Observed, minor uptick in russian BTC interest

My ongoing pay-to-click experiment is yielding a bit of odd metadata. I'm starting to see a number of cyrillic lettered ads. Chrome helpfully will translate them so there actually is some utility in their being shown me. It's odd to see and shows a different advertising aesthetic. At least one campaign is visually based on the idea of lending money to the mob.

It's probably nothing but gets tossed in the big mental pile of oddities that lurk around the back of my head.

All your health information belongs to us

Federal law requires that when a private corporation is hacked and customer information is stolen, it must notify the victims of the theft. This is a reasonable requirement that lets people rush out and buy identity theft protection and/or keep a close eye out for funny charges showing up on their bills. 

In the case of the federal healthcare exchange, there is no legal requirement to report such breaches. Individuals on the federal exchange are without such protection though most states do have reporting requirements. The issue came up during regulatory comments and HHS apparently declined to support any sort of mandatory reporting rule. They'll let us know when they feel like it. 

To add salt to the wound, HIPAA privacy protections do cover insurance companies and health providers accessing federal government systems but the federal government itself is not obligated to honor those protections. Fancy that. 

HT: National Review

Off the charts pollution in Beijing

Literally, the city of Beijing's air was so bad last night that it went off the chart. The US embassy has a sensor measuring PM 2.5 in Beijing. That's particulate matter of 2.5 micron size or less. Here's the screen shot of how bad things are over there.

All the grey bars are off the scale and the red ones are merely "hazardous" and you should stay indoors. Grey means stay indoors in a room with filtered air, and try to breathe as little as possible.

HT: Zerohedge

Call from school

It isn't often that you get a call from school and it's good news. Usually somebody's sick, unruly, or bleeding. But not today. My son's been tutoring two kids for a few months and apparently they just tested their progress. One of them raised their scores a full year. The other raised them a full two years. I'm so proud I could pop.

Something in the news today

It's mostly depressing reading the news today though on the bright side, the idea of chucking the text of the Constitution in favor of historical practice apparently only has 2 votes on the Supreme Court. These days, the apparently limited size of the Supreme Court minority ok with chucking the idea of Constitutional government entirely counts as good news.

Etiquette question

What is the appropriate conversational response at a party to "the suicide bomber almost got me"?

Discuss.

Bitcoin comeback

The gloom and doom bitcoin crowd seems to have quieted down now that BTC has resumed its upward trends from its recent lows in the $600 range. At writing Preev is listing BTC at $909, still well off its all time highs but about twice what my eyeball tells me its long term price trend is. That's a bit fluffy but not scarily so.

My microtransaction fueled program of acquiring bitcoins continues apace, currently totalling 0.04876797BTC or a bit more than $40 at present prices, territory of a decent burger joint night out with the wife with drinks added in. Minor tragedy has struck though as The Charley Horse has gone out of business and I was using their burger and drink menu for pricing benchmarks. I have to find a new restaurant now.