Month: September 2017

What to Do if You Were Affected by the Equifax Breach

Jason Tate

If you were affected by the Equifax breach, I’ve found these resources to be helpful in sharing with friends and family.

The New York Times:

In the meantime, here’s hoping that this breach is the nudge you need to finally sign up for permanent freezes on your credit files. I’ve used them for years, and here’s how they work. You sign up (and pay some fees, because you knew it wasn’t going to be free to protect data that you didn’t ask these companies to store, right?) at Equifax’s, Experian’s and TransUnion’s websites.

Lifehacker:

This breach actually happened three months ago, so there’s a chance that your information is already being used. Check your credit report and make sure there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening.

Reddit:

If you do nothing else, place an initial 90 day fraud alert on your file. This is free and will require lenders to contact you if someone (including yourself) tries to apply for credit.

Brian Krebs:

I’m here to tell you that if you’re an American, your basic personal data is already for sale. What follows is a primer on what you can do to avoid becoming a victim of identity theft as a result of all this data (s)pillage.

U2’s The Edge Helping Replace Lost Instruments

U2
Jason Tate

U2’s The Edge will be helping to raise funds via Music Rising to replace instruments lost in Hurricane Harvey:

Music Rising is raising money to help replace the instruments lost in schools affected by the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. We are taking donations through our partner the Mr. Hollands Opus Foundation. 100% of all donations go straight into our efforts.

‘It’ Isn’t Clowning Around at the Box Office

Jason Tate

It had a massive opening weekend, breaking records with its $123 million haul:

With a monster, $123 million opening weekend Warner Bros. and New Line’s It has delivered a record-breaking opening, breathing a little life back into the slumping domestic box office. The film has claimed the largest September opening, largest Fall opening, the largest opening for an R-rated horror film, not to mention the largest opening weekend for a horror film of any MPAA rating, and tops Open Road’s new release Home Again in second place by nearly $110 million. Overall, the film accounted for more than 75% of the combined gross for the weekend’s top twelve, and we’ve only just begun.

Come on, I get one really bad headline every once in a while.

Face to Face: The Visual History

Face to Face
Jason Tate

A retrospective coffee table book on Face to Face will be released in December. It’s called Face To Face – 25 Years of SoCal Punk, The Visual History and pre-orders are up and come with the unreleased song “Self-Determination.”

“When I started Face to Face in 1991, I never imagined such a fulfilling and rich career would develop thanks to the dedicated support of our fans. It’s both exciting and inspiring to see the band’s history captured in a such a vivid and artful way as Aaron Tanner has done with this book.” – Trever Keith

Equifax: The Dumpster Fire Edition

Jason Tate

Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:

The breach Equifax reported Thursday, however, very possibly is the most severe of all for a simple reason: the breath-taking amount of highly sensitive data it handed over to criminals. By providing full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers, it provided most of the information banks, insurance companies, and other businesses use to confirm consumers are who they claim to be. The theft, by criminals who exploited a security flaw on the Equifax website, opens the troubling prospect the data is now in the hands of hostile governments, criminal gangs, or both and will remain so indefinitely.

Brian Krebs:

I cannot recall a previous data breach in which the breached company’s public outreach and response has been so haphazard and ill-conceived as the one coming right now from big-three credit bureau Equifax, which rather clumsily announced Thursday that an intrusion jeopardized Social security numbers and other information on 143 million Americans.