I keep reading about the minimum wage debate in California, but I thought the OC Weekly staff clarified things nicely:
Fortunately, someone is looking out for California’s minimum wage workers: Thomas Hiltachk has filed a ballot initiative with the Attorney General that, if approved by voters, would raise the state’s minimum wage by a dollar an hour. Unfortunately, Hiltachk is a Republican who works as legal counsel to Governor Schwarzenegger, so therefore one must assume that such largesse comes with a nasty surprise attached. It does. In exchange for giving the worst paid workers an extra buck an hour, the charmingly named “Fair Pay Workplace Flexibility Act of 2006″ would abolish the 8 hour workday for all the state’s workers. Nice, huh? Especially considering that this week marks the 118th anniversary of the establishment of the 8 hour workday in California. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Republican party: Building a Bridge to 1887.
So, if you consider the law to be code, and Mr. Hiltachk to be a programmer…oh, what a virus he could deliver. Is “trojan-horse law” an official phrase yet?
Apparently there are a lot of people cited for running stop-signs in certain areas of the US. This data point is just one factor of many used by insurance companies to determine the rates you must pay for coverage. Might be interesting to correlate the frequency of bad drivers around you, the damage caused, the number actually cited, and the cost others end up paying for their behavior.
You probably know you are charged a different rate depending on where you live. But have you looked into the differences relative to how people drive in your area, or number of citations?
The federal statute and copycat state laws prohibit accessing computers or a computer system without authorization, or in excess of authorization, and thereby obtaining information or causing damage.
What does it mean to access a networked computer? Any communication with that computer — even if it’s simply one system asking another “are you there?” — transmits data to the other machine. The cases say that e-mail, web surfing and port scanning all access computers. One court has even held that when I send an e-mail, not only am I accessing your e-mail server and your computer, but I’m also “accessing” every computer in between that helps transmit my message.
Shadow/substitution solutions are becoming all the rage as people look for ways to create plausable deniability both from an attack and defense perspective. That’s just a fancy way of saying that more and more people want to be able to disappear.
Safe Talk is a UK company that suggest you use their service in order to
give out a temporary phone number to people you first meet so they can call you – until you know if they’re fit or fit to drop!
If people haven’t started adopting transaction-based IDs for their credit cards (offered by issuers for years now) how likely are they to start using them on their mobile? Maybe the motivation is higher on mobiles because the relationship is more likely to sour in ways that require a disappearing act? Fake name, fake number, imagine the possibilities. Will this be a convenient add-on service for social network sites, or the next big thing for spammers and phishers to abuse? I mean if it is successful as a (legitimate) service, and able to handle the looming liability/trust issues, I wonder how long it will be before this is a standard service from the major carriers.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995