The Count shared a fascinating and depressing article about how "tracking a gun purchase" is actually done.

“People don't think,” Charlie tells me. He's a trim guy, 51, full lips and a thin goatee, and he likes to wear three-piece suits. They fit loose, so the overall effect is awkward innocence, like an eighth grader headed to his first formal. “ I get e-mails even from police saying, ‘Can you type in the serial number and tell me who the gun is registered to?’ Every week. They think it's like a VIN number on a car. Even police. Police from everywhere. ‘Hey, can you guys hurry up and type that number in?’ ”

So here's a news flash, from Charlie: “We ain't got a registration system. Ain't nobody registering no damn guns.”

There is no national database of guns. We have no centralized record of who owns all the firearms we so vigorously debate, no hard data regarding how many people own them, how many of them are bought or sold, or how many even exist.

What we have instead is Charlie.

Inside The Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns.

This is a profoundly stupid country.

Thanks all, for your kind words about the Tricksey situation.

Much appreciated.

WASHINGTON —
Expressing a sense of guarded optimism that the latest incident of gun violence that left 58 dead and 500 injured in Las Vegas would be a turning point for the nation, Americans across the country confirmed Monday they were hopeful this would be the last mass shooting before all such occurrences stopped on their own for no reason at all. “After something as horrific as what happened in Las Vegas, we’re all just hoping that now these terrible shootings will stop once and for all without circumstances changing in any way or any of us taking even the slightest amount of action in response,” said Harrisburg, PA resident David Snyder, echoing the sentiments of tens of millions of citizens from coast to coast who told reporters they were confident that, after living through the most deadly mass shooting in modern American history and taking no material steps to change gun laws, reevaluate safety standards, increase access to mental health care, or even have a national conversation about how mass shootings could be avoided in the future, tragedies of this kind would at long last come to an end. “Having seen acts of violence like this happen over and over again for years now, I’m really holding out hope that, despite every single factor that allowed them to occur remaining exactly the same, we won’t have to live through another day like today. I know everyone’s praying this will finally be the time this issue just disappears forever entirely by itself without anyone doing anything.” At press time, Americans nationwide agreed that years of taking no measures whatsoever to prevent mass shootings may finally be paying off.

Four things the Trump administration has done to ensure Obamacare enrollment is more difficult this year:

The TL;DR Version

• Less Time To Sign Up: The ACA enrollment window, which begins Nov. 1, will only last for six weeks — half the time of previous enrollment periods.
• Sunday Maintenance: With the exception of Dec. 10, Healthcare.gov will be down for “maintenance” for 12 hours every Sunday during the enrollment period.
• Slashed Funding/Support For Navigators: Navigator groups, who help people select and sign up for ACA coverage, have seen their grant funding slashed by 40% in spite of promises it would be kept intact. Additionally, some groups say that HHS is not providing the support it used to for the glitchy, complicated software it requires these navigators to use.
• Who Needs Advertising? The advertising budget for the enrollment period has been slashed by 90%

Consumerist

If I were king, I would ban guns completely. Instantly. Without hesitation.

I've the heard the arguments for them and none of those arguments rise above fantasy and fetishism.

But not really into it.

In 2008, University of Michigan psychologist Jesse Chandler and his colleagues examined donations to disaster relief after seven major hurricanes and found that a disproportionately large number of donations came from people who shared an initial with the hurricane (e.g., people named Kate and Kevin after Hurricane Katrina).

It’s not clear why this is. It’s known that generally people attend to information with unusual care if it’s somehow relevant to themselves; in the case of a hurricane this may mean that they’re more likely to remember concrete information about victims and thus be more likely to donate.

Possibly they also feel more intense negative feelings (or a greater sense of responsibility) when the storm shares their initial. In that case, “Exposure to a same-initial hurricane makes people feel worse, and the most salient way to repair this feeling is the opportunity to donate money to Katrina.”

Legendary TV screenwriter, Ken Levine, made fun of people on the Emmy awards show. Some of those people weren't white. So, of course, people called him a racist.

Took four months for my iPhone to eat up all its storage, again.

As the Apache Foundation pointed out earlier this week, it reported CVE-2017-5638 in March 2017. Doubt us? Here's the NIST notification that mentions it as being notified on March 10th.

Equifax was breached in “mid-May” 2017, realised it in July and got around to telling the world in Early September. If we take “mid-May” as the 15th of the month, Equifax had nine working weeks in which to apply the patch.

That its data breach was entirely avoidable is not the end of Equifax's woes, as the new Progress Update also reveals that “Due to the high volume of security freeze requests, we experienced temporary technical difficulties and our system was offline for approximately an hour at 5PM ET on September 13, 2017 to address this issue.”

The company also appears to have suffered another data breach, this time in Argentina where its Bryan Krebs reports “an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”