China is proposing increasing the number of last names in use. The current draft would allow parents to combine their last names when naming a child. Currently china has about 1.3 billion people and 85 percent use the same 100 surnames.

US IT company to pay 2.4 million to H1b workers

cnet reported that a Cambridge, Mass company is having to pay back 2.4 million to 607 workers who were paid below the prevailing wage. In order for a US company to hire an H1b person they must pay them a similar wage to a US employee. This is supposed to mean that H1b workers aren’t brought into the country as cheap labor. If you take the 2.4 million and divide it between the 600 workers you come up with about $4000 per person. The Department of labor website doesn’t mention how they were able to detect this underpayment but my guess is it was related to employees not being paid when they are on the bench i.e. didn’t have work to do since calculating the prevailing wage is hard.

US companies don’t like employees to talk about how much employees earn which makes it very hard for an H1b employee to know if they are being paid at a lower wage or not. The opposite is not true for US employees, if a company applies for a new H1b visa they must post in a public location copies of the application for other employees to review. This can be very interesting reading if you company hires a lot of foreign nationals. It also means you can view what the current new hire wage is.

Bike stats

To avoid the heat of the day I decided to bike to old town Alexandria and back leaving about 8pm. The sun was due to set at 8:30. The one thing I wasn’t prepared for was the hale of oncoming bugs as I biked along beside the river.

Stats
Max 26.2
Time !:19:16
Trp 19.4
ODO 218
AVG 14.6

I love the thrill of cycling at night not knowing what is going to come up next. I bike with a nice Nite Rrider bike light which lights the path but it is still fun when a rabbit runs out in front and you chase it a little till it darts off to the grass on the other side.

Immigration debate

It has been interesting hearing the media coverage of the debate on the immigration laws being worked on at the moment. I saw this on cnet and started reading thinking I would hear the same argument that the new points system for green cards are bad for business since they won’t be able to bring in the right people. This is way it started but did at least go on to explain H1b visas.

The media coverage I have been hearing is very misleading they make it sound like an employer is going to have to use the new points system for bringing the right people into the county. The first thing to remember it is very very rare that a company will sponsor a green card for an employee not working in the US since it can end up taking three or more years to get. Instead they bring them into the country on an H1B specialst worker visa or an L1 inter company transfer visa. An H1b is good for up to 6 years. For companies it is going to be, if anything easier to bring a new employee to the US since the proposal is going to increase the number of H1b visas available per year.

What I think business is complaining about, is that if it is harder to get perminant residancy then people won’t want to come to the US.

I am not a huge fan of a visa or greencard appliction being tied to single company, since it opens up the employee to abuse by the employer. I think the point system potentially could be a fairer approach. However being able to covert from an H1b to a greencard is a key part of attracting talented people to work and stay in US.

Fortunately I am out of the immigration waiting game. I was able to get a greencard after getting married. Giving me the chance to abandon my work based application and change jobs.

Referer log

Warning, links are not work safe, and added some extra characters to break the urls

Interesting, I found this in my http logs today

riversideactiongroup.org 81.177.14.41 - - [05/Jun/2007:15:35:08 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 
200 36822 "https://c4806.loladotraff.info/522567xx/" "Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)"
*** "https://c4806.loladotraff.info/522567xx/"

So I did a wget on the url and got

hey! your Link a here : Blog
Given from:
https://www.riversideactiongroup.org/

The first thing that went through my mind was the site had been hacked and was redirecting to a porn site, then I added a browsers string to wget

 
wget -U "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) 
Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4" https://

and got a screen full of html with an iframe that points to the porn I saw earlier.

So it looks like someone is creating a website that when viewed with a search bot will display a page mentioning https://www.riversideactiongroup.org but when viewed with a mainstream browser will display porn.

I am not sure why I saw the reference to the loladotraff site in the logs but makes me wonder if any real people are searching for riversideactiongroup and getting porn. I did a quick search on google, yahoo and ask but didn’t come up with anything obvious.

Open ID

I have been following openID for a while now since I first heard about it on livejournal from brad.

OpenID let you use any authentication provider to prove you are who you say you are. For example if you have a livejournal account you can can leave comments on my blog using your livejournal credentials instead of having to create an account on my blog. You don’t ever give me your username and password, instead my web site would redirect you to livejournal, you enter your username and password then livejournal tells my website if it was successful or not.

Given that anyone can set up a openid server and start using it for spamming comments on blogs I think blog owners will start ranking openID servers on their trust worthiness. This could be very easy to do in the same way Real Time Block Lists (RBLs) work for spam. The end result is that blog owners can look up to see how trustworthy a site is before accepting the credentials. If an openid server is known to be used by spammers then it would get a negative number, otherwise it would have a value between 100 and 0 depending on complaints and compliments.

This opens and interesting idea. What happens if banks started offering an openID services. I know that I would be more likely to trust someone who authenticated using Bank of America compared to openid.somerandomhost.com. To get an openid account on a banking system would would require that the user would have had to open an account with them and jumped through whatever regularity hoops were required to do so.

This sounds very similar to an idea that was floating a few years back where banks would issue each user with a certificate which ther could use to prove their identity.