Cybercrime 3.0: stealing whole houses

[doctorow]

[Read the post]

[Papasan]

"If you’re thinking about getting into a life of crime, you should definitely become an identity thief and steal houses. It has never been easier, and it will get easier still, every day, for the foreseeable future.’

Yikes, that’s heart warming.

[anon41977465]

thanks for the career advice!

[Hutz]

@doctorow

The widespread conversion of shelter from a human right to an asset class that the dwindling middle-class relies upon as their sole hope of dignity in old age eases the elimination of tenants rights – rent controls, limits on evictions – driving up the value of the asset, and the precarity of the necessity.

Oh there you go, bringing class into it again…

Seriously though, housing/property is not a human right. We are not born with an intangible home that we need to protect from government encroachment. Life, liberty, freedom of thought and expression. These are human rights. Food, shelter, clothing, health care - these are needs. A just and caring society tries to ensure everyone has these things. But I am not born with the right to have the doctor see me now.

[Jyj]

Most services you authenticate to want to use a “security question” for password recovery. These security questions – date of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc – are matters of public record and things you can’t change when they breach.

If you were smart you would make up an answer to ‘where were you born’ ‘mother’s maiden name’. I do and sleep better knowing that you can’t look up the answers to those questions. Lazy people get taken advantage of, not really a nice thing, but not all of RL is nice

[doctorow]

Works great until you get your answer back in a multiple choice dialogue.

[SteampunkBanana]

Yeah, but why do you think you have to tell the truth then? Records might indicate my first car was red, but I wanted it to be purple so that’s what I put.

[anon68510181]

You would like the slogan carved into the Harvard School of Public Health. It’s something like “access to the best health care is a fundamental human right.”

[Jyj]

Damn the inventor of multiple guess tests to the pits of hell. That is one invention and it’s hellspawn that the world can do without.

[FogwomanGrey]

Note also that most states continue the old time practice of making the information of state licensed individuals public record. Which means accessible via the internet today, often in a searchable database open to anyone with an internet connection. This generally includes your full name, mailing address and status of your license.
Licenses like nursing, business, contractor, aesthetician, real estate, medical, etc.
As a nurse, I also see many state nursing boards being pretty indiscriminately free with our information, with no real idea that security of our data should be an issue.

[cheem]

What are they going to return as multiple choice answers? Seems like an especially problematic thing for mother’s maiden name type questions or city you were born in…

[cahutchins]

Can BoingBoing do something about these obnoxious RC/drone advertisements that are showing up on every BB page?

Auto-play video that starts off at full volume is just awful. I have BB white-listed on my ad blocker, but these are making my start to reconsider.

[GilbertWham]

It is tempting, yes.

[GilbertWham]

Hard to have the first three living in a hole in’t road dying of preventable diseases and/ or malnutrition though.

[kschang777]

With increasing proliferation of “big data”, it’s not just medical history (HIPAA) that needs protection, but our entire lives, both online and off, and needs protection. That, and authentication protocols like Steve Gibson’s SQRL.