Lessons for Living

Acquainted With Me

This morning I read about God being acquainted with all my ways. So I made this wallpaper for my computer:

Acquainted with all my ways

Then I read this:

State centers tap into personal data

Intelligence centers run by U.S. states have access to personal information about millions of Americans, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

[…]

A survey conducted last year shows the centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that maintain records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and other information, the newspaper said, citing officials familiar with the material.

Pennsylvania buys credit reports while analysts in Rhode Island have access to car-rental databases. Authorities in Maryland use a data broker called Entersect, which claims it maintains some 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans, the Post reported.

I assume I’m among the 98 percent.

What do “they” have on record about me?

Not nearly as much as God knows about me!

Should I care?

I know some people who don’t care.

Or don’t seem to care.

And I thought they did.

Including me?

PS: If I’m in the 2 percent suggested above, why?!

Calling WalMart Bashers

Attention!

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer — and remembered as American business’s answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

“A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level,” was Scott’s message to his people. “Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing.”

This extraordinary delegation of authority — essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year — saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital.

😀

This Is Progress?

😯

The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday:

Because pretty soon, we’re all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

[…]

At first, a phone that can shoot video might seem like just another gadget with just another feature. But the leap here is that coupling a video phone with the Web makes showing, sharing and storing video just about effortless.

[…]

Meaning it’ll be harder to get away with bad behavior. Start weaving too much on the 405, and the fellow behind you might send live video of you to the police. As well he should.

And that probably means, with the increased risk of being caught on tape, that the cautious among us will tend to shy away from unwise choices. I know my turnstile-jumping days are over.

I. Do. Not. Like. It.

Call me a phobic of some sort. Call me old-fashioned. Call me a security-and-privacy nut. Call me paranoid.

And call me a prophet.

This. Is. Not. Good.

On the other hand, this kind of technology emphasizes this Lesson-for-Living: Live the right way.

Imagine somebody using one of these phones to broadcast this riveting video-documentary: Mark Roth at WalMart.

What would viewers learn about the genuineness and depth and live-ability of my Christian faith? 😯

So, my friends, live your life and wear your face as though somebody were watching.

Soon they may well be.

(Actually, your fellow humans have been watching you for a long time. This technology just expands the audience as well as saves your life for future reference and review.)

Then there’s the matter that He has been watching you (and over you) from before your birth.

Now go do the right thing.

“Disseminating Fantasies”

Gorbachev dispels ‘closet Christian’ rumours; says he is atheist

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made clear this past weekend that he is an atheist after European news agencies last week claimed that he had confirmed his Christian faith during a visit to the tomb of St Francis of Assisi in Italy.

Gorbachev, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union, confronted speculations that he had been a closeted Christian during an interview with the Russian news agency Interfax.

“Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies – I can’t use any other word – about my secret Catholicism, citing my visit to the Sacro Convento friary, where the remains of St. Francis of Assisi lie,” Gorbachev said, according to an Interfax article posted Friday.

“To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist,” he stated.

So I should have filed my original post on this subject under Suspension of Disbelief as well.

Fine. At least I asked some good questions.

But tell me, why do you think I filed this one under Lessons for Living?

Parents, Guard That Door!

I confess I’m amazed this in in the New York Times:

The Undercover Parent

Not long ago, friends of mine confessed over dinner that they had put spyware on their 15-year-old son’s computer so they could monitor all he did online. At first I was repelled at this invasion of privacy. Now, after doing a fair amount of research, I get it.

Make no mistake: If you put spyware on your computer, you have the ability to log every keystroke your child makes and thus a good portion of his or her private world. That’s what spyware is — at least the parental monitoring kind. You don’t have to be an expert to put it on your computer. You just download the software from a vendor and you will receive reports — weekly, daily, whatever — showing you everything your child is doing on the machine.

Scary. But a good idea. Most parents won’t even consider it.

[…]

Some will say that you should simply trust your child, that if he is old enough to go on the Internet he is old enough to know the dangers. Trust is one thing, but surrendering parental responsibility to a machine that allows the entire world access to your home borders on negligence.

Some will say that it’s better just to use parental blocks that deny access to risky sites. I have found that they don’t work. Children know how to get around them. But more than that — and this is where it gets tough — I want to know what’s being said in e-mail and instant messages and in chat rooms.

There are two reasons for this. First, we’ve all read about the young boy unknowingly conversing with a pedophile or the girl who was cyberbullied to the point where she committed suicide. Would a watchful eye have helped? We rely in the real world on teachers and parents to guard against bullies — do we just dismiss bullying on the Internet and all it entails because we are entering difficult ethical ground?

Second, everything your child types can already be seen by the world — teachers, potential employers, friends, neighbors, future dates. Shouldn’t he learn now that the Internet is not a haven of privacy?

Parent or child or not, you really ought to read the full article. Thanks to Harrison Scott Key over at WorldMagBlog for calling my attention to it.

I think I’ll print it out for my teens to read. And I’ll also see what’s available for parental monitoring software.

OK, I just did a quick search and found this site right away: http://www.monitoringsoftwarereviews.org.

And here’s some software available via Amazon:


PC Pandora [NEW - Version 5.0]     Sentry at Home

eBlaster 5.0     Spector Pro 6.0

Another Security Lapse

This time at Facebook — Security Lapse Exposes Photos:

A security lapse made it possible for unwelcome strangers to peruse personal photos posted on Facebook Inc.’s popular online hangout, circumventing a recent upgrade to the Web site’s privacy controls.

The Associated Press verified the loophole Monday after receiving a tip from a Byron Ng, a Vancouver, Canada computer technician. Ng began looking for security weaknesses last week after Facebook unveiled more ways for 67 million members to restrict access to their personal profiles.

But the added protections weren’t enough to prevent Ng from pulling up the most recent pictures posted by Facebook members and their friends, even if the privacy settings were set to restrict the audience to a select few.

After being alerted Monday afternoon, Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the Palo Alto-based company fixed the bug within an hour.

So how many millions of lines of code does it take to run Facebook? And how many more bugs might there be, waiting to be discovered?

Here are a few more paragraphs from the above story:

The latest lapse serves as another reminder of the perils of sharing sensitive photos and personal information online, even when Web sites pledge to shield the information from prying eyes.

Before the fix, Ng’s computer-coding trick enabled him to find private pictures of Paris Hilton at the Emmy awards and of her brother Barron Nicholas drinking a beer with friends and photos of many other people who hadn’t granted access to Ng.

[…]

Despite the risks, more people than ever — especially teenagers and young adults — are publishing personal photos and other intimate details about their lives on the Internet.

News Corp.’s MySpace.com, the only online social network larger than Facebook, suffered a security breach that exposed its members’ private photos earlier this year.

And don’t forget about the security breach an Gmail. And plenty of other sites. (I wonder how long till we hear of a breach at Carbonite or some other online storage site.)

My urgent advice: Use the Internet (Web, email, chat, IM, storage, etc) as though it weren’t private and secure.

Attention, Adults!

Over at WorldMagBlog, Andrée Seu writes:

It was not quite 8 a.m. and as I was walking with Spider down streets still devoid of people, a little boy I don’t know called out to me heartily from his front porch: “Today’s my birthday!”

[…]

Remember the days when you didn’t need context to bring up a subject? All thoughts important to you were instantly relevant. Your friends, to their undying credit, didn’t think you weird but were on board without missing a beat, and ready to go with the flow.

Remember the days when you could expect that something that was good news to you would of course be good news to everyone? Even some strange middle-aged lady walking her dog?

Parents, you especially should read the whole piece. It’s not that long.

Grandparents, you should as well.

And teenagers.

And the rest of you.

Well, what are you waiting on?!

Above all, love God!