No on 1; Yes on Disclosure

There is a time and place for everything – even privacy.

Cloaked behind a veil of secrecy, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a NJ-based anti-LGBT hate group, has been leading the fight in Maine to repeal that states same-sex marriage law.

This past week, according to the Portland Press Herald, a federal judge “ruled that Maine's reporting requirements for ballot question campaigns do not violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution” and that NOM must disclose its donor list.

"Maine is entitled to conclude that its electorate needs to know, on an ongoing basis, the source of financial support for those who are taking positions on a ballot initiative," wrote Judge D. Brock Hornby in his ruling.

While this issue doesn’t stem from the digital domain, any issue of privacy has online implications. Last year, a California court ruled “Yes on 8” donors must be made public, and that information was quickly used by gay marriage supporters, mapping contributors and boycotting businesses.

Maine’s citizens will vote on the law this Tuesday on Ballot Question 1. Voting no preserves the state's gay marriage laws. If you are in Maine, please vote NO.

Cloud Computing: A cautionary tale

It was revealed last week that hackers had stolen sensitive account information from a major online payroll processing company to directly target its customers.

PayChoice, a company that provides online payroll tools to over 125,000 organizations and back-end support to 250 other payroll companies, was breached. Hackers emailed PayChoices customers directly with detailed information about their accounts to coerce them into giving up their passwords.

According to the Washington Post: Unlike typical so-called "phishing" scams -- which are sent indiscriminately to large numbers of people in the hopes that some percentage of recipients are customers of the targeted institution -- this attack addressed PayChoice customers by name in the body of the message. The missives also included reference to each recipient's onlineemployer.com user name and a portion of his or her password for the site.

PayChoice is taking appropriate steps to understand what happened and to correct any issues caused. Nevertheless, this serves as a cautionary tale as we move further down the road to decentralized cloud computing.