Facebook sells stake in business - BBC.co.uk

Facebook has sold a 1.96% stake for $200m (£126m) to a Russian internet firm, a move that values the social networking website at $10bn. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said he had been impressed by Digital Sky Technology's (DST) "impressive growth and financial achievements".

I understand the needs of capitalization, but this move is a foolhardy one on the part of a significant presence in the social-internet scene. Along with China, Russia and other Eastern-bloc countries are a primary source of SPAM, Malware and *targeted* data-mining attacks against western (read: U.S.) citizens and business interests. Where better to obtain e-mails and inside target info than the world's largest social network? And how better than to buy one's way in?

I would love to be wrong, but I'm going on the record here and now and forecast a significant uptick in Russian-originated SPAM and spear-phishing within the next 18-24 months, predicated primarily upon this imprudent transaction. Any previous advice to be vigilant about confidential information in public profiles is to be redoubled.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

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Protections Set for Antiabortion Health Workers - washingtonpost.com

The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.

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Alright, somebody gimme a frakkin' break! (Yeah, Yeah. I'm a BSG fan...)

One of the most fundamental rights we have as free citizens is the right to choose where we work, and what kind of work we choose to do. Naturally, this line of thought might lead us to understand that such matters are not just limited to 'health care'.

So, this would seem to lead most reasonable people (there's that term again) inexorably (cough, cough) towards the perspective that while an individual may indeed choose *what work* they wish to perform as their life's trade and *where* they wish to perform that trade, these freedoms *logically* extend also to those individuals (and businesses as 'members' of the community) who are employers. Employers alone decide what services they will or will not provide, and that the employee is *not* inherently privileged to make that decision after they've accepted employment with any given institution or organization.

Forgive the analogy, but it is unlikely that a vegan employee could simply refuse to serve the burger that every customer has a reasonable right to expect at McDonald's because it offends their moral or religious values. If a care facility offers particular procedures, then EVERY employee hired should be obliged to deliver those services as a reasonable condition of employment in that organization.

Mind you, this perspective still does not enable an employer to discriminate in hiring based upon those values of the potential employee except to the extent that those values would render the applicant unlikely to perform the duties of the job; but any legislation addressing this issue should insure that businesses retain the right to require standards of performance standards predicated upon the needs of the business. A business should not have to stop performing a service because it hired someone suddenly unwilling to perform. The onus should be upon the employee to understand the employer's expectations and their ability to meet them before undertaking employment. Or quit.

Last time I checked, an individual's religious and moral freedoms didn't extend to enabling them with control over their employer's right to determine the services they will provide as a business. If a worker's values are inconsistent with any given business' expressed plan, their freedoms should simply extend to their right to choose to work elsewhere.

So, if the government wants to 'protect' the rights of the individual, let them also make sure they don't trample the rights of employers to determine the scope of their business, and their right to meet the needs of their chosen customers. Pulling funding legislatively like this is religious and moral extortion by the government, based upon the values of a questionable majority of control, and is grossly ill advised.

The regulation, which would cost more than $44 million to implement, was aimed at enforcing several federal laws that have been on the books since the 1970s and were aimed primarily at protecting doctors and nurses who did not want to perform abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, (Health and Human Services Secretary) Leavitt said.

Time to watch both Obama and McCain on this one. And prompt your own legislator to amend this piece of legislation accordingly.

Low tech vs. High Tech - Checkmate!

For those who don't know, I'm a Network/Security Engineer by trade. I look for ways to make life difficult for those who might seek to exploit weaknesses in systems I occasionally work upon. This is not limited to data systems, but facilities in general.

Now, many might presume that means that I am more often than not, inclined to use a $5-10k (Cisco) hammer to drive five cent nails, but that is not always the case. In truth, $5k Cisco hammers and the systems they support/protect are quite easily defeated by a $3 kimchi flash drive these days (which is why PHYSICAL security is just as important as digital security). Still, never has this point been made more crystal clear than in the the photo that follows:

Mea culpa!

It seems that a goodly number, but not all, of the links on some of my recent posts (and probably older ones as well) have gone the way of the dodo. It appears that some of the resources I use have decided that they want to charge for access to 'historical' news material.

I had tried to limit posts to extracts and paraphrases, allowing you to go and read stories for yourselves, mostly in an effort to keep posting light. Seems I will have to be more selective in my site references, at least for linking purposes.

Academia Interruptus

Ok, ok... You might have noticed that my last post kind of trailed off into incompleteness. Yeah, I noticed it too.

When I moved the editorial material off my private blog, I was in the process of becoming a blogging idiot. But that was before my senior year at DePaul began, and the fall quarter from hell, replete with five classes and 30 hours of work concurrently.

Sadly, these events converged at a particularly inauspicious time, what with the midterm elections upon us. Our politicians and political allys (and not-so-allied types like North Korea) have provided a veritable cornucopia of fodder for commentary. Hopefully, now that mid-terms have passed, I'll soon be able to find time to return to my usual, observant self.

No, it hasn't been a year since I posted...

(Temporary post) -- The reason for the gap in postings between March of '05 and '06 is that these posts were originally authored on my personal blog, and are in the process of being ported to 'What Next?!'. Your patience is appreciated. -- JMS