[This Thursday re-run is from July 9, 2009.]
The latest hot topic on the identity theft front is a paper published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by two professors at Carnegie Mellon on how easy it is to guess a person’s social security number.
That day Ars Technica reported on it. Also, the authors of the paper started a blog on it. The AP picked it up Tuesday. CrunchGear blogged on it then too. And Wednesday brought posts from Wise Bread and Wallet Pop.
This is a great story. It combines several of my favorite themes. There’s the ever amusing hysteria over identity theft, which apparently renders a person incapable of rational thought and perspective. There are the unintended consequences of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time government policies. And there is the recurring phenomenon of folks who report and comment on academic papers without reading and/or understanding them.
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From CreditCards.com comes the news that U.S. credit card agreements are unreadable to 4 out of 5 adults. It is not that they are written in invisible ink, or tiny print, or even that they are hidden away in the deep recesses of some
web site. The agreements are printed in easy to see black and white and mailed to the card holder’s house.
Are they in Latin? Do they involve obscure legal terms? Perhaps they are poorly translated from some foreign tongue?
No, they are unreadable to 4 in 5 Americans because those sneaky credit card companies have written them in standard English, but at a 12th grade level. Bastards.
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Some people think that they are two people. They believe that they suffer from a form of split personality, two individuals with differing tastes and 
inclinations that awkwardly share the same body and, more to the point, the same bank account.
It is an interesting, but which I mean amusing, theory. It is not that I do not think that there really are folks, even millions of them, who have mental health issues such as bipolar disorder, which could be trivialized as two versions of the same person sharing one body. Others have substance abuse problems that cause an irresistible need to ingest certain chemicals.
But the people I am thinking of do not have such problems. They have nothing more profound than an inability to save as much of their income as they think they ought to. This they ascribe to mental illness.
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Today I am going to explain something complicated, so pay attention. Particularly if you write for the Wall Street Journal. My topic has to do with the
exotic topic of homeownership.
Many homeowners owe money on a special type of loan collateralized by the house, called a mortgage. Sometimes, they “refinance” these mortgages, often to take advantage of a lower interest rate. Generally, that is no more complicated than paying off lender A with money borrowed from lender B.
However, and here is where it gets really confusing, sometimes the money from lender B is not the exact same amount owed to lender A. If more money comes from lender B, then the refinancing is termed “cash-out.” It is called that because the borrower actually leaves the closing with more cash than they had previously.
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How old am I? So old that when someone says Facebook I still think of what was colloquially called The Facebook, the hard-bound directory of Harvard’s incoming class, so vital in laying the groundwork for your future cabal to control the world. The website was named after it. I find myself now wondering a) does Harvard still print it and b) if so, what do the kids call it now?
Some time ago, I made the decision to rise above such faddish things and not join. What’s the point of having a computer and going on-line if you are just going to use it to interact with other people? If I wanted to do that, I could do it in real life.
But I think I may have miscalculated. I had no idea just how pervasive Facebook would become. Two days ago, Facebook announced it had 500 million active users. That is a number so large it is difficult to put it in context. The planet contains, allegedly, 1.8 billion internet users, so Facebook has now roped in 28% of them. At the current rate of growth, 10% a month, they should have everybody around September 2011.
I plan to sign up for an account then. Because I am the last person on Earth who would join Facebook.
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That day Ars Technica reported on it. Also, the authors of the paper started a blog on it. The AP picked it up Tuesday. CrunchGear blogged on it then too. And Wednesday brought posts from Wise Bread and Wallet Pop.
Uncategorized | Frank Curmudgeon | 
July 29, 2010 11:59 am | 
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