Wednesday Miscellany

Originally published at Finding God in a Dog. You can comment here or there.

Things I'm thinking about today:

• It appears that Healthcare.org, already plagued with difficulty, is also demonstrably massively insecure, as one hacker was able to access the records of about 70,000 users in four minutes.
• 51-year-old Bryan Duane Tilley of Keizer, Oregon, is accused of hacking his stepdaughter’s social media accounts in order to control her behavior and ward off a suitor. His alleged behavior constitutes straight-up cyberstalking IMO. He plead not guilty today in criminal court. Why he couldn’t just have a conversation with his stepdaughter is beyond me.
• Python has millions of uses, with more invented every day. For example, this guy used it to try to find a suitable partner on OKCupid. He got lots of matches, but as it turns out, the actual compatibility varied.
• Peter Siebel argues that code is not literature. The problem with his argument is that we use the same process of decoding to read and interpret art. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but the difference is in what’s being communicated, not in how it’s communicated.

FBI chatting with Hoboken NJ mayoral staff about Christie allegations

NBC reports:

FBI agents have begun questioning witnesses in the investigation into whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's aides threatened to cut off Hurricane Sandy relief money to Hoboken unless the city's mayor backed a billion-dollar development project, three sources with direct knowledge of the probe told NBC News on Wednesday.

It's easy to speculate that this spells big trouble for Chris Christie and his staff. I'm still skeptical that this will go anywhere. Remember Fitzmas?