life hereafter

random musings from a wannabe economist

Moving into my new apartment earlier this month presented the opportunity to perform a social experiment. I have an old 27” CRT TV from my college days which due to some strange reasons has continued to follow me.

When I moved in I left this TV outside of my apartment for about six days. Half on purpose hoping that someone would take it, and half out of sheer laziness.

No one stole the damn TV. This means one of two things is true, either everyone in my new building is super honest, or even thieves have become snobs and would never be seen with anything less than a shiny flat LCD.

Earlier today I read an article in Business Week entitled “Hacking for Dummies.” (Please forgive the inaccurate use of the word.) The article discussed how easy and cheap it is for anyone to “rent a botnet” for the day and performed DDoS attacks. The article made me wonder how easy and cost effective it might be to use something like Amazon’s EC2 to accomplish the same thing.

What kind of safeguards do these “cloud computing” companies really have in place to mitigate the risk of rouge applications. I’m sure reputable companies would shut down disruptive services in a reasonable amount of time, but what if you only need a few minutes of distraction. Would it really be that hard to use a stolen credit card to sign up for service leaving virtually no trail.

Perhaps I am way off…

How trying to protect individuals from one form of identity theft may create another.

Late last week I filled out a form on the PennDOT website notifying the Department of Motor Vehicles that I moved.  A few days later I received a letter at my new address containing my updated registration and license.

A few days later I received another letter from PennDOT with the little yellow forwarding service label sent to my former address.

Let me reiterate, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Transportation sent a letter to my former address with all of the information on my license, including the license number and personal traits. What if I didn’t have a chance to provide forwarding information to the post office, or worse, if the post office decided to ignore (or delay) my forwarding information. I would never have received this letter and it would be sitting in the mailbox of some stranger.

I understand the purpose of this letter is to notify people who might not have moved and had their license address changed by some random person as a result of identity theft. However, in order to change your address with PennDOT you have to provide your old license, and both the title and registration from your vehicle. (Which seems odd, since you might have a license, but not own a vehicle, but whatever.)

I guess PennDOT determined that the risk of disclosing personal information to strangers was a lower risk than distributing licenses to people who were able to obtain not only someones original drivers license, but the title and registration from their car.

So I am officially all “moved-in” to my new place. Now, this doesn’t mean that the 40 boxes in my living room are unpacked, but that is neither here nor there…

I went to the in-house gym today and was the only one there for a while. About halfway through my workout a strange woman came in, fully dressed and wearing a Sunday Hat. She then proceeded to turn off all of the lights. At this point, I did not say anything, as it was my first day and I really didn’t want to rock the boat. Maybe I was breaking some rule, using the lights at 8am? (There were lots of windows, so this was okay). Next, she takes some cleaning supplies and wipes down one of the machines. She then sits down on the machine and starts laughing at the show I was watching. A few moments later she walks over to where I am, sets up her mat and starts using the free weight. At this point she comments that she doesn’t think he (Stephen Colbert) writes his own material. I shrug and put my headphones back on. She then puts all of her stuff away and leaves.

All of this occurred in approximately ten minutes. Did I just meet the neighborhood crazy??