incomes. Either way, living in the 'sticks' should not preclude access to information.
That's not the "digital divide", that's just the difference between civilization and wilderness.
*puff**puff**coughcoughcoughcough**puff**hrrmfff*
OK. I thought we were talking about rural communities, and not Yellowstone Park, though.
Are you saying that people in rural communities have no access to job training, and never will unless we give them broadband?
Nope. I think you missed the part where I said *cost effective*. I don't want to spend a wad to educate people when it can be done for much less money with the same or a similar result.
Are you completely ignorant of how much the government is already spending on job retraining for displaced blue-collar workers? These people don't need broadband, they need the "Ask Lesko" book.
Again, no. I'm not privy to exact dollar figures spent for the exact purpose of retraining (care to enlighten me?), but I am quite certain that it is less expensive to provision a few hundred homes with broadband than to rebuild community facilities (for the purposes of holding training classes) that are literally falling to pieces. Retraining classes are often a 100-150 mile trip one way. Driving the farm pickup truck that gets 15MPG will cost you $40 just to get to class and back, which effectively makes those classes unreachable. Personally, I'd rather incur a small expense to help educate these people, keep their skills relevant, and keep them employed, rather than have them collect unemployment, Medicaid, and food stamps.
Maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree, but I don't think getting Lesko involved will improve the situation. There are enough loudmouthed dorks involved in this fracas already.
Spoken like someone who's never had to deal with the digital divide. It *is* real, especially in rural areas. Without government subsidy or initiative, there is an excellent chance that many communities in our state (NE) will never see an improvement in offered digital services. There simply isn't enough population density for any company to deliver in a cost effective way.
Continuing (or restarting) education is a real priority to help people that have lost access to 'blue collar' jobs, and that would otherwise be suckling from the taxpayer's teat. High speed internet access is key to cost effectively providing retraining.
Go hang out in Salem, Nebraska for a day or two, and let me know how satisfactory you find the Internet service to be, after you are done paying long distance charges for 19.2K dial up.
I must agree, if information has actually been disseminated. I work in a position that handles electronic IRS related data. They audit us at least once a year, and have no sense of humor or leniency in following strict privacy controls they require. They guard tax data closer than their teenage daughter's virginity. I can't imagine that such a breach has occurred and Intuit is still doing business.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty much in the same boat, but I signed up directly with the MyFICO service, which was eventually sold to Equifax. I run a wildcard email forward on a throwaway domain for all my vendor contact stuff, and I'm not getting hits like this for other domain stuff as other comments suggest. I receive obvious finance related phishing crap, related to this financial information transaction, at this specific email address. In my case, the email address was dormant for 4+ years with zero traffic before it got hit.
As close as I can tell, the source of the leak is: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215527/FAQ_Epsilon_email_breach
Of course, I could be wrong, but it's unsettling to say the least. Trying to explain it to an elected official to get some sort of action (specifically, official letter requesting more information) is less entertaining than rope pushing. Direct calls to Equifax have been completely unproductive.
Easy 99% fix for the states: require credit card processors to collect sales tax, and pay them for the privilege. Then there is no preference between Internet and local sales.
Hell, the parts are CHEAP, even for the astronaut's titanium hammer. The certification paperwork and the personnel time to execute certification testing and report generation for materials origin, handling, intermediate/final assembly, and shipping is the big money. When I worked at rockyworld, we shipped our FAQT radio for about $2M and barely broke even, parts were about $75K of that number.
Being, more or less, bombs with a big leak at one end. I am amazed every time one burns out before it blows up.
I'd suggest that burden go to VISA/Mastercard?AmEx, et al. They already perform 99% of the digital money move, and they know the source and destination of the transaction. I have a hard time understanding why they aren't required to collect taxes on cross-border purchases (hell, even *local* purchases) as a cost of doing business in any state. All vendors would be required to do is ask V/M/A to establish electronic codes for exempt goods/status. What am I missing here? I know this isn't a trivial effort, but why ask anyone other than the financial clearinghouses to aggregate the data and money?
Effexor is generally considered to be a 'crisis' drug for the whacko set, not something to stay with if there are other options. It is addictive in my experience, and some withdrawal symptoms (or discontinuation syndrome or wtf ever they're labeling it today) and side effects do not go away. Ever. If you can find a way off it, I suggest it, it's wicked nasty to your liver, have your serum levels checked if you haven't. It's not unheard of for a psych 'doc' to disbelieve a patient. Keep a detailed journal, find another doc, and show them the journal. Off label scrips are not unheard of, some BP reducers are used as sleep aids, there are many others out there
+1 Perhaps some poor soldier might leave his magic device behind, now the bad guys can pick it up and see where the rest of his unit is... of course, it might be interesting to leave one behind to see if the bad guys would pick it up and take it home to their secret lair.
You can make WiFi unusable, however. Or you could alter the classroom so RF cannot enter through the walls or ceiling. And turn off the wireless AP in the room during exam time.
I suppose convincing the university to alter the classroom in this manner could be difficult, but they could also see the value in having some exam rooms that are essentially faraday cages
Making WiFi is not impossible or even terribly difficult. Use a netstumbler box to send continuous deauthenticate and disassociate messages. Cellular is a different story.
+1 Sage advice. Lose *everything* to burglars a couple times and your ability to trust folks diminishes rapidly, especially when you discover much later the perps were so-called friends of yours that oddly stopped talking to you about the same time... If someone needs to know where I am, I'll go out of my way to tell them, otherwise, it's none of their damned business.
The nasty detail that seems to just whiz past most folks about biometrics: they are not revocable, unless you're willing to cut off your finger(s), or disfigure yourself in some other way. There are procedures for getting new SSNs, driver's license numbers, and so forth, revoking or rendering useless the old information as part of the process.
Insightful? Really?
Ethernet using cat5 cabling was specifically designed such that the cheapest hubs would just be RJ45 jacks wired together passively. So one could make a "hub cable" in theory.
Citation please. Cat5 maybe all on it's own hijacked for phone purposes, maybe. I've been installing ethernet and phones for 20 years, and from what I know of Ethernet over twisted pair, there is no electrical provision for this anywhere.
Interestingly another instructable linked to the one he showed, was about how to use 1 cat5 cable to every jack in the house to support both phone and Ethernet data.
This person was apparently unaware of the fact that a phone cords 6P4C or 6P2C cable will happily fit into the wider 8P jack. (That is to say that phone cable will plug into Ethernet jacks by design).
Again, citation please. Every Ethernet jack I've ever used gets the 1-8 pins bent or broken when some fool does this. You can put a one inch round peg in a one inch square hole, but to say that they mate correctly is a bit misleading.
Further the Ethernet wiring standard deliberately has pins 3-6 (which correspond to pins 2-5 in a phone style jack, which are the 4 that are normally connected in a phone jack) connected identically to standard phone cord. Further Pins 4 and 5 are deliberately unused in 100Mbs Ethernet, which is the one pair necessary for a single phone line.
Thus if you have a house wired for Ethernet but not phone, adding support for phones to all the jacks is as simple as using Ethernet switches that connect pin 4 of all jacks together and pin 5 of all jacks together, and then plug a pone line into one of the jacks in the switch. (I would actually be surprised if there were not Ethernet switches specially designed for that).
One more time! Citation please. I don't recall T568A or T568B mentioning anything about cohabitation of analog phone and data in any one cable sheath. I'd hazard a guess that the reason you don't know about any Ethernet switches off the top of your head that merge analog phone and data is because there probably aren't any. Find just one, please, even just one made 20 years ago. Another SWAG about why you won't find any: 100V ring voltage would probably smoke most of the components intended for voltages lower than 5V. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that it was intended by the design engineers that created a product.
Tor - privoxy or any many-to-one NAT setup shoots the IP / PII argument full of holes.
Unfortunately (or not), Windoze based. My experience with it started out unstable and feature poor at version 4, but it kept the relatively inexpensive (core, support, and add-on) price tags, and features kept getting better, and stability continues to improve at version 7.1. Remote windows and java consoles, remote pollers, SNMPv3, easy custom MIB compiles, functional dependencies, device grouping, custom alarms, restricted console views, packaged third party paging and email, custom tool integration, easy maps, acceptable (to me) TCP service monitoring and third party script support. Reporting is also integrated, or use the up-featured SQL add-on. I'm using it for just shy of a couple thousand devices on a single modest server. It's been able to accommodate every NMS feature I need, and a great many wants. My only real gripes are: console authentication still doesn't have a RADIUS, LDAP, or AD hook, and I'd like a Linux port for the backend. Other than that, it's shamefully simple to get new staff up and running, and it requires very little care and feeding. Good luck with your search.
Nuclear, or for that matter any power source that requires a steam driven turbine, has a major issue that is now starting to show itself: the availability of fresh water. Water vapor is considered to be a greenhouse gas, just in case anyone forgot.
Some vehicles require little compromise. Take the VW GX3: High performance (~6 second 0-60 mph, ~1g skidpad). Good fuel economy (45 mpg, OK, it's not 100 mpg). Reasonable cost ($17K sticker). Good emissions (it's a VW Polo drivetrain). Shamefully killed by VW lawyers frightened by GX3 vs. Hummer cage matches. Indeed, a reasonable concern with all the behemoths on the road today, but we're going to have to make some compromises somewhere to make some progress in getting lighter weight, lower profile vehicles on the road. Perhaps put an off the shelf Polo diesel in the thing and boost fuel economy some more?
You know what? You can't get really good live opera or chinese food out in most rural communities either.
You are correct. Not that the rural community as a whole really cares about it though. The fact that most prison facilities have better access to digital information resources than rural areas is more than a bit bothersome.
Part of moving out into the sticks is making the choice of giving up certain big-city advantages to live out among the cows and trees.
Most members of the communities in the rural areas I refer to were born and raised there, they didn't move there. In addition, the cost of moving out of the 'sticks' is higher than they can bear on sub-poverty level incomes. Either way, living in the 'sticks' should not preclude access to information.
That's not the "digital divide", that's just the difference between civilization and wilderness.
*puff**puff**coughcoughcoughcough**puff**hrrmfff*
OK. I thought we were talking about rural communities, and not Yellowstone Park, though.
Are you saying that people in rural communities have no access to job training, and never will unless we give them broadband?
Nope. I think you missed the part where I said *cost effective*. I don't want to spend a wad to educate people when it can be done for much less money with the same or a similar result.
Are you completely ignorant of how much the government is already spending on job retraining for displaced blue-collar workers? These people don't need broadband, they need the "Ask Lesko" book.
Again, no. I'm not privy to exact dollar figures spent for the exact purpose of retraining (care to enlighten me?), but I am quite certain that it is less expensive to provision a few hundred homes with broadband than to rebuild community facilities (for the purposes of holding training classes) that are literally falling to pieces. Retraining classes are often a 100-150 mile trip one way. Driving the farm pickup truck that gets 15MPG will cost you $40 just to get to class and back, which effectively makes those classes unreachable. Personally, I'd rather incur a small expense to help educate these people, keep their skills relevant, and keep them employed, rather than have them collect unemployment, Medicaid, and food stamps.
Maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree, but I don't think getting Lesko involved will improve the situation. There are enough loudmouthed dorks involved in this fracas already.
Spoken like someone who's never had to deal with the digital divide. It *is* real, especially in rural areas. Without government subsidy or initiative, there is an excellent chance that many communities in our state (NE) will never see an improvement in offered digital services. There simply isn't enough population density for any company to deliver in a cost effective way. Continuing (or restarting) education is a real priority to help people that have lost access to 'blue collar' jobs, and that would otherwise be suckling from the taxpayer's teat. High speed internet access is key to cost effectively providing retraining. Go hang out in Salem, Nebraska for a day or two, and let me know how satisfactory you find the Internet service to be, after you are done paying long distance charges for 19.2K dial up.
I must agree, if information has actually been disseminated. I work in a position that handles electronic IRS related data. They audit us at least once a year, and have no sense of humor or leniency in following strict privacy controls they require. They guard tax data closer than their teenage daughter's virginity. I can't imagine that such a breach has occurred and Intuit is still doing business.
Golden rule: He who has the gold, rules.