Computer heist puts voter IDs in danger

From Saturday’s Nashville paper the Tennessean

The names, addresses and complete Social Security numbers of more than 337,000 Davidson County voters may be in the hands of thieves, Metro election officials said Friday.The information could be used by identity thieves. County election officials are warning the public to monitor their credit accounts for any suspicious activity.

Election officials had said earlier in the week that the computers stolen over the Christmas holiday from the Metro Election Commission offices at Howard School Building, 800 Second Ave. S., contained voters’ partial Social Security numbers, along with other personal information.

The Election Commission will send a written notice to all voters in Davidson County, alerting them to the potential danger of identity theft, within the next week.

The theft should not cause any problems for Nashvillians casting ballots in the upcoming presidential primary. Early voting begins Jan. 16.

Think your Mac makes you immune?

Learn the lesson Scott Feldstein learned.

So I’m thinking to myself, hey, I’m a Mac user. Both my laptop and my web server are running Mac OS X. There aren’t any malicious botnet-style malware for us.. is there? Then I start to think maybe the email itself is a scam. So I call the number in the message.

Turns out it’s for reals. I talk to a security guy and he confirms: spam email has been coming from my connection. I say I think that’s pretty unlikely because I’m a (smug) Mac user. He agrees that it would in fact be odd. Then he asks me the million dollar question: do I have a wireless network at home?

Someone as paranoid as I am

Sandi  at Vista On Current Events talks about a “free” traffic generating service.

This morning I got an email from blogrush.com telling me about their free traffic generating service. Well, when someone wants to give me something for free I rarely bite. In the rare occasion that I do I check them out pretty thoroughly first. Ok, I was curious so I visited their site, but not by using their “invitation link” of http://www.blogrush.com/i11840573. I dropped off the i11840573 which is probably just a tracking check to see how effective their email campaign is. Yes I know they probably sent me a tracking cookie anyway but, I deleted cookies after I left their site. [emphasis mine]

Actually, being the lazy type, I probably wouldn’t have done that. But maybe I’ll start doing it a little more often.