Security For All

But am I here? It’s kind of hard to tell
I do a good impression of myself
But what’s normal now anyhow?
from “Normal” by Porcupine Tree

Since the great weirdness last month things are getting pretty much back to normal in Colorado. The Balloon Boy’s parents have fessed up, but not before the Larimer County Sheriff posted an item to his blog attacking [the father], calling him “clever and manipulative” and comparing him to the Joker character from “Batman.” But sadly, if you were looking forward to the Balloon family reality show, that idea is a non-starter according to at least one New York-based production company.

“It’s just too poisonous,” said Irad Eyal, vice president of development at True Entertainment. “I don’t think anyone is going to want to meet with a man who shamed his family and children that way. In reality TV, there’s a definite line you don’t cross, and that’s tormenting children.”

I’m just going to leave that quote alone – as nothing I could possibly add would make it any more hilariously absurd than it already is. But I digress. Balloon Boy saga done.

The insurance companies that thought they could get away with denying coverage to healthy children are backpedaling and spinning their respective ways back to sanity. The Denver post reports that the insurer changed it’s course on the chubby baby.

Rocky Mountain Health Plans announced Monday that it found a flaw in its underwriting system and now will provide coverage to healthy infants, regardless of their weight.

“As a small company we were able to act quickly and decisively,” said Rocky Mountain spokeswoman Kayla Arnesen. “We are really pleased we are going to be covering Alex and other healthy babies.”

A “flaw in it’s underwriting system“? Dude, I can’t make up stuff this good. But again I digress. And the Denver Post also reports that the insurance company changed it’s mind on the skinny tot as well.

The Golden Rule Insurance Co. said Wednesday that it has changed its mind on a 2-year-old from northern Colorado rejected for coverage because she’s so skinny.

The insurer announced the change after [the parents] brought their story to television stations.

Golden Rule said in a statement that it changed its mind on Aislin’s case after a routine appeals process.

“I won’t tell you we’ve never made a mistake, because we have. But our reviews process is open to all,” said company spokeswoman Ellen Laden.

And the mistake was that they thought they could get away with it? At least the reviews process is open to all.

Westword is close to hiring that medical-marijuana dispensary reviewer. Although apparently I’m not the only one who found it humorous. According to Westword, their hunt for a pot critic made international news and the talk-show circuit.

“A newspaper in Denver is planning to hire a critic to write reviews of all the medical marijuana clinics in the state,” Conan O’Brien joked on his show last week. “My one suggestion for the editors: Give the guy a deadline.”

Thanks, Conan: We have. Westword stopped accepting applications for our medical-marijuana dispensary reviewer in mid-October. Now if comics and reporters alike would just stay off the story for a while (Westword‘s job opening has been the punchline on both NPR‘s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and a BBC quiz show, and we just logged mentions in newspapers in Russia, Israel and China), we might be able to actually finish the hiring process. For the record, we’ve gone through the more than 250 formal applications we received, contacted a dozen semi-finalists, and hope to have our new critic in place within the week.

That’s right, then it’s back to the same old, same old. But, seriously wouldn’t this  be the best job ever.

The Denver Broncos are behaving more like expected now with a 6-3 record having lost the last 3 games straight making it altogether possible (yea even probable) that they might only win 6 games total this season. Hey, you can only push the Almighty so far.

And finally the Windows 7 juggernaut continues unabated. Well, except that according to J. Nicholas Hoover at InformationWeek the U.S. Government isn’t jumping on the bandwagon until the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), is finalized for Windows 7.

It may be another six months before agencies can move ahead with Windows 7 deployment because a government-mandated security standard hasn’t been finalized.

The Federal Desktop Core Configuration spells out 300 settings for Windows PCs and laptops, with a goal of making them less vulnerable to hackers and data breaches. FDCC settings exist for Windows XP and Windows Vista, but not yet for Windows 7.

“It will take until spring 2010, at least,” said Ken Page, Microsoft’s FDCC program manager, in a presentation today at Microsoft’s Washington, D.C., office. “This process does not happen fast.”

Oh and there was that little brouhaha over Microsoft snagging some open source code for use in a semi-proprietary licensed tool as reported by Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet. But they’ve fessed up and made it right now. Or at least made it GPL 2.

From a November 13 blog posting by Microsoft Open Source Community Manager Peter Galli:

“After looking at the code (within the USB tool) in question, we are now able to confirm this (inclusion of improperly licensed GPL v2 code) was indeed the case, although it was not intentional on our part. While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process. We have furthermore conducted a review of other code provided through the  Microsoft Store and this was the only incident of this sort we could find.”

Galli said Microsoft plans to make the source code and binaries for the Microsoft tool available the week of November 16 under the terms of the General Public License v2 “and are also taking measures to apply what we have learned from this experience for future code reviews we perform.”

So like I said, things are getting back to normal. At least as normal as things ever get.