Primate Brow Flash

I want to record the shit I put up with around here. Four times yesterday, I was treated like a criminal:

1. At 9:00 AM, I got notice that my dependents will lose their health insurance in 9 days if I don’t document that they are in fact my dependents. The state has launched an audit to hold down costs. Because I might be a cheater out to get health insurance for a bunch of children that don’t deserve it, I have to spend a bunch of time bowing and scraping before the auditor kings and hope they accept my papers. They set up a site where I can upload scanned images of the birth certificates, my marriage certificate, and my tax return. I hope they’ll enjoy looking at the extra images. How much are we paying for this audit?
2. At 11:00 AM I got a reminder about harassment training. The state has mandated that every single state employee undergo harassment training. 30,000 people will sit in conference rooms across the state to be told that it is NOT OK to move their fist back in forth in front of their mouths while pressing out against their cheek with their tongues. I don’t need to be told not to slowly circle my lips with my tongue while looking over my cube wall at my co-worker or make suggestive motions with grocery items. If I DID, a two hour meeting would not cure me! I skipped the training. Because I have work to do. I expect dire consequences.
3. When I got home after this long day of being bad, I was accused of eating a chocolate Gelato (whatever the THAT is) that someone gave my daughter for her birthday. This is fake drama about living with a male who can’t control his urges.
4. Finally, that same evening, the clerk at Target took my $20.00 and held it up to the light. Because I might be trying to pass funny money. I was like, “I’m outta here. Keep your Archer farms Smoked Ham”. How big of a problem is counterfeiting, really? Big enough to train all cashiers to spot bad bills? Big enough to make it worth while to subject all customers to this kind of treatment? Well, if the cost of insulting your customers is zero, then maybe it is worth while. I’d like to raise this cost.

One: Do I get bent when I walk by a bike that is locked up? Isn’t that treating me like I might steal a bike? No. I’m not having a transaction with that bike owner. It also addresses a real problem. I know from personal experience that all unlocked bicycles will be immediately stolen by a supernaturally efficient bike theft underworld.

Two: Don’t all those measures help keep crime at bay and benefit society? I don’t think so. We, as a society, have smashed the living shit out of crime, relatively speaking. New crime prevention measures are reaching the point where cost exceeds benefit. These measures are not going to solve some kind of huge costly problem. Kind of like a runaway train of virtue, well meaning bureaucrats are trying to engineer all slack out of the system and make sure nobody is ever ripped off, injured or even upset. The ultimate effect is to control and harass ordinary citizens to the point where we can’t think of anything else except how not to look suspicious.

this was a group project with some clay and a webcam

I get a lot of pleasure out of Facebook. While I’m happy to use it and even be advertised at, this free application needs to be watched. A lot of security and privacy folks have quit Facebook for their security and privacy lapses. The lapses will continue. As someone who will use Facebook anyway, I wanted to make it as secure and private as possible. So, for this blog post, I made note of the things I was surprised by. The things listed here are really only pointers or teasers for the Exhaustive Guide (updated September of 2011).

That guide goes deep and shows some new features, some of which allow for more privacy. For example,

• Make sublists of friends so you can control which groups of friends see which posts.
• Keep an eye on those Apps. With Application Access Logs, you can see a history of which Apps requested which personal information from you.
• Test your security settings by viewing your Facebook page as it would be seen by another user. To do this, go to privacy settings –> edit profile –> view as. Now type someone’s name in the box and you will see if that person sees only what you want them to see.

There was a good set of instructions going around more than a year ago. I followed those recommendations and like many people, I just assumed those would stick. Well, enough has changed in the account and privacy settings that that old “lockdown” is no longer complete. So, the first step to locking down Facebook is : Pay attention to changes. The graphic at the end of this article shows the changes over time to default Facebook privacy settings and they trend towards more exposure, not less. A good source of Facebook info is the ZDNet friending Facebook blog.

Here are notable facts from the article:

• Especially if you use Facebook with public wi-fi, you need to force HTTPS. It took a long time, much longer than it should have, but FB now allows you to use exclusively HTTPS. This means that your communication between your browser and Facebook will be scrambled so that nobody can read your traffic or hijack your session. HTTPS is not on by default, though. You have to turn it on. If you have any doubt about the need for this, watch this video.
• Customization for Apps has been upgraded. Facebook apps are things like Scrabble, Wordtwist, Mob wars, and whatever else you are adding into Facebook . These third-party applications are often poorly and insecurely written and can even be malicious. Note that the list of apps you see on your front page when you click “apps” is much shorter than the actual list of apps that are installed and silently monitoring your life. To view the full list go to Privacy Settings –> Apps –> Edit Settings. I was surprised to see several apps that I had forgotten about, silently working.
• I missed this in my first pass at checking account settings, but Facebook can also use your “Like” vote about a product or business as endorsement when they show an ad for that product to your friends. You can turn this off Account Settings –> Facebook Ads –> Edit Social Ads Settings.

Two things I would add to that guide:

1. If you haven’t changed your password recently (or ever), do that now. Breaches in the past year make it somewhat likely that your password has leaked out somewhere.
2. This might be more paranoid than you wanna be, but photographs uploaded to Facebook may leak personal information. This information may include the make and model of your camera, time of day and location. If you do not want this information known, consider scrubbing the photograph’s exif data before posting

This is from Facebook itself (link):

Applications your friends use can also access information from your profile

Not much has been written this, but your friends’ poor security choices could affect you. It happens when they post on your wall advertising a funny video that is really a virus.

As requested, here are the shoes I mentioned in a recent post:

Cole-Haan Nike Air Shoes found at Goodwill for $14.99

I like the rhythm of the library. Request, borrow, read, return.

The Koch brothers have been much maligned recently, especially in a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side. Looking for an enemy of the day, I just read the wikipedia page for David Koch:

“I have friends who smoke pot. I know many homosexuals. It’s ridiculous to treat them as criminals—and here was someone running for president, saying just that.”[12]

Whaaaaaaaaaaa?

He broke with the Libertarian Party in 1984 when it supported eliminating all taxes[3] and Koch has since been a Republican.[3]

Current political views

David Koch supports gay marriage and stem-cell research.[3] He is against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and was against the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.[3] Koch is unsure if global warming is caused by humans, and thinks a warmer planet would be good because “[t]he Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food”.[3]

He opposed the Iraq war, saying that the war has “cost a lot of money, and it’s taken so many American lives”. “I question whether that was the right thing to do. In hindsight that looks like it was not a good policy.” he told an interviewer.[15]

David Koch dislikes President Obama’s policies. “He’s the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation… and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we’ve ever had.”[15] Koch believes that Obama’s father’s economic socialism explains what Koch views as Obama’s belief in “antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences.”[15] Koch believes Obama himself is a “hardcore socialist” who is “marvelous at pretending to be something other than that.” [16]

Yeah, not so black and white…. and then I read on:

Since 2000, Koch has pledged and/or donated more than $600 million to the arts, education and medical research, more than he gave to political causes.[24] Koch maintains that only a relatively small portion of his giving goes toward political causes. Instead, most of his charity goes toward cancer research, followed by cultural and educational programs.[25]

Does this sound like the big bugbear of the democratic left?
Today there is a huge headline on Bloomberg: “Koch brothers flout law with secret Iran sales”. So, I thought, maybe they are evil after all. In the first few paragraphs of the article, it becomes clear that somewhere in their vast empire of companies, one in France might have been paying bribes and Koch industries dispatched investigators and things then get very murky. And yes, in that murk, there are sales to Iran, conducted by a French subsidiary. Not evil enough for me. Not nearly as evil as the Brown brothers, who would have LOVED the Iraq war.