Saturday, June 10, 2006

Time to kill Spam and Identity Theft

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The current social security numbering system sucks. We need a much larger supply of numbers, so that you can change yours as easily as you can change a PIN. As soon as you leave a company, drop a bank account, etc, you should be able to go to a new number. The Feds need a master database of alias's for you, one which will continue to recognize you for record keeping purposes, so that a company or bank account can still do any financial reporting, but one where any accounts opened under your "old" number after the date you've retired it, would immediately show up as bogus the first time the bank or employer getting that "old" number sees it and tries using it at the state for federal level. yes, it is national id forever, but that's better than the current cost of identity theft.

Well SPAMMERS, I've had to retire my email of eight years, because the ratio of good to bad was getting past one good email for every 50 bad ones. Net result, I have a ton of new email addies, most of them custom to one institution or person. In addition, I've added in "2006" to most of the names, a subtitle hint that in 2007 the mail name will no longer be valid. By setting my email to sort by the name the mail is addressed to, I get all my mail from a particular person in one box.

Other stuff which is from official looking Ebay or whatever goes straight to the junk filter, where I verify it as bad. Of course I shouldn't be getting any other stuff, and when I do, I look to see which email addy has been compromised. I change the addy and relay the change to the appropriate sender, and I am done. bye bye SPAM.

This is inconvenient, but it works for me. Downloading email now takes seconds, instead to minutes. The time saved more than justifies the time spent updating addies. Business cards are easy to reprint, and lasting relationships get custom addies as soon as they are needed.

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