Rays of Light: January 2009

Don't trust the government with your money

Financial planners tell us that getting large refunds back on your annual income taxes is a bad idea. The government gets an interest-free loan from you to keep your money during the year. But if that was not bad enough, what if the government decided not to give you your money back? According to this LA Times article, the state of California has decided to deal with its budget crisis by refusing to send out tax refunds. This means that thousands of people who were depending on the money won't be getting it for weeks or months.

If an individual taxpayer were to refuse to pay the tax money he owes, he would face interest and penalties. If he were determined to be grossly negligent, he could face harsh penalties and possibly jail time. But of course, the State of California won't face any of these problems. It might decide to pay a little bit of interest to each of the taxpayers, but it won't face penalties or jail time for what is clearly gross negligence.

Are you ready to borrow $3000?

As if last year's massive bailout bill to the financial industry wasn't enough, Congress is at it again. The House just passed a $810 billion dollar "stimulus" package (translation: pork barrel spending), and the total is expected to climb to $900 billion by the time the Senate is finished with it. And while the financial industry bailout left the taxpayers owning various assets, some of questionable quality, this new stimulus is about spending, and not getting anything in return. To put the size of the package into perspective, the bill means that the US Government will borrow $3000 for every single person within the United States. Per actual taxpayer, the bill will be about $6500 per person.

The United States is massively in debt, and it looks like Congress is ready to add another ten percent for 2009 onto our $10.6 trillion total debt. The US taxpayers will have to pay every dollar of that debt at some point. Perhaps instead of saddling our grandchildren with an impossible tax burden, we could choose to reduce our government's spending.

Bad Internet behavior

Among other things, I am responsible for maintaining my company's computer systems, and this includes monitoring my system logs. Over the past week or so, I have noticed an uptick in the level of bad behavior from various Internet parties. For example, this weekend, someone was attempting a DNS amplification attack against isprime.com (NANOG thread). This type of attack uses small forged requests to a large number of servers, where the responses are much larger and are sent to the victim IP address. The result is that the victim's network is completely flooded with traffic. I had to make some minor changes to my DNS server to silently drop these requests.

The bad behavior has not been restricted to just the blackhat community. There has been an increase in the number of commercial companies that try to stealthily monitor web sites, thinking that they won't be noticed. These companies have automated bots that download entire sites over time. These bots don't obey the standard bot rules (such as honoring robots.txt), and they pretend to be various versions of Internet Explorer. Despite their efforts, they are still easy to detect and watch. The old assumption about anything you post on the Internet can be read by anyone is more true than ever. Even if you delete the material, it is likely that some "cyber intelligence" firm has it archived away.

On Board Air Force One

This evening, I had the opportunity to attend a screening for On Board Air Force One at the National Geographic Headquarters. The members of the Presidential Airlift Group (PAG) were the featured guests at the screening, and Col. Scott Turner, the new senior pilot and group commander, delivered some brief remarks before the show. The retiring senior pilot, Col. Mark Tillman, was unable to attend, having gotten stuck in traffic in Baltimore.

The show provides an overview of what Air Force One is like post-9/11, and it airs on National Geographic on Sunday January 25 at 8pm.

Escaping Inauguration Weekend

This weekend, between one and two million people will descend upon Washington DC to celebrate the inauguration of a new President. Having that many out of town visitors is likely to leave DC and the suburbs in total gridlock. So rather than deal with the hassle, I flew home to Ann Arbor for a four-day weekend. It has been quite enjoyable being home, despite the cold and the snow. While I am here, I have been taking care of errands and hanging out with friends.