TECH CRUNCH: Say Goodbye to Your Social Security Number

Eyeing more secure alternatives to Social Security numbers, lawmakers in the U.S. are looking abroad. The Senate Commerce Committee questioned former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Verizon chief privacy officer Karen Zacharia and both the current and former CEOs of Equifax on how to protect consumers against major data breaches.

The consensus was that Social Security numbers have got to go. Rounding out the panel, Entrust Datacard president and CEO Todd Wilkinson offered some context and insight about why the U.S. should indeed move away from Social Security numbers -- a step that the witnesses unanimously agreed was necessary if not wholly sufficient to protect consumers moving forward, in light of the Equifax hack. 

"Over 145 million Americans' insecure identities are now forever at risk, and they have limited ability to protect themselves," Wilkinson said. "A key question for this committee to consider is: What do we do now given these identities are forever compromised?"

Social Security numbers are a privacy nightmare. While a consumer who gets hacked can replace credit card numbers and other account details, a Social Security number is relatively permanent, linked to a real identity throughout a person's lifespan. In the hearing,

Wilkinson and many of the senators present argued that the U.S. needs to move to a dynamic system of personal identity, one designed with digital security in mind -- a stark contrast with an inflexible legacy system that dates back to the 1930s.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/are-social-security-numbers-going-away/

BBC - Selling Cake Mix: Psychology And Marketing

Cake mixes were introduced in the 1920s and boomed in the 1950s, but sales soon leveled off. BBC reports, "The sales numbers gradually plateaued. Most home cooks were still making their cakes from scratch, and the product had reached everyone it was going to reach.

Even if some people had decided any cake was better than no cake, the persistent sense that something soulless about cake from a box kept many others from embracing it. As they tried to work through this, a man named Ernest Dichter came into the picture.

He was a psychologist and marketing consultant, now known as one of the founders of modern consumer behaviour studies and a pioneer of focus groups."
BBC continues, "Dichter told the cake companies the answer was to take the eggs out of the mix and put them back into the hands of the baker. The problem was that the women who were making the cakes didn't feel emotionally invested enough just adding water, he said. Eggs would make it feel more like baking." 

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171027-the-magic-cakes-that-come-from-a-packet

New York Court Gave Every Detained Immigrant a Lawyer

Omar Siagha has been in the US for 52 years.

He's a legal permanent resident with three children.

He'd never been to prison, he says, before he was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention -- faced with the loss of his green card for a misdemeanor.

His brother tried to seek out lawyers who could help Siagha, but all they offered, in his words, were "high numbers and no hope" -- no guarantee, in other words, that they'd be able to get him out of detention for all the money they were charging.

Then he met lawyers from Brooklyn Defender Services -- part of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, an effort to guarantee legal representation for detained immigrants.

They demanded only one thing of him, he recalls: "Omar, you've got to tell us the truth."

But Siagha's access to a lawyer in immigration court is the exception.

There's no right to counsel in immigration court, which is part of the executive branch rather than the judiciary.

Often, an immigrant's only shot at legal assistance before they're marched in front of a judge is the pro bono or legal aid clinic that happens to have attorneys at that courthouse.

Those clinics have such limited resources that they try to select only the cases they think have the best shot of winning -- which can be extremely difficult to ascertain in a 15-minute interview.

But advocates and local governments are trying to make cases like Siagha's the rule, not the exception.

Soon, every eligible immigrant who gets detained in one of a dozen cities -- including New York, Chicago, Oakland, California, and Atlanta -- will have access to a lawyer to help fight their immigration court case. 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/9/16623906/immigration-court-lawyer

How to Hire Fake Friends and Family

Money may not be able to buy love, but here in Japan, it can certainly buy the appearance of love -- and appearance, as the dapper Ishii Yuichi insists, is everything.

As a man whose business involves becoming other people, Yuichi would know.

The handsome and charming 36-year-old is on call to be your best friend, your husband, your father, or even a mourner at your funeral. His 8-year-old company, Family Romance, provides professional actors to fill any role in the personal lives of clients.

With a burgeoning staff of 800 or so actors, ranging from infants to the elderly, the organization prides itself on being able to provide a surrogate for almost any conceivable situation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/paying-for-fake-friends-and-family/545060/

REASON.COM: Is Silicon Valley Building Infrastructure for a Police State?

Zach Weissmueller, Reason: Silicon Valley firms are building surveillance and profiling tools to help government agents make sense of the massive amount of information available on social media and in publicly accessible data sets.

Are they using cutting-edge technologies to keep Americans safe, or laying the groundwork for a police state?

Edward Hasbrouck of the nonprofit Identity Project says this technology enables the government to violate civil liberties without necessary checks on its power. He compares it to the Berlin Wall.

"By building checkpoints -- by building the control mechanisms," Hasbrouck says, "we're already putting into place the infrastructure for those who will abuse them in the future."

http://reason.com/blog/2017/11/10/is-silicon-valley-building-the-infrastru

FOCUS ON LORRAINE LOPEZ; Internet Radio Spokesperson Wants To 'Break Bread And Smash Stigma' Of Being HIV Positive

YONKERS GAL"S HIV ACTIVISM: You Don't Have To Be Afraid Of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

CUP CAKE CUTIE BOUTIQUE: At 8 S 6th Avenue In Mt Vernon Lorraine Lopez Is Willing To Sweetly Talk About AIDS Prevention To Whoever Will Listen

SPREADING THE WORD: #LorraineLopez implored people to take precautions against HIV. #LorraineLopez say,''In my family, we didn't listen" 

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED: Our Towns; AIDS In The Backyard, Heads In The Sand 

....When the county health commissioner, suggested a needle exchange program to combat the spread of the virus by drug users, he met a resounding silence from Yonkers officials. This, in a city with 30 percent of the county's 3,457 AIDS cases.

And when Westchester's largest AIDS service provider, wanted to open offices and a walk-in center in downtown Yonkers, he said, he was given the runaround and gave up.....

.....Lorraine Lopez, a special assistant to Mayor John Spencer and a former City Council member, said she asked the local AIDS advisory group to brief the Council during her tenure, but most members, representing districts outside southwest Yonkers, seemed unmoved.

''They gave them the courtesy, but they didn't do anything,'' Lorraine Lopez said. ''There was almost a sense that this doesn't happen in my backyard. But it does.''

If some officials look the other way, so do some people at risk. At a youth rally for World AIDS Day on Monday, Loraine Lopez implored the audience to take precautions. ''In my family, we didn't listen,'' she said......

....It would be unfair to say Yonkers shrugs off its AIDS burden. There are medical and housing programs for infected people, some subsidized by the city, as well as educational programs.

But there is a sense here, as elsewhere, that the crisis has passed since drugs made a fatal illness merely chronic, even as the disease becomes more concentrated among women, minority residents and intravenous drug users.

''We're starting all over again,'' said Charles G. Lief, president of the Greyston Foundation, which treats AIDS patients here, ''but the country is kind of exhausted with it.''

Perhaps that explains why Yonkers seems to be trying to keep #AIDS in its place.

Asked about the ban on social service agencies in the re-emerging downtown, #IanKipp, who runs the downtown business improvement district, said, ''Our experience has been that these uses are detrimental for redevelopment.'.... 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/nyregion/our-towns-aids-in-backyard-heads-in-sand.html