I’ve written about the troubles at Birther Report that was acting as a vector for malware from one of its advertisers. Google Safe Sites identified the malware, and visitors using the Firefox browser were warned about the infection.
Orly Taitz has been noted for malware on her site in the past, but I haven’t heard of any infections through her site lately. What I have seen is that if you stay idle on her site for a while, something may pop up, including a fake message that your browser needs updating. Today, while researching another article, I was on her site and a window popped up with a buxom Asian girl pictured and the title, “Date Chinese Women.” That’s definitely on the lower tier of advertising. Even lower is this that appeared a little later:
What happened was that the Taitz site tried to open the page in Firefox, but it was blocked as a phishing site, probably from a Google service. While not exactly malware, it is an example of Orly using dodgy sources for her advertising, and her total disregard for the user experience her site provides.
Orly had previously reported that her site was unreachable with the Google Chrome browser, but I didn’t have any problems when I tested this today.
Two sites consistently crash Chrome on my iPad. One is Taitz’s blog and the other is Birther Report.
Maybe Orly can buy space on the new BirtherReport server…..
http://www.birtherreport.com/2014/02/update-new-high-end-server-acquired.html
I think a pool on how long the new “Dell PowerEdge server with a three-year warranty” lasts before it goes up in smoke is in order.
Depends upon how up-to-date they keep their irony meter protection.
I guess if Orly sees this, she will ask her flying monkeys to report the White House LFBC PDF page as a “web forgery”. 😉
What a waste of money and overreaction to a self inflicted wound by BR. The site reliability will probably suffer big time also. Wait until the first time they screw up the database.
Do you think those two new officials that were assigned and then not assigned to the Zullo/Arpaio case might have something to do with BR’s site going down? They did seem to coincide. But, I don’t understand why that would prompt a movement from one server to another. I’m not sure about Taitz’s because I don’t really pay much attention to it. I know that SS numbers get recycled and don’t find this too unusual and she seems to have nothing new. Having said that, I do believe she is attempting to uncover the truth about the mailman and that the Powers that be are deliberately stalling. She won’t get that come H*ll or Highwater. Mark my words.
http://WWW.IFORGEDOBAMASBIRTHCERTIFICATES.COM
I think they’re in for lots of surprises. It’s not clear from the message I linked to just exactly what they’re going to do with the server: Is it going in a real, secure facility or is it going behind *FALCON*’s couch where the fans can clog up with Fritos dust?
What I got from Tansey’s remarks is that they are going to buy a server, configure it, and then find a colocation company to host it. They will probably get a fat pipe and a good firewall that way. They may come out OK and maybe not. I don’t think the BR guy is competent to make an informed choice. We’ll see.
I believe the sun (and moon) rose and set that day as well. Curious, isn’t it?
You know wrong: Social Security numbers are not recycled.
I agree: They have no idea what they’re getting into.
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
Are they howling conspiracy yet … first BR, now Taitz? The Obots must be feeling the pressure, why else would they resort to such tactics, right?
It sure is a conspiracy. Google is a collection of individuals pursuing common purposes. In this case, those nefarious geeks are trying to perform due diligence, and operate as a responsible provider of internet services. Those dirty so-and-so’s!
Hmmm….I checked your info and it’s correct. I took an accounting course and could’ve sworn they said they’re recycled after 120 yrs or so. Well, then shouldn’t this be a slam-dunk for Orly? Oh, wait…I get the con. You can’t force a SS out of Washington but a knowledgedable fake identity maker (note I’m not saying “forger”) would be forced to regurgitate and old SS number. Interesting. Look to Nancy Pelosi or Joseph P DAlessandro for that one.
Any excuse to post this 😉
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUW_8cWG7YA
Hmm. An accounting class? You mean that adding and subtracting stuff?
No bells went off for you? “120 years or so” would be 2056 since the first one was issued in 1936.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/firstcard.html
Perhaps, I should add that I failed said accounting class, twice along with two other business courses. I am not a numbers person. (UF/Gainesville). Feel better?
Are you sure you’re not a performance artist? You just gave us great comedy with your bringing up of accounting and then mention of said failure.
I’m sticking with my first comments which was that somewhere down the line I was given the impression that SS # are recycled. If it’s not correct, it’s not correct.
It’s not correct.
Anyone play that new phone game yet? Its called “Flappy Taitz”, you can’t win, and it costs money to fix your mistakes, but you can spam your facebook friends to send you money to cover the in app purchases.
Frankly, I think I’ll stick with Dead Effect.
Some years ago, when I was working for a bank, I took a brief training that included facts about social security #s. I distinctly remember that the course materials did say that social security numbers did get recycled. So more recently, I was surprised to hear that the SSA says otherwise.
Excuse me for screaming.
ORLY TAITZ HAS A TOTALLY CRAPPY WEB SITE ❗
Thanks for your indulgence.
It’s not correct. But more interesting why did you not check it yourself years ago?
Not only is it not correct, but by the time the 120 years rolls around the SSN will probably have been replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
For the sake of discussion let’s assume the “years ago” you refer to was 20. That means they had only been issuing numbers for about 60 years.
Did it not occur to you that duplicate numbers in that time frame might cause just a few problems?
It’s your blog, Doc. Scream all you want.
Does Taitz really think she can get away with hosting a forgery on the web? 😉
We’ve all noted the atrociousness of birther sites. And it has been noted that the birfers aren’t providing much entertainment. I think it calls for an Ugly Contest! Which birther site is the ugliest / least reliable / least functional / worst written / least user-friendly?
Could be the saddest parallel of the Olympics ever.
What occurred to me or did not occur to me, at the time, or now, is irrelevant to what I was saying. I merely stated the fact that once upon a time there were educational materials disseminated claiming that the #s could be reused, and warning bank employees of that possibility. So it is not surprising to find people having that belief. Since you want to be smart about it, “just a few problems” were exactly what motivated the bank to produce the educational materials for employees whose jobs involved establishing identity by various means.
Naively one might assume that that numbers were available to account for 999-99-9999 accounts. So, without thinking deeply about it, you might assume that there were almost a billion numbers, which would be 3 times enough to cover the living population. However, a fact presented in the course, was that not all the numerical sequences were valid as SSNs. So there would be somewhat fewer numbers available than would completely cover 3 generations. A couple of decades later, in 2011 some more sequences were opened up, increasing the count of valid #s.
Social Security has never reissued numbers because there was no need to. Here is the current information regarding all that:
Q19: How many Social Security numbers have been issued since the program started?
A: Social Security numbers were first issued in November 1936. To date, 453.7 million different numbers have been issued.
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
You were mistaken on this as well as everything else you’ve said.
Birfers are so stupid, and delusional birfers like this Nancy Owens woman are even more stupid. Even when shown information in black and white, they still say “if,” LOL!!
And that is ‘several generations into the future’!!!
I suspect that you are remembering that material incorrectly.
There were indeed many (30? or so maybe) people who mistook the sample SS Card that wallet manufacturers used to put into their wallets as ‘their’ number and reported against it. This is not the SS reusing numbers, but many individuals using the same wrong number.
This caused a lot of confusion at the time, but has been cleaned up long ago. Bank managers and others would have been warned about this problem and the problem of accepting a SS card as a form of ID, which it is NOT and never has been.
Why would Nancy be constrained by facts?
Failure is her middle name. Ignorance her profession
Nice to see Nelson and Tansey play right into our hands.
You guys are funny, switcherooing their servers with the old “Google took down the blog” trick.
I am continually amazed at the brilliance that is shown by the anti-birthers.
It’s like fine art.
But will they provide accomodation for FALCON to guard it with his TWO MIGHTY GUNS?
Back in the 80’s, my boss had it in his head that they were going to run out of social-security numbers and insisted that our software have a 10-digit data field for it (and its descendents still do today). It turned out for the better because some customers used prefixes to make up fake SSNs for people that didn’t have one), making a 10-digit number. Some years later, it became a no-no to use SSN as primary identifier, or to require someone to give a number to get health treatment.
The rule about using SSNs as health care identifiers in private insurance changed because of identity theft. Nevertheless, Medicare still uses SSN numbers plus a letter for identification.
Unless you’re on Medicare. In which case it’s right there on the front of your ID card with the following instructions on the back:
1 – Carry your card with you when you are away from home.
It’s easier for it to get lost or stolen that way!
It is said that the greatest failure of humanity is the failure to understand the exponential function, or in this case, a simple rate problem. I do not regard the year 2056 as being several generations away, since I intend to be alive then.
So 5 and one-half million were issued some recent year. If the rate holds perfectly steady, the remaining numbers will be exhausted well before the end of this century. But that assumes zero population growth.
In the last century the population increased from 75 to nearly 300 million. If any thing close to the traditional rate takes place, well over half a billion will be added in this century.
I suspect the reason Dr. C’s Boss might have been alarmed was partly due to the fact that only certain segment sequences were in use at the time, reducing the actually usable count to a few hundred million. From time to time, more sequences have been opened up, so they now assume they can get nearly a billion numbers without changing the format. Still, unless there is depopulation, or growth well below present rates, it will be necessary to reuse or add digits during the lifetime of some people being born today.
Back when I was going to College, your student ID was your SSN. I hope that’s not the same now.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
“Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
“Q18: Is there any significance to the numbers assigned in the Social Security Number?
A: Yes. The first three digits are assigned by the geographical region in which the person was residing at the time he/she obtained a number. Generally, numbers were assigned beginning in the northeast and moving westward. So people on the east coast have the lowest numbers and those on the west coast have the highest numbers. The remaining six digits in the number are more or less randomly assigned and were organized to facilitate the early manual bookkeeping operations associated with the creation of Social Security in the 1930s.
——————————————————————————–
Now those are the words of SSA, not anyone elses.
OOPs , sorry about that, I posted before reading the whole thread, mea culpa!
A ‘generation’ is generally considered to be about 20 years or so. 2056 is about 2 generations away. The numbers are loose enough that the quantifier ‘several’ fits.
One of our other great failures is to understand that words mean things….as Rush Limbaugh would say.
There’s lots of disagreement about how long a generation is – 20- up to 30-years. 2056 is, obviously, 42 years hence so by most definitions that would count for “several generations” of time.
And, of course, you are absolutely correct when you say “Still, unless there is depopulation, or growth well below present rates, it will be necessary to reuse or add digits during the lifetime of some people being born today.”
I doubt they will ever reuse numbers. I’m not going to lose any sleep worrying about it……but…..you never know.
But that wouldn’t work unless you also “regurgitate” the name. You can’t do identify theft with just a SSN, because if withholding payments or income tax returns show a mismatch on name and SSN, it immediately raises a red flag.
It is not at least where my children went to college.
When my daughter was in high school she taught herself how to read bar code. She figured out that the bar code on their ID badges was their social security number. She told one of her teachers that she bet that she could guess their social security number. The teacher was shocked when she rattled it off. Daughter had some explaining to do.
yeah, well, whatever. I read and post on both Obot sites and Birther sites. All I said, originally, was that I understood why some people thought that SS #s were recycled, because I had heard that rumor or fact myself from a “reputable” source once upon a time. Obviously there is a great deal of enjoyment to be obtained by telling somebody that they are stupid or ignorant or insane to believe that. Whether I believed that or not, then or now, is irrelevant. Orly Taitz believes they are NOT recycled. That belief is central to the Birther theory. Me, I don’t know. If I believed everything on the internet from dot gov sites then there would be no doubt. You guys are exactly like the Birthers, except you favor the Blue Team over the Red Team. Or maybe I got it wrong. You favor the Red Team over the Blue Team? In the end, it is just the battle to win over the eleven year old mind.
Simplest solution would be to add a leading digit. Current series is 0xxxyyzzzz; next one is 1xxxyyzzzz and is good for another 50 years or so.
They have almost 50 years to make the change in everybody’s software. Most big businesses run SAP HR or Oracle HR, it wouldn’t take more than 3 upgrade cycles to ‘solve’ it for those folks. 50 years is an eternity for software.
Me too. Sort of. (early 70’s)
My SS card said that it was not to be used for ID purposes, so I refused to let my school use it. No problem, they just generated an ID number and had no problem with my recalcitrance.
2009 had less births than 1957 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html).
If you take just the 2009 birth rate, about 400 million people will be born in the US in the 21st century. That’s quite a far cry from your 500 million “added”, especially since you have to subtract those who die. (I agree immigration is another issue, but there’s no indication those numbers will rise much, either.)
If you truly believe that, then you aren’t paying attention.
Is Warren Buffett exactly like Donald Trump?
Is Wesley Clark exactly like Terry Lakin?
Is Dr. Conspiracy exactly like *FALCON*?
Is debunking BS exactly the same as disseminating it?
I do agree with you that it’s wrong to take pleasure in telling someone they are stupid, or crazy, or ignorant. But when that someone is being a bigoted seditionist, and spreading lies about the president, I don’t blame an anti-birther for delivering the medicine of bitter truth without consideration for bedside manner or a spoonful of sugar.
You’re missing the point. The difference is that birthers continue to believe what they want to believe even after they are provided with proof that they are wrong. At that point they deserve to be mocked.
There have been reports of the same Social Security Number being issued to two people as the result of a clerical error, but those cases are miniscule in number and are rectified as soon as the problem is discovered. Apart from the fact that the Social Security Administration denies that numbers are ever recycled, common sense tells us that recycling numbers would render the Social Security Death Index useless and it would create havoc for the IRS, not to mention credit bureaus.
“helen” … Thanks for the apology for the double-post. It’s the most intellectually honest move and most thoughtful post I have ever seen from you here …. or elsewhere 😉