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April 21st, 2013:

Weekend link dump for April 21

Apr 21st, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
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An Anthony Weiner mayoral candidacy would be a gift for shameless headline writers, if nothing else.

It’s time for MLB to honor all of its pioneers, without whom there couldn’t have been a Jackie Robinson.

“People who assumed Siskel & Ebert was just about movies were never really paying attention.”

“Eden Foods — an organic food company with no shortage of liberal customers — has quietly pursued a decidedly right-wing agenda, suing the Obama administration for exemption from the mandate to cover contraception for its employees under the Affordable Care Act.”

Seriously, if you care at all about this, avoid Eden Foods.

I have always liked the designated hitter. And I too believe it’s time for the NL to adopt it.

Some thoughtful words about Google Glass.

Right now geekdom is positively stacked with Green Blazered Men, who are shocked and concerned that women in geekdom are suddenly not just satisfied with the idea that they have equal standing, opportunity and engagement in the geek world — they are actually pushing for it to happen, and pushing back against the men who are resisting that, whether that resistance is passive, aggressive or passive-aggressive.

Maybe President Obama should have nominated Jay-Z to be Secretary of State.

“Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care. The key ingredients are quite simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development. By these metrics, American day care performs abysmally.”

Five lessons from the Gosnell abortion-clinic controversy.

So how’s your gold collection doing?

On the alliance Jackie Robinson forged with Richard Nixon in the 1960 Presidential election.

Real scientists have families, too.

How to protect your WordPress blog from hackers. Don’t get pwned, y’all.

“In the age-old dilemma between liberty and law enforcement, Rubio switches sides depending on the issue. He believes passionately that laws designed to catch lawbreakers don’t work, that inconveniences to law-abiding citizens are intolerable, and that government databases are unacceptably dangerous—but only if you’re buying a gun.”

“I guess I should point out here that white persons have been allowed to talk about black history for as long as there has been black history.”

Better to be right slow than wrong fast.

RIP, Pat Summerall, truly the voice of NFL games for many of us.

We are all very, very old.

And forgive us our trespasses, unless they violate the terms of the divorce decree. But at least now we know what a bridge too far looks like.

Brittney Griner comes out. She and her peers have a refreshing attitude, thankfully typical for their generation, about it. Just don’t read the comments there, as doing so will more than wipe out the good feeling you’ll get from the story. Oh, and I also wonder if this will have a salutary effect on her alma mater, which is not known for its tolerance.

More like Adolphus Busch, please.

And more like Aamina Fetuga, too.

“An accident waiting to happen”

Apr 21st, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

I don’t even know what to say.

There were no sprinklers. No firewalls. No water deluge systems. Safety inspections were rare at the fertilizer company in West, Texas, that exploded and killed at least 14 people this week.

This is not unusual.

Small fertilizer plants nationwide fall under the purview of several government agencies, each with a specific concern and none required to coordinate with others on what they have found.

The small distributors — there are as many of 1,150 in Texas alone — are part of a regulatory system that focuses on large installations and industries, though many of the small plants contain enough agricultural chemicals to fuel a major explosion.

The plant in West had ammonium nitrate, the chemical used to build the bomb that blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people. According to a document filed in 2012 with the Texas Department of State Health Services, the maximum amount of this “extremely hazardous substance” the plant could store in one container was 90 tons, and the most it could have on site was 270 tons. It is unknown how much was onsite at any given time, or at the time of the explosion.

It was also authorized to handle up to 54,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia, a substance the Texas environmental agency considers flammable and potentially toxic.

“This type of facility is a minor source of air emissions,” Ramiro Garcia, the head of enforcement and compliance at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, told The Associated Press.

“So the inspections are complaint driven. We usually look at more of the major facilities.”

No federal agency determines how close a facility handling potentially dangerous substances can be to population centers, and in many states, including Texas, many of these decisions are left up to local zoning authorities. And in Texas, the state’s minimal approach to zoning puts plants just yards away from schools, houses and other populated areas, as was the case in West.

That plant received a special permit because it was less than 3,000 feet from a school. The damage from the blast destroyed an apartment complex, nursing home and houses in a four-block area.

In the city of Houston, sexually oriented businesses are forbidden to be within 1,500 feet of a school. Say what you want about strip clubs, they are generally not prone to exploding. From a safety perspective, it’s no contest.

It’s pretty simple. We can simply accept that this sort of thing will happen from time to time, and chalk up the death and destruction as one of the costs of our society, or we can decide that’s not acceptable, and be willing to pay some amount of money to mitigate those risks. I’m pretty sure I know which one we’re going to choose – we already have chosen it, we’re just going to reaffirm that choice – I just wanted to be clear about that fact that it is a choice. It doesn’t have to be like this, we want it to be like this.

There are a lot of Republicans who want to move us backwards on equality

Apr 21st, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Drew Springer is at it again, and he’s got help.

In the last year, two Central Texas school districts have announced plans to offer employee benefits to same-sex couples, but one bill heard Tuesday at the Capitol would make that more difficult across the state.

Pflugerville ISD announced the change last fall, making it the first district in the state to offer benefits to “dependents” who pay into their partners’ insurance plan, at no additional cost to the district or state. Austin ISD followed in late March, saying the change would cost the district $600,000 per year.

Rep. Drew Springer (R-Muenster) has a plan that’d put an end to this trend, though. He explained his proposal to the House Public Education Committee [last] Tuesday night, to withhold 7.5 percent of the state’s funding to any district offering domestic partner benefits. That, he said, should be about equal to the full cost of a district’s employee insurance program.

Springer is joined by dozens of Republican co-authors on House Bill 1568. He stressed that his bill would apply equally to same-sex and heterosexual couples, but also suggested Pflugerville and Austin’s policies were rooted in something more specific.

“I think that was around the back-side door and around the corner of trying to figure out, ‘We’re not happy with the constitutional amendment we had in 2005 that defines marriage between a man and a woman,’” Springer said.

Here’s HB 1568, which is pending in committee, and here’s more on the bill. Author Springer has meddled elsewhere this session as well. It’s a thing with him, it seems.

There is good news, however. Equality Texas reports that HB1568 was withdrawn from consideration after its hearing in the Public Education committee on Thursday the 18th. That’s great news, but a “compromise” bill is in the works, whatever that means. Even if that amounts to nothing, the number of sponsors on this bills suggests the possibility of it being attached to some other bill as an amendment later on. So be happy for now, but don’t rest easy.

Two more points to note from the story:

Springer complained that expanding these policies would be a huge extra cost to the state. “If we outlawed marriage, we could save a ton of money,” Rep. Joe Deshotel (D-Beaumont) prodded him.

Unlike married people, though, Springer noted, domestic partners can’t get divorced. He said some might take advantage of the system by staying on the same health insurance plan after they’ve split up.

“It’s very difficult to be able to police that,” Springer said. ”You have a next-door neighbor who may be 40 years, 80 years old—my next-door neighbor—and she comes to me and says, Drew, I need to get coverage, help me out here. It’s easy to make that person my partner.”

No it’s not, you idiot. In fact, most private employers that provide domestic partner coverage have a verification process to ensure brain-dead schemes like Springer’s don’t happen. Many private employers now provide this coverage to their employees, including some of the biggest companies in the world. They do it because it’s something many employees want, and they know they can’t compete for the best talent if they don’t provide such basic benefits. Fraud is unsurprisingly rare. You would think that a party that worships businesses the way the Republicans do might think twice about banning government entities from adopting some of the best practices of the free enterprise system, but I suppose there are things that are more important to them than that.

Steve Washburn, pastor at the First Baptist Church of Pflugerville, told lawmakers of the turmoil that followed the district’s decision in his otherwise civil community. “At a school board meeting in the heat of debate, I was referred to as a hate-monger,” he said. “I’ve been there for 23 years. I’m pretty highly respected. That enraged a lot of people. It hurt a lot of people’s feelings.”

Sorry, Rev. Washburn, but when you seek to deny people the same rights that you enjoy, that makes you not a nice person. I’m sorry that comes as a shock to you, and I’m sorry your feelings have been hurt by the understandably and justifiably angry reaction to your intolerance, but you really need to examine your actions and your motives if you want to be respected again. It’s entirely up to you.

Senate committee votes to repeal state sodomy law

Apr 21st, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
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About time.

RedEquality

The Senate Criminal Justice Committee voted on Wednesday to repeal the state’s anti-gay sodomy law, a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

Texas, along with Oklahoma and Kansas, will be the only states that still have the law on the books after Montana’s legislature approved its repeal of the measure and the governor pledged to sign it.

Sen. Jose Rodriguez, D-El Paso, authored the bill and said the state was long overdue in taking the measure off the books and that it created confusion among law enforcement.

“This defunct law was the grounds for police to harass patrons of restaurants in my district resulting in a suit against the city of El Paso,” he said, describing a 2009 incident where police arrested a same-sex couple for kissing. “Not only is the continued existence of this law on the books a source of misinformation to law enforcement, but in my own district local governments have been forced to spend their limited resources due to this misuse.”

Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, said he tried to get the law repealed in 1993, but conservatives in the Texas House blocked the attempt.

“All you’re doing is following court rulings and taking unconstitutional language off the books,” he said.

Sen. Rodriguez’s bill is SB 538. It’s the second pro-equality bill to pass out of this committee so far. As before, the big question is whether either bill can pass the full Senate or the full House, but regardless of that it’s still a step forward. Kudos to Sen. Rodriguez for filing the bill and to Sen. Whitmire for getting it through his committee. Equality Texas, Texpatriate, and the Texas Observer have more.

Mobile payments

Apr 21st, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Austin is a hot spot for the hot new thing in retail technology.

Mobile payments technology is gathering steam across the country, but Austin is one of the hot spots, both for deployment of new technology and for development of new software for payment systems and payment processing.

Dozens of merchants have affiliated with Square Inc., a well-funded startup based in San Francisco that is winning over smaller merchants with lower credit card processing fees.
Other companies in the field are coming here because of the tech talent base. Mozido, an ambitious payments startup, moved from Dallas to Austin early this year, drawn by better recruiting prospects.

“There is a lot of talent and energy here,” said company founder Michael Liberty. “It seemed like all the good young engineers in mobile who we wanted to recruit either lived here or aspired to live here.”

Brent Warrington, CEO of SecureNet Payments Systems, a payments processing company, moved the company headquarters and its technology development hub to Austin last year from Maryland to tap into the talent pool.

Warrington, a payments industry veteran, said the mobile payments industry is starting to take off after years of more talk than action. “There have been more changes in the payments industry in the last year than I have seen in the previous 15 years of my career,” he said.

Isis, a big joint venture of three mobile carriers, is using Austin as one of two pilot markets for its mobile payments service. The company has brought 1,000 merchant locations on board in Central Texas since the middle of last year and presently is adding about 100 a month. The company is working with Austin’s Mutual Mobile on some software development projects. It is using Gemalto, a big European digital security provider with operations in Austin, for its Trusted Service Manager security.

And PayPal, a veteran of online payments, is adding new workers in California and Austin as it focuses on making mobile payments the starting point for its new software development. The company was recruiting new talent during the recent South by Southwest festivals. The PayPal Austin development center, which is run in conjunction with its parent eBay Inc., employs about 650 people.

A newcomer to town is Visa Inc., a global payments giant, that is building a big software development center on Research Boulevard. The project, which expects to employ nearly 800 people within five years, received approval for state and local incentives late last year. Visa hasn’t spelled out publicly what the Austin development center will be working on, but part of its assignment is expected to be mobile payments.

Other payments companies in town include: Starmount Inc., which develops mobile point-of-sale software for retailers; Bypass Lane, which creates mobile payments systems for public venues and campuses; and Tabbed Out, which develops mobile software for settling tabs at restaurants and bars.

Analyst David Schropfer with New York-based Luciano Group rates Austin among the top cities in the world for mobile payments, taking into consideration the Isis pilot program here and the companies doing software development and market development here.

“Austin is a snapshot into what will happen in the rest of the country and the rest of the world in mobile payments,” he said. “I would put Austin among the top five cities in the world in terms of focus and attention that people are giving to it and the companies that are there.”

Gartner Group, a major tech consulting firm, estimates that global mobile payments will more than triple over the next three years, expanding to an estimated $617 billion. That sounds like a lot, but it compares with estimates that global retail sales will reach $20 trillion by 2017.

The key factor behind the optimistic forecasts is the public’s fascination with smartphones, which are fast becoming the dominant form of cellphone being sold worldwide with an estimated 722 million shipped last year. International Data Corp., another tech consulting firm, expects the number of smartphones shipped annually will double to 1.5 billion over the next four years. Keep in mind that there are presently about 7 billion people on the planet.

It’ll be very interesting to see how this shakes out. I can’t imagine that the market will ultimately support more than maybe two or three mobile payment technologies. People aren’t going to load up multiple apps on their smartphones, and vendors won’t want to bother with systems that their customers don’t use. Will established players like Visa and PayPal suck all the oxygen out of this space, or will the upstarts steal their thunder and become big boys and girls themselves? Place your bets, y’all.

One cannot talk about new technology without also talking about security for this new technology.

Payments industry executives say the technology is good and getting better. But security experts say the swift growth of smartphone use inevitably is going to attract fraud. And as more consumers use their mobile phones as payment devices, the potential risks can increase.

Dallas-based NQ Mobile, the leader in security software for smartphones, says it saw more than 65,000 new malware threats released worldwide in 2012, up from 24,000 the year before. Malware and phony app sites can direct unsuspecting phone users to sites where they give up sensitive personal information, such as bank account passwords.

“It is a real problem, and it is growing,” said Gavin Kim, chief commercial officer of the company. “Smartphone sales are booming, and they are becoming a much more targeted device by hackers.”

The company sells software that can identify mobile phone apps sites and protect users against malware and viruses.

Interest in the mobile phone security software is growing, but the company estimates that only about 8 percent of the mobile market actually uses security products on phones.

Certainly, the threat of malware is there for smartphones – it’s a huge growth opportunity for the bad guys, especially if smartphones become popular for making payments. The back end is likely the bigger target, but I presume that the PCI DSS standard would still apply to mobile payment systems. But threats aren’t limited to just software these days. It’s just a matter of time before there’s a vulnerability in mobile payment systems. Doesn’t mean you should avoid them, just that as with all other things related to computing that you be aware of the risks and take steps to mitigate them.