Memo to Objectively Unfit and Supposedly Reconsidering-it Mitt Romney (HT Gregg Jackson in an e-mail): Don’t even think about it, pal. We weren’t done, and you don’t want the rest out there.
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This will keep IT managers up at night:
A team including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Princeton University, and other researchers have found a major security flaw in several popular disk encryption technologies that leaves encrypted data vulnerable to attack and exposure.
“People trust encryption to protect sensitive data when their computer is out of their immediate control,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen, a member of the research team. “But this new class of vulnerabilities shows it is not a sure thing. Whether your laptop is stolen, or you simply lose track of it for a few minutes at airport security, the information inside can still be read by a clever attacker.”
The researchers cracked several widely used disk encryption technologies, including Microsoft’s BitLocker, Apple’s FileVault, TrueCrypt, and dm-crypt. These “secure” disk encryption systems are supposed to protect sensitive information if a computer is stolen or otherwise accessed. However, in a paper and video published on the Internet today, the researchers show that data is vulnerable because encryption keys and passwords stored in a computer’s temporary memory — or RAM — do not disappear immediately after losing power.
Ouch. Don’t let that laptop stray.
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Congressman John Boehner, with this move, is again showing why he’s a great American. The Earmark Reform site needs to be kept open, and those who are in the way of reform need to be exposed. The attempt to shut it down is a blatant attempt by Speaker Pelosi to continue, and extend, business as usual, and is simply unacceptable.
Those who are in the way of earmark reform need to pay a price at the ballot box this year.
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I think this Washington Post article on home-equity lines deliberately overplays the severity of what’s happening.
Here’s an example:
Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, suspended the home equity lines of 122,000 customers last month after reviewing their property values and outstanding loan balances. The company, like others, has an internal automated appraisal system that tracks values.
The company declined to disclose how many of the affected borrowers lived in the Washington area. About 381,000 borrowers in the region had home equity lines at the end of last year, according to Moody’s economy.com.
USAA Federal Savings Bank froze or reduced credit lines for 15,000 of its customers, including Corazzi, and will not reconsider its decisions until “real estate values improve substantially,” the company said in a statement.
The first paragraph uses a big number with no context. How many million equity lines does Countrywide have? That info should be pretty easy to find, or ask for. If it’s more than 2.3 million (and I suspect it’s a lot higher), then only 5% (and I suspect the percentage is much lower) of Countrywide’s equity lines have been suspended.
Because there is no paragraph break between the first and second paras, the second excerpted paragraph’s stat is vague. I can tell that it’s equity lines from all lenders, but I believe that many readers will believe it’s Countrywide only, and may even think that one-third of Countrywide’s lines (122K/381K) are affected, which would clearly be wrong.
Finally, note the subtle change from the first paragraph, which covered freezes only, to “froze or reduced” in the third.
All in all, I believe the authors intended to make things look worse than they really are. After all, what’s usually happening is that an unused credit line is being reduced. Seriously now, if the bank lowers the credit line on a credit card you seldom use from $10,000 to $5,000, where’s the suffering?
