Category Archives: Security

Computer user creates giant budget shortfall in Indiana

The AP reports that an Indiana IT department has been involved in some curious data integrity issues:

A house erroneously valued at $400 million is being blamed for budget shortfalls and possible layoffs in municipalities and school districts in northwest Indiana. […] Lippens said the user probably tried to access a real estate record display by pressing R-E-D, but accidentally typed R-E-R, which brought up an assessment program written in 1995. The program is no longer in use, and technology officials did not know it could be accessed.

Humans apparently thought the jump from $1,500 in property taxes to $8 million was a mistake, but the computer accepted it…was the input malicious, mischevious, or was it even a user?

I also wonder if this could be a case where people knew the money was not theirs but they said nothing in the hope that somehow they could keep the windfall?

Death by Insurance

Bruce Schneier has posted a restaurant guide to San Jose, which reveals his particular taste in food as well as humor. I found it enjoyable and informative and noted that he, and his wife Karen, hate the idea of corporate food because corporations are not legally bound to serve the interests of the consumer:

Look up the 1919 court decision Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.; it’s easy to find with
Google. That case still stands, and it upholds the fundamental legal principle that a corporation must put the interests of its shareholders above all other interests; and that it has no legal authority to serve any other interests, customers included. A corporation can only serve its customers’ interests inasmuch as it also serves its shareholders’ interests. Otherwise, as in Dodge v. Ford, the shareholders can sue.

The Super Size Me documentary showed the dangers of being an uninformed consumer, and how the giant food corporations can get an upper hand on average people by abusing their trust. Some suggest that putting regulations on these corporations will have a chilling effect on the market, but the opposite is generally true. The problem is that the market of “nutrition” slides into a market for “marketing”, which means those who actually try to deliver nutritous meals are sidelined by the deceptive and more profitable substitutes. “Honey, are we having snake-oil for dinner again tonight? It’s my favorite!”

In related news, I just read about the tragic story of a man who paid money into a health-insurance company only to find out that they had no intention of helping him afford health-care treatment. If you think markets do not need regulation, try to figure this one out.

When [KMBC’s] Flink talked to Tracy Pierce, his cancer was attacking his body. Despite being fully insured, every treatment his doctors sought for him was denied by his insurance provider. First-Health Coventry deemed the treatments were either not a medical necessity or experimental.

“I don’t know what else to do but just wait,” Tracy Pierce said last May.

As he waited, his doctors appealed again and again, including a 27-page appeal spelling out that Tracy Pierce would die without care. Coventry dismissed each request.

“It’s purely economical. You never see an insurance company try to block an inexpensive test,” said William Soper.

Soper leads a group of doctors who filed a lawsuit last year against insurance providers. This week, Soper went to Jefferson City to lobby legislators for change.

“And you know, it’s not going to get better anytime soon. It’s going to get worse,” said Myra Christopher, who is the president and chief executive officer of the Center for Practical Bioethics.

It is hard to read this type of news and then review the Coventry Health Care, Inc. website, which boasts how shareholders are richly rewarded by sound financial management.

Coventry Health Care, Inc. (NYSE:CVH) today reported operating results for the quarter ended December 31, 2005. Operating revenues totaled $1.72 billion for the quarter, a 24.2% increase over the fourth quarter of 2004.

Their mission statement seems plausable for a health-care provider:

To be the recognized leader in providing quality, accessible, and affordable health care benefits and services that maintain and improve the quality of life of all our members and the communities we serve.

But the only news that this corporation reports seems to be related to pleasing their shareholders:

Barron’s has repeatedly made note of Coventry’s focus on keeping costs down, indicating that Coventry shared in common with 2005’s other top 5 finishers “a tightfisted approach to overhead� and an “innovative use of information technology.�
[…]
Among all companies named to Forbes’ list in the category of Health Care Equipment & Services, Coventry was recognized in the 2005 edition as having had the highest 5-yr annualized total return, a distinction the company repeated in the 2006 edition.
[…]
Among all Fortune 500 companies, Coventry was also cited in the 2005 edition as having had the third highest total return to shareholders over the prior five-year period.
[…]
The Wall Street Journal again named Coventry to its list, and cited it as having the seventh highest five-year returns among all companies. As in the 2004 edition, Coventry again ranked #1 among all health plans nationally based on five-year performance.

Take a look yourself, ALL the news items they cite are related to shareholder returns. Not a single news item related to their mission statement!! Any chance they would post a news page where they actually say something like “we helped someone stay healthy today” or give some testimonials? I couldn’t find one. In light of the news they favor, maybe they should change their mission statement to “we keep overhead down and give great returns to shareholders”.

This of course begs the obvious question what is the antidote to the powerful incentives that make companies deny treatment in order to achieve financial accolades? Who can answer? Could it be the new Coventry CEO (ex-CFO), Dale B. Wolf who reported a cool $4,364,807 income for 2005, and $1,153,490 in exercised stock options (and $16,733,300 in vested, $2,632,500 in non-vested options)? Not bad for a company that was reported in 2005 to have a $5.3 billion revenue with $337.12 million net and $3.72 earnings per share.

Ouch. Tracy Pierce died while Coventry reported a $337 million net. Something tells me if you take this case to the feds right now, they might have a hard time understanding the problem. Even though the public pays for an ambulance that the AP says Vice President Cheney always has on call, I suspect that Bush and Cheney never actually bother with health-care insurance or consumer-grade care because they simply do not trust the system to take proper care of them.

We are told a corporation in America is legally a person (as in corporeal) and yet how many of us really know the person that we entrust with our lives or health? What do you do when you get cancer and the person you paid in advance to take care of you says “sorry, I don’t think you’re worth the time/expense”? And that is not even to touch upon the insurance premiums that are forcing the cost of care to skyrocket. The health-care crisis is solidly upon America, and detailed insider information (about corporations) is power.

One final thought: I always see innocent kids drinking “Rockstar” and I wonder if they know or care who is behind the label. Does it matter? Based on the above, I would hope most people might say yes. We need information to make the market work, and yet most people find information gathering expensive and clumsy. Journalists used to make a living out of delivering quality information, but even that market has eroded in terms of quality to the point where individual contributors and boutique outfits (those less beholden to the shareholder) are a more reliable source of data.

Anyway, back to Rockstar, Russell Goldencloud Weiner is the founder and CEO of the company, which is based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It turns out he is the son of Michael Weiner, ala the extremist right-wing talk-show host Michael Savage. You might have heard of Savage as the guy who said on air that the US should murder millions of Arabs, or the guy who claims that “radical homosexuals” and “radical Islamists” are “one and the same, they’re all terrorists”. Maybe you heard about the time when he said Clinton would recover from heart surgery only because “hell was full”. And then there’s the time he explained to his listeners “When you hear ‘human rights,’ think gays. […]think only one thing: someone who wants to rape your son”.

So, speaking of sons, is there a political connection between the younger Weiner and the Savage? Sure enough, Salon reports that they are both in the business together:

Savage’s son, Russ Weiner, kicked off the show. With his spiky, dyed-orange hair and calculated scruffiness, he was reminiscent of Dr. Evil’s son Scott from the Austin Powers movies. The resemblance was confirmed when Weiner proclaimed, “I’m proud to be the son of Savage!” The 30-something Weiner is the founder of RockStar, an energy drink that he developed with his dad, drawing on Savage’s previous career as a Marin County herbalist and ethnobotanist named Michael Weiner. RockStar’s herbal liver-cleansing formula is supposed to enable drinkers to “party like a rock star,” which presumably means drinking and doping. Generous free samples had been passed out to the crowd on the way in. It lived up to its hype: The antifreeze-colored, cough-syrup-flavored beverage can only be enjoyed if you’re taking drugs.

But while Weiner has cashed in on other people’s bad behavior, he made it clear that he’s a family-values kind of guy.

Right. Drink up everybody. Here’s to healthy information.

Pirate Party

This news has been slowly percolating through the Internet:

The Pirate Party aims to take up the roll of maintaining a balance of power after the 2006 election. There are between 800,000 and 1,100,000 active file swappers in Sweden, and they are all tired of being called criminals. We need to have 225 000 of them with us to cross the four percent threshold and land in the roll of power balance.

To get one fourth of a criminalized and angry mob with us is far from unachievable. It is that which we shall achieve in the coming nine months.

Democracy in action, or should I say “populism” of the progressives. The question is whether a common voice can really survive without investor capital and a marketing department. If this goes anywhere near as far as linux, then ten years from now we might just have to say “amazing that parties that represent normal dedicated people manage to compete with other parties that have strong corporate backers”.

The goal is to create a political one-issue party centered around the abolishment of copyright as we know it along with most IP laws in Sweden by getting into the parliament in this year’s elections.

Secondary, but equally important goals are to strengthen personal integrity by rejecting the EU “eavesdropping” directive and expand the “postal secret act” to include all forms of communication, regardless of carrier technology.

Someone had to point out, of course, that the Pirate Party webserver was running a licensed copy of Windows 2003.

Burglar Steals Squad Car

Funny. Reuters reports today that a burglar in Germany, who had just been booked at the Eschwege station, grabbed the keys to a squad car during his interrogation and drove away.

Apparently the police noticed him leaving in the car but the burglar still tried to escape chase. Insult to injury or just a chance to get away?

To put this in perspective, Reuters also reported today that Vice President Cheney directly authorized his aide to “use classified material to discredit a critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq war effort”. Cheney was engaged “in an effort to counteract diplomat Joe Wilson’s charge that the Bush administration twisted intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons to justify the 2003 invasion.”

Wilson charged the Bush administration with manipulation of the truth. Rather than prove themselves innocent of manipulation, the Bush administration dug in further and did it again. The question now is who is authorized to chase them down and take the keys away before more innocent people get hurt?