Body Hacking

“And computers are getting smarter all the time: scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (By they I mean computers: I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)”
-Dave Barry

Scary story of the day:

Black Hat researcher shows it is possible to remotely control a diabetic's insulin pump without person's knowledge

Bottom Line

Technology is wonderful but most inventors and companines fail to take security seriously. Hackers can turn off pace markers and most any other medical device that responds to remote signals. If your life depends on technology, ask your doctor about the risks of hacking or even "Noise" or magnetic fields disabling your device.

Scrap Metal Theft in Chicago

"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself."
William Shakespeare

Last month I wrote about Scrap Metal Theft. This month CBS Chicago reports that thieves are stealing air conditioner units for the metal value.

"They work silently, leaving no trace behind. A Chicago neighborhood is on alert after the number of thefts of air conditioning units have jumped sharply in recent weeks. The robbers are after the copper inside, which they can resell for scrap, a favorite quick money-making method for drug addicts. But they're not just cracking open the units and plundering the pipe, they're lifting the entire central AC unit."

NBC Chicago reports that,

Some 100 orphaned cats and dogs living in a Chicago animal welfare center are in danger heading into the expected-to-be-hot weekend after vandals either stole or destroyed all of the building's main air conditioning units Thursday evening.

The shelter will need $20,000 to replace the A/C.

Bottom Line

"Residents have taken to enclosing their air conditioning in thick cages with multiple locks. If you live in an area where AC theft is a concern, you should also lock up the disconnect box to make it harder to get to the AC."

The Most Dangerous Cities in America

According to 24/7 Wall St. the FBI reports that:

violent crime dropped 5.5% in 2010 while reported property crimes fell 2.8% during the depths of the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression. The news, though, is far from positive.
Though most regions of the U.S. saw declines, the Northeast saw an increase in murders (8.3%), forcible rapes (1.4%) and aggravated assaults (0.7%). ... Even when crime rates dropped, older urban areas still had more violent crime than other cities. Philadelphia, Cleveland, Buffalo and Hartford finished high on the FBI's list.

Using the FBI report, 24/7 Wall St. created a list of the ten most crime-plagued cities in the U.S. with populations of more than 100,000.

1. Flint, MI  (22/1000 violent crime) - poverty and high unemployment
2. Detroit, MI (18.9/1000) - ditto. The median income is just $26,098, 48% below the national average.
3. St. Louis (17.5/1000) - 30% below the average income
4. New Haven, Conn. (15.8/1000) - highest on the east coast. A stark mix of poverty and the elites of Yale University.
5. Memphis, Tenn (15.4/1000) - what would Elvis do?
6. Oakland, CA (15.3/1000) - income and employment are slightly above the national averages so why the violence. May be youth gangs.
7. Little Rock, Ark. (15.2/1000) - one of the highest incidents of rape (no Clinton jokes please).
8. Baltimore (14.6/1000) - only Detroit had more murders
9. Rockford, Ill. (14.5/1000) - "unusually high violent crime rates for a city of its size".  Rockford receives traffic from the drug markets in Madison, Chicago, and Milwaukee.
10. Stockton, CA (13.8) - "rated one of the most miserable cities to live in the country by Forbes in March, 2010"

Bottom Line

24/7 Wall St. concludes,

Unemployment will inevitably improve in these cities. The most hard-hit sections, however, may never completely recover. They failed to do so after the last economic upswing -- and the one before that. Some part of all the cities on this list will be home to high levels of violent crime permanently.

Common Scams

“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principles of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale” - Thomas Jefferson

Here are the top 10 International Scams according to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).

1. Asking for money to be wired
This is a scam red flag! Wiring money is like sending cash: there is NO protections against fraud and no way to know who received the money.

2. Money requests from "friends", persons in need, businesses you did not order from.
Don't send money to strangers or unsolicited businesses.

3. Asking for info by phone, text, or email.
Never give personal information to someone contacting you. They could be lying about who they represent. Never use links supplied by email.

4. You won a foreign lottery!
Playing in foreign lotteries is illegal.

5. Please deposit this check and wire me some money back immediately.
Famous scam. The check may take many days to clear before bouncing and you will be fined for the bad check. Meanwhile the money wired is gone forever. (see #1)

6. Unauthorized charges
Always check your credit card statements and bills for "Extras" that may have been added without your permission.

7. Donating to a "fake" charity
After a natural disaster, stick to established charities like the Red Cross. Don't trust just anyone offering to collect your money.

8. Miracle Health Product!
Buy drugs only from licensed U.S. pharmacies. Otherwise, you could end up with products that are fake, expired, mislabeled, or dangerous.

9. There is no such thing as a sure thing
Stay away from anyone promising a low-risk, high-return investment opportunity. This is a contradiction of the financial market. The only true "low-risk" is FDIC insured bank accounts with terrible rates. Higher returns ALWAYS require higher risk and a chance of losing money.

10. Dealing with a fake business.
With VoIP and P.O. Boxes it is easy to create fake companies that disappear with your money with no way to find out who has it. Only deal with reputable companies with real addresses.

Bottom Line

If a deal sounds too good to be true, it is!

Speeding Violations

Lane changin' left and right
Blowin' horns and blinkin' lights
Oh the fast lane has never been so slow
- lyrics to “Five O'Clock 500” by Alabama

The USA Today story, Speeding 'cushion' may dwindle due to recession, is worth a read. It describes how some communities are attempting to raise funds by handing out more traffic tickets or raising the cost of traffic violations:

• Police in Canton, Ohio, issued more than four times as many tickets in January of 2010 vs. January 2009. The Police Chief says a decrease in crime in the city has freed officers to do more traffic enforcement and the additional revenue from traffic citations allows his understaffed department to hire more officers.

• Tennessee is considering a law similar Georgia’s that adds a $200 fine for "super speeders," driving more than 25 mph over the posted speed limit.

• Speeding fines are being doubled in "travel-safe" zones on several stretches of highway in Missouri. A state passed a law in 2008 allows authorities to establish "travel-safe" zones on high-crash stretches of highways.

The main theme of the article is the dwindling speeding “cushion” that police used to allow. That is, no fine unless you’re over 10mph above the speed limit. Now some towns are dunning motorists for just 5mph over the limit. And waiting just past the lower speed limit sign to catch them.

Bottom Line

When you see a speed limit sign, the new speed starts at that sign. So begin breaking immediately when you see the speed sign. Police in speed traps immediately after the sign love to catch someone who is slowly breaking or coasting down to the new limit. This is particularly a problem on a main road doing 55 that suddenly switches to 30 as it enters a town. This caught my college roommate in Wyoming on Spring Break.

Another common trap catches motorists on the down side of a steep hill after gravity has increased your speed. I encountered this in rural Illinois many years ago.

Another place I’ve been caught was at a tollbooth requiring 5mph in the “Easy Pass” lane. A policeman with a speed gun stood next to the booth and waved over anyone going faster than 5mph.

Online Privacy

“Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite.” - actor Marlon Brando

While I really like Facebook, you do have to be careful with the information you share and who you share it with. Some people I think go too far and lock down all information so all I have is a name and no clue if this person is my long lost friend from college or not. Other people publish everything about themselves to the world, their birthday, where they live, etc. That is too much sharing. I restrict that level of detail to just my “confirmed” friends. My public profile shows my workplace, my “town”, the colleges I attended, and a single photo carefully chosen.

Many websites (like games I play) ask for a birthday, so I’ve created a new one of January 1 with the year rounded down to the nearest decade. That won’t do on Facebook since friends want to celebrate my real birthday. So I entered a date that is near but slightly off. The town I list is the township I live in, not the smaller village jurisdiction.

Am I being paranoid? Perhaps not. There is a new company at http://www.spokeo.com/ that uses Facebook and other online data to build individual profiles. The amount of information they had on me was disturbing – my actual village, my house value, my age and birthday month, married, number of kids, etc. And this was the “free” display. If I paid I could have seen even more details (or so they claim).

Type in your name and see what comes up about yourself. If you have a common name, try [name], [city], [state].

Bottom Line

The good news is that Spokeo supports privacy requests. Go to www.spokeo.com/privacy and put in the URL of “your” page on their site. Then give them an email address (you could create a temporary email for this). Within seconds I had an email, clicked the response and immediately my name disappeared from their search results.

Criminal Behavior

“Everybody in the whole cell block,
Was dancing to the jailhouse rock.”
- lyrics, Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock

The NY Times published an interesting story on effectively dealing with repeated drug offenders.

“How do you force criminals to change their behavior? … the US criminal justice system has been spectacularly bad at answering this question. America is the most punitive nation in the world, with 2.4 million of its citizens behind bars and another 5.1 million on probation or parole. Yet … two-thirds of released prisoners commit another serious offense within three years.”

Judge Steven Alm of Hawaii realized that the current policy didn’t work. Most probation violations went unpunished and he might see an offender only after dozens of violations, at which point his choices were: let the violator off with yet another warning or send him to prison for many years.

Jerry Lum of Honolulu, a meth smoker since age 14, spent nearly half of his 42 years behind bars but continued smoking meth. “I could game the system,” he says. “I used to be late to see my probation officer — sometimes, if I knew my drug test was going to be dirty, I wouldn’t even show up.” Officers usually looked the other way. Given the lengthy paperwork involved, there were not enough hours in the day to write up every infraction.

So Judge Alm changed the rules with a new program called HOPE. ALL parole violations would be punished. He rewrote the paperwork so it would take only minutes to fill out and simplified the court procedures down to 7 minutes per parole violation. Drug tests were made random – parolees call each night to learn if they are to be tested the next day. Participants who test positive for drugs are arrested on the spot, tried within 72 hours, and sentenced to jail for two to five days.

“After just six months, HOPE probationers were 93 percent less likely to miss an appointment with an officer or to fail drug tests. Since most HOPE participants were able to quit drugs and hold down steady jobs, many stopped resorting to crime. … Though HOPE cost $1,400 more per probationer than the old system, it saved the state $6,000 per probationer in reduced incarceration costs.”

Bottom Line

“Cesare Beccaria, an Italian philosopher and arguably the first criminologist, wrote in 1764, “The certainty of a small punishment will make a greater impression than the fear of one more severe.” Several generations of experts reached the same conclusion: Punishments are more effective when they follow closely after crimes, and when they are levied consistently.”

Jerry Lum has not spent a day in jail since joining HOPE. “I hate to say it,” he says, “but I’m the type of person that — when I wasn’t supervised — I kept screwing up. If I’m supervised, no problem.”

Three Strikes in Chile

"We are nine meals from anarchy."-docudrama After Armageddon

On Feb 27 a magnitude 8.8 earthquake hit the country of Chile. This was 500 times stronger than the quake in Haiti and the sixth largest quake measured in modern times. At first glance it appeared that Chile was well prepared with about 700 dead and 2 million homeless (compared to 220,000 dead and 8 million homeless in Haiti). "The Government is up and running, the stock exchange is running, the newspapers are out." – ABC news. Fifty years ago the worst quake ever-recorded devastated Chile (magnitude 9.5 in 1960) and a new infrastructure was built to be earthquake resistant. (Haiti is also a high-risk zone for quakes but poverty and government corruption has not promoted safe building codes.)

But now for the rest of the story. The Chilean earthquake was followed by two additional catastrophic events:

1. Tidal Waves: many seaside towns in Chile were struck by surging waves several meters high that washed away homes and carried an untold number of people to their deaths. Most of the deaths in Chile occurred AFTER the quake with the tsunami. The entire Pacific was then put on alert for coastal evacuation. Fortunately the waves were only 3-4 feet high by the time they reached Hawaii and barely noticeable in Japan.

2. Looting: Chile Battles Lawlessness, Desperation After Massive Earthquake
“Many looters made off with food and basic supplies. Others saw an opportunity for large-scale theft, carrying away home appliances on their backs.” Everything has been stolen from the supermarkets, the small shops, and the pharmacies. Hundreds of looters have been detained and troops have been forced to fire tear gas to stop mobs from pillaging shops and homes.

The situation in parts of Chile is now considered "desparate".

Bottom Line

A disaster or catastrophe means, by definition, that the normal order of things has been overturned. Life will NOT soon return to normal. You cannot rely on local, state, national or international government to quickly come to the rescue. Hence the recommendation to have at LEAST one week of supplies in your home. As Chile shows you can survive the quake, survive the tsunami, and then starve because a mob has grabbed all the food while looting.

PS

The situation in Chile highlights a problem with food storage – a mob may steal it from you. It’s charitable to share your food store if you can, but you might want to lie low and not advertise that you have food storage if you fear mobs and lawlessness. You might also consider breaking up your food storage and hiding portions of it. This way some might remain after the rest is stolen. [Unless neighbors discover the “hidden treasure” of food and ransack your entire house in a treasure hunt.]

Another option is to create/join a neighborhood group to repel looters and “outsiders”. Some towns in Chile have gone this route.

Burglars

“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?”- Saint Augustine

Reader’s Digest has been discovering the tricks that burglars use:

1. They frequently rob during the day while normally dressed as a census/survey taker, a lawn guy, etc. Or a crook may use a day job like an appliance deliveryman, carpet cleaner or painter to check out the houses they visit.
2. They may knock at the door, and if no one answers AND the door is unlocked, just let themselves in. Burglars may also check side doors and the garage door (when the garage connects to the house).
3. They also love open windows.
4. They are not afraid to break a window to get in. If your typical neighbor hears an odd sound, followed by just silence, he’ll go back to what he was doing. It’s human nature.
5. The antidote to #4 is loud dogs and nosy neighbors.
6. Alarm systems won’t deter if they are not turned on.
7. Windows with open blinds or curtains advertise what you have worth stealing.
8. There are many ways to let a burglar know you’re away from home
   -You post about your upcoming vacation on your blog or facebook
   -Your mailbox is full
   -Newspapers have not been picked up
   -There are no footprints in day-old snow, or your drive is not plowed.
   -The house is dark between sunset and bedtime.
   -A flyer left in your front door

Bottom Line

Professional burglars are savvy. They’ll look at your landscaping, your cars, views through the window, and so on to determine if you have quality goods worth stealing. They’ll carry out small safes and know all the traditional hiding places like sock drawers, dresser drawers, bedside tables, matresses, and the medicine cabinets.

A good deterrent is putting lights, a TV, or fake tv on a timer so the house does not look empty at night.