US National Debt 2020 as of 8/31/2020:

 |   Date      |   Dollar Amount     | Annual Inc | President |          |
 |-------------|---------------------|------------------------|----------|
 |  09/30/2000 |  $5,674,178,209,88  |            | Clinton   |          |
 |  09/30/2001 |  $5,807,463,412,200 | 102.35%    | Bush      |          |
 |  09/30/2002 |  $6,228,235,965,597 | 107.25%    | Bush      | 9-11     |
 |  09/30/2003 |  $6,783,231,062,744 | 108.91%    | Bush      | 9-11     |
 |  09/30/2004 |  $7,379,052,696,330 | 108.78%    | Bush      | 9-11     |
 |  09/30/2005 |  $7,932,709,661,724 | 107.50%    | Bush      |          |
 |  09/30/2006 |  $8,506,973,899,215 | 107.24%    | Bush      |          |
 |  09/30/2007 |  $9,007,653,372,262 | 105.89%    | Bush      |          |
 |  09/30/2008 | $10,024,724,896,913 | 111.29%    | Bush      | Subprime |
 |  09/30/2009 | $11,909,829,003,512 | 118.80%    | Obama     | Subprime |
 |  09/30/2010 | $13,561,623,030,892 | 113.87%    | Obama     | Subprime |
 |  09/30/2011 | $14,790,340,328,557 | 109.06%    | Obama     |          |
 |  09/30/2012 | $16,066,241,407,386 | 108.63%    | Obama     |          |
 |  09/30/2013 | $16,738,183,526,697 | 104.18%    | Obama     |          |
 |  09/30/2014 | $17,824,071,380,734 | 106.49%    | Obama     |          |
 |  09/30/2015 | $18,150,617,666,484 | 101.83%    | Obama     |          |
 |  09/30/2016 | $19,573,444,713,937 | 107.84%    | Obama     |          |
 |  09/30/2017 | $20,244,900,016,054 | 103.43%    | Trump     |          |
 |  09/30/2018 | $21,516,058,183,180 | 106.28%    | Trump     |          |
 |  09/30/2019 | $22,719,401,753,434 | 105.59%    | Trump     |          |   
 | 08/31/2020* | $26,728,836,000,000 | 117.65%    | Trump     | COVID-19 |

• https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/mspd/2020/opds082020.prn

Just got this email and I’m excited! Might be able to completely change my life! Er … perhaps not. The first line is a little, er, familiar for a bank.

As another online website got hacked today and leaked userids, email addresses and passwords, I started thinking about what would solve this issue basically forever.

1. don’t use the same password anywhere online. Always unique per login/website.


2. if you can, use a unique login for every online identity. No need to let anyone connect-the-dots or get a hint about your email login from a blog website. This is more important for logins to financial services. I couldn’t tell you my brokerage userid – don’t know it – it is random.


3. if you can, use a unique email address for all identities. These do not need to be anything more than email aliases, since receiving email and redirecting it to a real account is easy. No need to support “send”. If you don’t know what an email alias is, don’t worry.


4. Definitely have a few different email addresses – 1 for social stuff online and a different 1 or 3 for financial stuff. If the social email gets hacked, that shouldn’t impact your financial email accounts at all.


5. Lie on all password reset questions. Never tell the truth or the same answer for different websites. Keep your lies inside a password manager.

How to do these things easily? Use a password manager. Try it for a week, see if you don’t become addicted. More on KeePass

There are other uses for password managers too. Well worth your time.

If we do these things, no need to panic over having any social/google password db out there. Even if it were leaked as plain text, I wouldn’t care. It doesn’t matter. Don’t let any social website know your real email address or a password used anywhere else. Unique, random matters.

Prefer F/LOSS security tools over commercial offers. Historically, commercial security vendors have mislead their users or the marketing department simply lied.

keepass and keepassx are good. The source code is available for download and review by anyone. Security of the tool is not through anything hidden, just good encryption which currently cannot be broken when normal best-practices are used.

KeepassX is amazing.

This week, I got a shock in my snailmail box. It was an offer from my current health insurance company for a different policy which meets the new federally mandated requirements.

For the least 3-4 years, my premiums were $148/month. That was manageable.

The new premium is $321/month and raises the annual deductible 20%. I checked both my current provider’s other plans and those from the Obama-Care website. The Obama-Care website didn’t have any plans from my current insurer and were about the same 2x price. I didn’t look too closely at the options. I use Costco’s Insurance marketplace now and did look over the different options there. The cheapest plan which was significantly worse than what I have today was $280/month. I compared a few other plans against the one picked for me by the insurance company. Found one that was $302/month, then tried to change my current plan over to it, but couldn’t login. Reset the password (I use a password manager, so it shouldn’t have been necessary), and wasn’t able to login still. It was late, so I decided to try later. I have until Monday (2 days) to pick a different plan.

That offer had an increase of 2.1x and will all but destroy the extra household budget for entertainment. My hobbies will simply have to take a back door to health insurance premiums. I suppose we will eat out less too.

I’m confused how a service that I barely use that has monthly cost of $138-$148 can justify doubling in a few months? Is this fraud or do the federally mandated changes, which don’t have anything to do with my needs, really require that much more money?
Or are the insurance companies using this to make everyone pay more?

Perhaps 100% free health care in the USA would be better?

It seems that I’m not alone with the premiums going up. Washington Post

Perhaps I can qualify for government assistance for these premiums? I think this is doubtful.

At a LUG meeting recently, someone asked which distributions I used and why. My choice of distro is not random by any means. It was a carefully thought out reason, which fits my requirements.

A few months ago, I purchased Quicken 2012 Home & Business with the intent of upgrading my Quicken 2008 version which runs pretty well under Linux in WINE. I finally got around to trying to get it working. I’m sad to report that after over 8 hours of attempts, I was unable to get Quicken 2012 to startup and stay running for more than 10 seconds before crashing under WINE. Sorry.

There are instructions over at the WineHQ to get Quicken 2012 running. These did not work for me.

For most readers, that is enough to move along.

Every year I receive a text message on my cell phone reminding me that my minutes are about to expire. For the last 5+ years, I’ve added $10 worth of minutes every October to keep the plan alive.

Just $10/year for cell phone use?

A few times every week, we all get offers from the local cable company or telecom that has a low-low-low price in a 48pt font. The price is so low that we open the letter and read a little. I’m staring at an offer from AT&T right now, but it could be from the cable company just as easily.

$29/month for U-Verse TV +
HD-Ready DVR Included +
No Equipment to Buy!

Wow! That sounds like a great deal. How can I possibly pass it up? Then I read a little more, you know, the fine print.

For Six Months

So what’s the price after 6 months? Will they say?

There’s an old SSL/TLS security hole (from 11/2009) that has been out and patched for over a year (since 2/2010), but it appears that many major websites haven’t bothered patching it. CVE-2009-3555

The guys over at ssltls.de have a list. Seems that consistently patching is tough for many organizations. The list is pretty shocking for who is and isn’t patched. Take a look and be afraid. There are lots of big banks on the unpatched list. Scary. The list is not comprehensive, so just because your site or bank aren’t listed, doesn’t mean they are consistently patched.

• home.americanexpress.com is patched, but
• www.americanexpress.com cannot be confirmed as patched.

There are attacks in the wild that take advantage of this issue. I need to check whether my SSL sites are vulnerable too. Here’s an SSL checker

Ok, not really 101 uses for a Password Manager, but many more than you thought, about 30.

Use A Password Manager

For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get anyone with more than 5 passwords to remember to start using a password manager, PM, as part of increasing your desktop security. Below I’ll go into a few alternate uses for that password database beyond just storing computer and website passwords.