Help me deal with a blatant thief and murderer!

Raccoon of Doom

Omaha and I know that it was a raccoon that attacked Dinah, and probably got Lisakit's cat Sugar. This bastard just walked into my yard around 11:15am this morning, sniffing at my basil of all things.

I want him out of my yard. Animal control will come and get him, but they won't provide their own means. Are there good live-animal traps someone can recommend that probably won't snag the cats (or, if it does, it will do so harmlessly) but can get the raccoon just fine?

This guy has to go. The greenbelt behind my house (a common feature in Puget Sound neighborhoods, provides a sound-and-visual barrier between a subdivision and the wider arterials, it's a wide strip of "unimproved" pine forest) (I hate the term "unimproved," there's nothing wrong with a pine forest) is probably big enough to support a few of these, but I will not have this one threatening my family.

Doing business: Things Known and Unknown

Last night, I had a lovely time at a geek event, but afterward I had a conversation with one of the participants, and we had an interesting exchange of knowledge about being men of small business.

I learned two things that surprised me. The first was that he did not know what an encumbrance was. In accounting, an encumbrance is a forward-looking entry in your ledger indicating money that you are obliged, with contingency, to pay sometime in the future. In Quicken, for example, all "scheduled transactions after today" are encumbrances. Quicken will show you how much money you will (or won't) have three months down the line if all of your scheduled income and payments go as scheduled. Contingencies are things like: you sell your car and have no more car payments, or you lose your job and have no more income.

In a project I have, customers can launch long-running processes. We create an encumbrance to their account. Whenever someone enquires as to how much credit the customer has left, unless a flag is passed in the response is the credits minus all encumbrances. This prevents overspending. If the long-running process succeeds, the encumbrance is committed and the account debited; if it fails, the encumbrance is cancelled. So he learned something.

I learned that Washington State applies sales tax on everything you buy out of state. Everything. If the state you bought it from has a sales tax, you must pay the difference to the Washington state treasury. There is no refund if the other state's sales tax is higher. This is not optional. It applies to Internet purchases. It's called a use tax.

If you're an Internet business in Washington, and your servers are in another state, you must pay the "use tax" on those servers. If you buy a bag of peanuts in New Orleans but don't eat them until you're in Washington state, you owe the Washington State Department of Revenue 1.5% of the cost of the bag (Louisiana has a 4% sales tax, compared to Washington's 6.5%):

Use tax is a tax on the use of goods or certain services in Washington when sales tax has not been paid. Goods used in this state are subject to either sales or use tax, but not both. Thus, the use tax compensates when sales tax has not been paid. Use tax is due at the rate where you first use the article, not where the sale takes place.

Note that this puts the burden of accounting for use tax on the purchaser, not the seller. No wonder it's usually only applied to businesses, but that's selective enforcement.

For a respected tech geek, you are so 1999!

Another one of those "tear my hair out" stories on the radio. NPR's Michelle Norris was talking to Brian Cooley, the "editor at large" of CNET.com. The first thing that made me feel all retro was, when asked what steps Apple was taking to secure the iCloud platform, Cooley responded:

We don't really know because that's the first step in good security is not to tell the world what you're doing. But we can assume that Apple being one of the most sophisticated technology companies in the world has thrown massive resources at this.

AAAARGGGHHH! No, that's bullshit. All that means is that Apple's customers don't know if they have to take any action to protect themselves. The correct route to security is to tell absolutely everybody what you intend to do, in excrutiating detail, with honeypots and demonstration servers, and let the world beat the bugs out of it. The strongest security in the world, the public key infrastructure, the same one used by banks and militaries and national security interests, is based on source code absolutely everybody knows and that the public has source level access to.

The other stupid thing he said was:

The first step in good Cloud security is to have a hard to figure out password that you change regularly, every six months at least.

"Hard to figure out" is not the same thing as a "hard" password. Want your password to be secure? Make sure it's at least 12 characters long, sixteen if you can stand it. Make sure they're not subject to a dictionary attack by using odd characters.

Man, this guy's advice is out-of-date. Everyone who listens to him will be ill-informed about what really needs to happen.

In the same article, Symantec System's Gerry Egan and McAfee's Joris Evers both encourage reporter Nina Gregory to give her listeners this advice: always have anti-virus software installed. Far be it for me to suggest that people who sell anti-virus software have something to be gained from a virus-laden cyber-ecology, but why is it nobody ever mentions that the biggest threat to Internet security is the inherent insecurity of its most popular operating system, Microsoft Windows?

Apple products outstripped Windows in the home consumer market a few years ago, but the multi-tiered security of Apple's operating system makes it much harder for viruses to get a foothold, and the number of viruses exploiting Macs is orders of magintude smaller than that of Windows. The same is true of computers running more obscure operating systems, like Linux.

The best anti-virus software for ordinary consumers is Mac OS X. Or, if you can't afford the top-of-the-line, a used PC laptop and Ubuntu.