You've got to love those teasers at the end of the 5 o'clock news: : "The one thing you must immediately stop doing or your whole family is going to die. Tune in at 11 for our special report." In unrelated news, one of the problems being backwoods rural....I had my driver's side window replaced about a month ago. I'm finally getting around to getting it tinted to match the others today. It's only going to be about a 120 mile drive.
While my husband was enlisted he had TS clearance and had to undergo all that background check stuff. I was interviewed and that was mainly the lady's line of questioning. Gambling and credit card debts.
Ha... one of my devs at work used to work with Tim Bray (inventor of XML, among other things) and has been hosting his web site for 15 years or so. He sent me some of his traffic stats from today, looking for some tuning advice. Figured out what caused the sudden spike in traffic: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...any-chickenshit-for-firing-protesting-workers
My favorite part of the background check process is how the US government made a list of all the people with access to classified information along with all of the ways to blackmail them, put it all together in one place, then had the whole thing stolen in 2013, and they aren't even completely sure who stole it.
The total lack of recourse when an institution loses your credit or identity info is fucking insane. I literally have a file folder in my file cabinet for credit breach documents because it has happened multiple times. And each time they offer to pay for a credit monitoring service. Gee, thanks guys.
What's even more frustrating is that we haven't implemented any of the learnings from the last century of studying information that came with the computer revolution. In order to read my email you need my email address, my password, and the output of a one way hashing function, the input to which only Google and I know, and neither of us ever send anywhere in any form. To act as me with github, you need a private key which not even github knows. Yet to open a bank account in my name, file my taxes, or any number of other way more impactful and malicious things? All you need is a number that is: both username and password; not random; only nine digits long; handed out willy nilly to financial institutions, shady landlords, government agencies, medical providers, and others.
That's a good point. You're basically born with your SSN and it (theoretically) never changes. You can't update it. And everything is tied to it. Just.... yikes.
I forgot another inconvenience about rural living. Dead fucking bugs all over my windshield and the nose of the car. I should've washed it after I made the drive.
I once hit a bird while doing 90+ up the 5 in the Central Valley. Hit the part of my windshield that was dead between my eyes. Scared the shit out of me.
Don't worry, most of the time they obfuscate it by only using the last 4 digits, which also happen to be the only part of the number that isn't fairly easy to generate from public records.
I saw Murder Hornets open for The Stomach Contents at Call The Office back in ‘98. They threw syringes into the crowd.
I've only held a clearance and worked in the intelligence field for the last 20yrs, but thanks for explaining that to me.