Schwer Log

Plogress.com

RSS feeds for your favorite politicians. Here are my Federal representatives:

Barbara Boxer
Dianne Feinstein
Lynn C. Woolsey

AnnualCreditReport.com

New Law Promotes Access to Free Credit Reports
“A recent amendment to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months..”

The site makes it pretty easy to check your credit report at the three major credit reporting companies all in one shot, and it is well worth your time to do so.

Here is an interesting (albeit lengthy) paper detailing one persons experience interviewing for a job at the NSA.

http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/nsa-interview.pdf

I saw this in December’s crypto-gram.

At least the kids look like they are having fun .

Linux Journal answers the question: What’s your presidential candidate for 2004 running for a web server?, in a recent article.

Apache does currently hold 64% [netcraft] of the web server market, so it should be of no surprise that most of the candidates are running it to serve their web sites. And seeing as there is only one Republican candidate it’s not really a very fair sample space. Also I suspect that the respective up times are directly related to the choice of web server, and not political affiliation.

But it is still way more fun to think that Microsoft and the Republicans are part of some sort of evil conspiracy.

California Governor Elect Schwarzenegger, that just sounds weird. I wish him the best of luck, he and the state are gonna need it. If nothing else, Angela reminded me that our diplomas are signed by the governor, so even if we can’t get jobs in the state with them at least they’ll be worth some money on ebay.

Obtaining a California driver’s license just got a little bit easier. As reported here [pressdemocrat.com] Gov. Davis signed SB 60 into law. Touted by the media as the Illegal Immigrant License bill; SB 60 (which makes no reference to immigrants at all mind you) would make obtaining a license easier for everyone including illegal immigrants. That is because the bill makes it so a social security number is no longer required to obtain a license in California. What is required is a federal taxpayer identification number, a birth certificate, and another form of identification (passport, foreign driver’s license, etc.).

I think the bill is a mistake. I think obtaining a license should be more difficult not less. I think illegal immigrants are hard working people that do all the crap jobs that stuck up U.S. citizens wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, but it just seems wrong for the state to legitimize such an illegal act.

That being said; Wow! what a great new source of revenue for the state. Seriously; in January of this year the BCIS (Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, remember there is no more INS it changed to BCIS after Sep. 11th to be under the auspice of Homeland Security) reported [.pdf] that there were an estimated 2.2 million illegal immigrants in California. I personally paid $54 this year to register my vehicle if each one of those 2.2 million people pays the same fee the state can expect 100-200 million dollars in new revenue. Local automobile insurance companies should also see similar increases because of this bill.

The bill doesn’t actually go into effect until the 1st of January next year, and some gubernatorial candidates are already vowing to repeal it if they are elected, so the bill may be dead before it even gets going.

Another Crypto-Gram story. This story blows me away. The guy usually signs his name upside down, so when he goes in to renew his license the DMV won’t accept his signature and refuses to issue him a license, and they take away his old one.

Maybe the guy is just trying to stir up trouble, but I don’t care; that still doesn’t give the DMV the right to tell individual citizens how they can or can’t sign their own name. Let the guy sign his name upside down; who does it hurt? As long as he can replicate it; it sounds like the signature is serving its purpose as an authentication layer.

An interesting story from this months Crypto-Gram. Apparently not even the governor of Wisconsin on his super secret Bat Man phone is safe from telemarketers. The story is here.

According to this S.F. Chronicle story (which is a N.Y. Times reprint) the President of the U.S. is no longer accepting your comments or questions at the email address: president@whitehouse.gov.

Instead you must navigate to the White House Web Mail form where you will first need to state whether the forthcoming message is a supporting comment or a differing opinion; then you will need to select from a pre-compiled list of topics where your message will fit (and it better fit, or you can just stop right now) of which the economy, and jobs are not an option. After you have properly categorized your message you will then need to identify yourself by submitting your name and address. Now you are ready to tell your president your thoughts and feelings; provided those thoughts and feelings are of the approved topic type.

I think this Fortune article pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter. The whole system seems to be designed to make the president less accessible to average citizens, and the whole having to identify whether you are for or against the president’s ideas makes me think the against ones just go right in the trash. I understand that 15,000 emails a day is a lot to sort through, but do they have to be so brazen in the way they go about telling me my opinion doesn’t matter?

Update: looks like they caved a bit to the pressure; there is now a general comment option, and the economy is now an approved topic.

It looks like the Recall Davis camp may very well get its chance to recall Gov. Davis, however I agree with David Brooks in this NewsHour interview, that this is not democracy. We just voted this guy in nine months ago, and now they want to vote him out. You can’t just vote out the governor every nine months because you don’t like the way things are going; I mean that would be complete chaos. There also doesn’t seem to be any strong runner to replace Davis, so who knows who would replace him; maybe Arnold…?

We have currently gone from a budget surplus to the largest budget deficit ever, and this NewsHour report says it will get worse before it gets better. A down economy; increased spending in Iraq, and Afghanistan; as well as the Bush tax cuts have all helped to increase the deficit. In fairness the GDP is also up, so to just look at the absolute numbers is a little misleading, however in any case the numbers still are not good.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays in the 2004 elections, and how this will affect how we remember Pres. Bush. As it stands now his legacy may be: uncertainty in Iraq; intelligence reports that are anything but; a down economy and this huge deficit; oh and tax cuts.

Speaking of tax cuts: let me go on record as saying I think tax cuts are a bad idea. It is a gamble to say that if you give people extra money (tax-cuts) that they will go out and spend that money and in turn stimulate the economy. In this down economy I think everyone is just going to hang on to their tax-cuts, and you won’t see the kind of growth it was intended to created.

For this July the 4th, I thought it was appropriate that I found these links which can help to keep voters informed about their elected officials.

opengov.us is an MIT project aimed at collecting as much information about public citizens as possible. Their mission statement, and goals are little bit weird and scary, but the wealth of information they have acquired is astounding! Just click around a bit, and find your representatives, you’ll be amazed at how much information there is.

Both opensecrets.org and vote-smart.org can really help a voter drill down and find out about their elected officials. Some really interesting information there.

So we are currently three months into a post-war Iraq, and still no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been found. WMD was the crux of the administration’s argument that Iraq was a dangerous country, and was what put most Americans over the edge to support the move towards war with Iraq.

The NewsHour has a great lead in to this point, and how (rightfully so) the tune has changed in the administration:

The real question here to me is not whether there were or weren’t WMD, but rather was the intelligence flawed, or did we just get out and out lied to? Almost just as disturbing is that the majority of Americans don’t seem to care, and how ill informed they are, again I’ll quote the NewsHour since i can’t seem to find the original poll:

I’ll be curious to see how much of an issue this becomes in the upcoming presidential election.

According to this BBC story and further discussion on the NewsHour, Russia has closed its last independent television station, and just before elections, what a coincidence. The station was critical of the Kremlin, and of President Putin in particular, now with parliamentary elections coming up in the fall, the only television stations left on Russian T.V. are state owned or state sanctioned.

I can’t be the only one who finds this just a little bit concerning. I mean the last thing we need right now is for Russia to become unstable, and this move certainly at first blush looks like a slide back towards communist Russia. The upcoming elections in Russia will be interesting, and if Putin and the Kremlin do what critics in Russia fear, re-write the constitution such that Putin gets a third term (the constitution limits the president to just two terms), then I think we really should start worrying.

today the california senate bill SB 1386 went into effect. the bill (now law) makes businesses that store customer information responsible for safe guarding that information from criminals. the law states that if customers personal information (credit card numbers, names, social security numbers, etc.) that is stored on a computer are acquired by unauthorized persons (criminals), then the company in question is responsible for notifying those customers that their information was stolen.

this all seems like common sense to me. if you are a business and i give you my personal information you are responsible for making sure it doesn’t get stolen or used improperly, and certainly if it does get stolen you should tell me about it. the problem is that most business don’t want to embarrass themselves, or gain the bad P.R. that would come from admitting you lost your customer’s information. so instead of admitting they have lost personal information they usually just cover it up, which of course hurts the consummers involved, and leaves no incentive for the companies to actually enact preventative measures, so that it doesn’t happen again.

now with this law companies better beef up security and protect my information, otherwise they will get caught with their pants down, and everyone will know about it.

i first saw this story in the P.D. and what was most shocking was that california is the only state to have such a law. that may soon change though, as U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced similar legislation to the U.S. Senate a few days ago [press release] , which she is titling the Notification of Risk to Personal Data Act. the bill (S 1350) is similar to the california bill, and would apply to any company involved in interstate commerce, and as most federal laws do, would supersede any inconsistent state laws.

i can see why business or people with business ties would fight this law, i mean it is just bad marketing to announce to everyone that you lost a bunch of sensitive data, but i would have to say tough to those people because this law makes sense, and companies have a responsibility to their customers to inform them of this kind of crime against them.

if you haven’t done so already then go right now to www.donotcall.gov and sign your self up. note: it may take a while for them to send you the confirmation email.

i think this is a good thing for all of us who hate those damn telemarketers, however if you read the documentation you’ll note that there a few exemptions.

also it seems like this would really benefit the telemarketing companies because now they have a list of people not to waste their time or money on. this should save them a great deal of money if they followed this logic, because then they could focus more on the people who might actually buy their crap.

however based on that logic then spammers wouldn’t try and alter their messages so as to not get caught in email message filters marking them as spam, because then they would only be targetting those people that may be interested.

in the end i think we will have to wait and see how effective the national do not call list really is to stopping those annoying telemarketer calls. in any case i think it is a step in the right direction, and i wouldn’t mind seeing something like this for spam.