Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times

Friday, December 9, 2005

Terrorist Watch List

C|Net:
About 30,000 airline passengers have discovered since last November that their names were mistakenly matched with those appearing on federal watch lists, a transportation security official said Tuesday.
No freaking kidding. I, me, moi am one of those lucky 30,000.
But wait there's more:
Of the 30,000 people who said they were mistakenly matched to names on the list, none ever had been kept from boarding an airplane, Kennedy said. Their names appeared only on a "selectee list," where members are singled out for additional screening. Names on the "no-fly" list, however, are unilaterally barred from flying. The office said it hasn't been informed of any cases where people have disputed matches with names on the no-fly list.
After submitting their notarized forms and identifications, and waiting for evaluations, the vast majority of the people mistakenly matched to names on the watch list have now been added to a "clearance" list.
Oh, that's not all. They want an original birth certificate, a list of your last five residences, employment information...and if that's not creepy enough...
That doesn't mean their names are erased from the watch list. In fact, travelers who go through the paperwork are told, Kennedy said, that "it will not quote 'remove' you from the list because the person we're still looking for is out there."
Just who is this "bad" Barry Briggs person anyway?
Instead, their names are put on the separate clearance list, which means they typically can't check in for flights at an unmanned kiosk and must approach the ticket counter to explain their situation and have an airline employee match their name to the clearance list.
Yeah. Welcome to my world. It's true, I've never been kept off a flight but it's just so much damn fun to wait at the counter, with loads of annoyed people staring at you and wondering why the agent disappeared into the back room with your driver's license. Yeah, I'm real freaking suspicious...middle-aged Anglo-Saxon usually with wife and kid in tow.

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New CEO at Microsoft

Well, I don't think Steve has to worry...or does he?
On Friday, Dec. 9, there' will be an extra CEO at Microsoft -- just for the day. His name is Kiyaan Vazirzadeh. He hails from Simi Valley, Calif. And he's 10.
Vazirzadeh made his wish to spend a day being CEO at Microsoft on the NBC Television reality show "Three Wishes," which follows recording artist Amy Grant on visits to communities all over the U.S., where Grant and her team grant wishes. These wishes range from the simple and light-hearted to the more dramatic and involved, and all feature people who get to witness some of their hopes and dreams made into reality.
Asked to name his heroes when he was still in the first grade, Vazirzadeh wrote about Bill Gates. That did not change through the years, and a compelling essay, coupled with his goal of being a CEO at his young age, prompted Microsoft and the "Three Wishes" team to make his wish come true.

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The SOX Industry

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about one of the hottest growth areas in the software industry: Sarbanes-Oxley compliance:
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and other similar measures, passed in the wake of corporate scandals like those at Enron and WorldCom, have left a burden on publicly traded companies. They must demonstrate that their accounting and financial systems are robust enough to ward off fraud or serious errors. That means either hiring more people to do the tedious job of bullet-proofing their financial operations, or investing in software that can do much of the job automatically.
A new tech sector has sprung up to provide that software. Virtually every computer and software maker is eager to tap one of the few high-growth markets in technology -- the best thing to happen in the sector since the Y2K panic caused thousands of big businesses to remake their computer rooms in 1998 and 1999.
Being a business process kind of guy, and believing that business is nothing more than a set of interdependent processes, to me the great opportunity for both customers and vendors is weaving Sarbox et.al. in with the process server. Increasingly, that's your business -- and so that's where to track it.
However you look at it it's pretty much impossible to overestimate the impact this sort of thing is having on business.

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