The BBC calls the Milan theft a Daring $1m mid-day heist:

Staff at Pederzani’s, one of the city’s exclusive jewellers, thought nothing amiss when a window cleaner went to work on the plate glass display.

Dressed in regulation overalls, he propped his ladder against the window.

But then, instead using the bucket and squeegee to clean it, he calmly unscrewed it before scooping an estimated $1m-worth of jewels into his bucket and walking off into the Friday shopping crowd.

You can unscrew the window from the outside? How do you remove a window that you’ve propped your ladder against? Maybe something was lost in translation.

Enforcement of the FTC Red Flags Rules has been postponed for several months, as reported by Bank Info Security:

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced this week it will suspend enforcement of the new Identity Theft Red Flags Rule until May 1, 2009 – six months beyond the original Nov. 1 deadline.

This move will give non-banking creditors and state-chartered credit unions additional time to develop and implement written identity theft prevention programs. FTC observers saw that many industry segments were unaware of the compliance date, hence the six-month pushback of enforcement.

[…]

The FTC’s delay does not apply to address discrepancy rules that were issued at the same time as the red flags rule.

The FTC’s announcement also does not affect other federal agencies’ enforcement of the original Nov. 1, 2008 deadline for financial institutions subject to their oversight.

The FTC’s decision to push back the enforcement date began with its outreach efforts to explain the rule to the many different types of entities that are covered by it. Examples of businesses and organizations that said they weren’t ready included utilities, certain healthcare providers, and higher education organizations. Most of those entities that aren’t compliant have not been subject to FTC oversight in other areas of their business

The entities were unaware. That does not seem like the most convincing argument for lack of compliance, but so it goes. The FTC is trying to be nice.

In their eagerness to become compliant, companies might not take the right deliberate steps to identify what the risks are, and instead go out and buy something off the shelf for compliance or do something that wasn’t well suited to their business, Broder notes. “So in the interest of getting it right, we extended the date for enforcement to give those companies time to get their program in place.”

Eagerness to become compliant? That’s a good one.

All compliance deadlines lead to last-minute buying sprees and unbudgeted/unplanned expense. What the FTC is doing is like a teacher giving students an extension on a final exam. They did not know there would be a final exam? Ok, final warning for the final exam. Will procrastination be cured by sliding the deadlines? I would argue no, but on the other hand what good comes of the FTC finding nobody compliant on November 1st — most entities might just give up in despair and protest/fight instead of try.

The bottom line is that if you were already operating under FTC oversight, then November 1st is still your deadline.

Remember Senator Steven’s defense regarding expensive gifts?

“I refused it as a gift,” Stevens replied. “I let him put it in our basement at his request.”

Uh-huh. Palin is starting to parrot the same defense, as revealed in an AP story:

“Those clothes are not my property. We had three days of using clothes that the RNC purchased,” Palin told Fox News in an interview that aired Thursday night.

Just because those clothes were purchased for my use, are my size, and I’ve worn some of them, does not make them my property. Not my property? Is that some kind of loophole that makes spending $150,000 on clothing in liberal cities over two months suddenly acceptable?

You just can’t make this stuff up.

In other news Palin condemned her predecessor for waste, and then gets caught with numerous acts of waste. Her command of ethics and transparency is suspect.

The real issue in the above story, in fact, is that her campaign paid more for physical appearances than foreign policy of the United States.

An acclaimed celebrity makeup artist for Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin collected more money from John McCain’s campaign than his foreign policy adviser. Amy Strozzi, who works on the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” and has been Palin’s traveling stylist, was paid $22,800, according to campaign finance reports for the first two weeks in October. In contrast, McCain’s foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was paid $12,500, the report showed.

That’s $11,400 a week to maintain Palin’s appearance. Can America really afford this? Let’s consider for a moment that Palin argues that if you measure her waste you will like her better than other people who (she argues) wasted far more before her. It is clear they had different kinds of waste, rather than more, but regardless of the waste of others this is about a more universal and grounded concept. The measurements are in and showing clear signs of waste no matter how you look at it and irresponsible financial management in the Palin powder room. A terrible act by another person does not wash away her lesser acts of poor judgment. Her command of even basic ethics is questionable.

Why do I keep thinking about Imelda Marco’s shoe collection?

Just to be fair, it is also possible that Randy Scheunemann is a poor excuse for a policy advisor and not even worth $12,500, whereas Strozzi seems to know what she is doing.

Scheunemann until recently was an open extreme right-wing lobbyist (e.g. he advised Rumsfeld on the “Liberation” of Iraq and look how that turned out) until McCain was forced to take an anti-lobbyist policy stand. Then Scheunemann suddenly dropped his lobbyist credentials and became an “advisor”.

Perhaps the payment was just a symbolic gesture and the real money for foreign policy “advisors” is coming through extra-legal and underground means. For example, Georgia reportedly paid Scheunemann’s lobbying company $200K after McCain condemned Russia.

A BBC story about dogs that can detect drugs makes me think about double-duty pets:

Retired sniffer dogs that have spent years on police patrol are now working in the private sector in the US – sniffing out teenagers’ bedrooms.

Parents can rent a dog and handler for $200 (£125) an hour from Sniff Dogs, a firm operating in New Jersey and Ohio.

Can there really be trust if parents are using sophisticated surveillance, albeit dogs, to monitor their home? My guess is a severe communication problem exists that needs to be fixed if a parent would rather call in big dogs instead of investing in an evening chat over dinner and finding ways to build genuine trust. I say big dogs since police apparently prefer labs due to the intimidating size and people skills, even though the breed is more likely to cause damage to homes while sniffing.

On the other hand, the constant threat of surveillance will give kids a leg up on law enforcement as they grow up in such a system and learn evasion techniques from an early age. Bring in the dogs to teach your kids how to avoid law enforcement techniques. Nice. Or maybe parents will use Sniff Dogs in cahoots with their kids as a test to make sure law enforcement will not find anything, should the real dogs appear.

Imagine parents training their pets to detect things they do not want in their home. Rather than renting, this could be a whole new angle to obedience training, as well as change the dynamic of getting your kids/friends a puppy.

Personally I wonder if parents should also be using dogs to find kids with cigarettes, rather than just marijuana, due to the significant health issues of the former. Strangely, I noticed cigarettes are not on the list:

Sniff Dogs can detect most recreational and illegal substances including marijuana, heroine, methamphetamine, cocaine, Xanax, and Ecstasy. As new drugs enter the market we will bring that new skill to our dogs.

Xanax? It does say recreational. Not sure what that includes. Coffee? Ironically, Sniff Dogs makes the argument that marijuana is harmful to your health because it is just as bad as cigarettes:

And keep in mind, marijuana is by no means harmless to the health: Marijuana users may have many of the same respiratory problems that tobacco smokers have, such as chronic cough and more frequent chest colds. The daily use of 1 to 3 marijuana joints can produce the same lung damage and potential cancer risk as smoking five times as many cigarettes.

Ok, no citation or reference makes me skeptical of this claim but even if I accept it at face value, I am still curious why/if the dogs do not get trained to detect cigarettes. Maybe they assume even humans can detect cigarette use on their own? Or maybe the handlers smoke so many cigarettes the dogs can’t distinguish?

There is a very familiar sounding security disclaimer on the Sniff Dogs FAQ:

The search is a “snapshot in time,” meaning we cannot guarantee you that drugs were not present last week or won’t turn up next weekend. A Sniff Dogs search can only discover what it currently present.

That brings me back to my point above. If a parent wants a surveillance system, why not train a pet to detect things? That seems like a useful and more personal service, just like selling a business a set of security tools so they may protect themselves as they see fit rather than offer them penetration tests. The only problem with the training, other than cost and time, is probably that kids will be very effective at cross-training or even re-tuning the pet sensors.

One last thought: Are there dogs that can find lost socks? What about comic books, obscene images or liberal thinking?