A Tennessee cop and a criminal get into a gunfight after the cop initially mistakes it for an ordinary Taser deployment. The cop gets ventilated by hits below his vest, likely due to his giant stomach making the vest ride up. The woman gets hit several times and manages to dump her weapon and escape, before expiring a short distance away. Here is the video:
For those of you who saw the behavior of the cop in this story and were as outraged as I was, I just learned that the courts AGAIN have given the cops a pass. The man’s lawsuit was dismissed. He gets nothing, and the cop is free to treat others the same way.
The cops act like tyrants, and the courts rubber stamp the poor behavior. No surprises there.
There are repercussions for this.
This is the real purpose of making children into the victims of sexual programming: the goal is to isolate them from their more conservative parents, make them feel like unwanted outsiders, then turn them into soldiers for the revolution:
A woman in a Florida emergency room wanted narcotic pain killers, but the hospital wouldn’t give her any. She got loud, so the hospital had her trespassed. She returned moments after leaving by driving her car through the entry door of the hospital.
Earlier in the year, I was talking about using a password manager to secure your passwords. I have been using LastPass for the past 8 years. As I discussed previously, LastPass had a security breach last summer. That breach involved the exposure and loss of their customer database. This handed the black hats all of the encrypted data of their customers. It was simply a matter of time before the bad guys used password cracking tools to decrypt customer password files.
So I did the sensible thing and changed all of my passwords, beginning with the most sensitive ones: email passwords, passwords to financial websites, and on down the list to the least important. It took several weeks to change hundreds of unique passwords. I also changed the master password. The next step that I took was to add MFA by using Yubikey. All of my data is now secure, and anything they have is no longer relevant.
I don’t blame LastPass for the fact that they had a breach. Everyone is a target, and a company like LastPass is a bigger target than most. No, what made me upset was that the breach happened in August, but they didn’t disclose it until November. They denied that the bad guys had gotten encrypted password wallets at first, then finally admitted in December that the password wallets had been lost. So the bad guys had our vaults for months before LastPass bothered to tell anyone. Months to brute force passwords, time to steal, and time is all they need.
They still are slowly releasing information in dribs and drabs. It comes out that the database was stolen because one of their engineers was permitted to have access to the servers from his home computer. That computer was compromised, which allowed the hackers to access corporate information. Now, password vaults are all encrypted and no one but the user has access, but still. Who does this? Home access to sensitive information? There is also the fact that they hid this information for over 9 months. That’s just too shady for me.
I didn’t want to change from LastPass, but this is the last straw. They just are not trustworthy. This isn’t the time to be cute and try to spin this from a PR perspective. This is a much bigger deal than just bad publicity. People’s information that YOU are supposed to safeguard is at stake. I no longer recommend LastPass as a viable password vault application.
LastPass is no longer for me, and it shouldn’t be for you, either. I want cloud storage of my passwords, because it allows portability between laptop, cell phone, etc. So I switched my password wallet over to 1password. The cost is $60 a year for the family plan, which allows up to 5 people to use the account. 1password is also compatible with Yubikey.
The Biden administration has passed a new rule that charges people with good credit a fee, so that money can be used to subsidize people with bad credit. Anyone with a credit score of more than 680 will pay the fee, which will be used to lower interest rates for people with scores below 680.
I can’t even. When I showed this to my wife, she thought it was a Babylon Bee story.
The 24 hour period that begins with sunrise on April 19 is a very busy day in history.
News for homeowners in Florida who wish to have insurance is rough. Insurance companies can’t do business in Florida, mostly because of the high cost of hurricane damage. The average Florida homeowner is paying $4,231 for their property insurance: nearly triple the national rate of $1,544. Homeowners in Florida pay the highest rates of any state in the US. Those rates are set to increase in June by an estimated 40%, on average.
The state of Florida has a taxpayer funded insurance system for those who cannot obtain homeowners’ insurance from a private carrier. This carrier is called Citizens’ Insurance. One in five Florida homes is insured by that fund, and that number will continue to climb as insurers leave the state. Things can’t continue on this path.
Insurance is nothing but a dilution of risk. That is, the risk of damage to homes is spread out among all of the people who have insurance policies, and the premiums of everyone are used to pay the damages of those who have losses. The problem with diluting risk in Florida is that oceanfront homes are worth 50 to 100 times as much as homes located further inland. For every insured oceanfront home that is lost, the premiums of as many as 150 inland homes are used paying for the damages. Pick any coastal city in Florida and look at the home costs. A single family home on the oceanfront that sells for less than $1,000 per square foot is a steal. In Miami, single family oceanfront homes START at $20 million each.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of hurricane damage is within two miles of the coast. Insurance companies can’t charge $100,000 a year for insurance premiums, so they spread that cost amongst every homeowner in Florida. This can’t continue because it is mathematically impossible for the situation to stay as it is. Currently, I pay 1.5% of the value of my house each year to insure it.
If the state of Florida wants to fix the insurance problem in the state, they need to divorce the risk pool of oceanfront homeowners from the rest of the state’s homeowners. If you want to build and live in a $10 million home on the beach, fine. But make your insurance premiums 5% of the home’s value, but stop raising my insurance to cover for your house.
Your master password in a password wallet is the one that is used to encrypt the digital vault that stores your passwords. It may be your PGP passphrase, if you are old school enough to be using that software. Whatever your reason, a strong password is important. My master password is not actually a word. I use pass phrases. Let me explain: Suppose that I pick a mashup of the opening to the Gettysburg address and a nursery rhyme:
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow
The master password is made by mashing it into numbers, letters, and symbols. Words that are numbers become numbers, that are symbols become symbols, the remaining words, I just use the first letter, like this:
4 s & 7 y a, o f b f o t c a n n, M h a l l, i f w w a s
Now take out the spaces, and your new master password is: “4s&7ya,ofbfotcann,Mhallifwwas” It’s easy to remember, nearly impossible to guess, and at 29 characters is very difficult to brute force. This password is also guaranteed not to be on a list of common passwords that many black hats use to guess passwords. A long, difficult to crack master password buys you time to make the data it is protecting obsolete. That’s what I did. All of my master passwords are AT LEAST 25 characters long.
The black hats are large in number, and stealing personal data is the new currency. Make yourself as difficult a target as possible.
I wonder if anyone has statistics on how many spree killers are taking antidepressants? This guy shot 4 people and is now trying to claim temporary insanity.