I Pinch.
So maybe everyone else already knows about this, but I discovered a Firefox add-on called Shazou. Click on the “S” next to the progress bar on your browser and Shazou maps the location of server on which the current page resides. This is theoretically for use as a security feature, but I can’t help checking every page I visit just for fun.
Some day I hope to work for a company with operations in cities to which someone might want to travel. For the time being, however, I will be spending this week, as I did last week, in a plant in the town of Osceola, AR. The Chamber of Commerce website tells a little bit about the town and county, but what is conspicuously absent is the fact that it is the mosquito capital of the free world – what ever happened to DDT? Oh, and it was about 102 degrees every day last week.
Over-all I would rank Osceola as a 1 out of 10 for a vacation spot (a 2 if you come in the early fall when you can watch farmers pick cotton). It earns that rating because of a general lack of things to do, the abundance of mosquitoes, and no good “sit-down” restaurants. Locals make the 75 minute trek to the east side of Memphis to shop and dine out. If you head down here, stay at the Days Inn, it’s nice, but it is better than the other three places off exit 48; if you hold your mouth right you can even get a Wi-Fi signal. I also recommend that you head up to Blytheville (~ 20 miles north) to get all the fried fish that you can eat at Ed’s Country Catfish House.
Does it seem that suddenly quite a few laptops with large compilations of personal information have recently been stolen? The VA got lucky this last week when they located a laptop which contained data on a whopping 26 million veterans, but today I read that a computer containing personal info from blood donors has been stolen from the Red Cross. I did a quick search and found several occurrences of identity theft via stolen laptop in the past couple of years.
These thefts have taken place at UC Berkley, the Department of Justice, Bank of America, Aetna, the YMCA, and ING among many others. Each of the aforementioned thefts exposed thousands of people to risk from fraud and yet, apparently, databases of private information are still being stored on laptop computers. A very long list of this type of incident (and others) has been compiled at privacyrights.org.
I am no network security expert, but wouldn’t it add at least some level of difficulty for ID thieves if this kind of thing were stored on servers that could (hopefully) be kept in a secure location. At least then a hacker would have to do some work to steal your identity instead of picking up a computer someone sat down in a coffee shop or an airport.
