(Photo: Free Code Source)

Today in brilliant ideas: Verizon's security blog tells the story of an employee at an unnamed company who decided to outsource his job to China so that he could "watch cat videos" all day.

When the company noticed that someone from China was using the VPN of the employee (named "Bob") to login, they called their telecommunications company, Verizon, to investigate. Verizon initially thought it was some type of malware, but it turned out that the company just had an amazingly lazy genius on their hands.

"Bob" had hired a Chinese software company to do his job for him for just 1/5th of his six-figure salary, FedExing them his VPN so that they could login from China. This freed him up to spend his days as follows:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.

2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.

5:00 p.m. – Go home

Apparently the Chinese firm was so good at "Bob's" job that he won numerous awards for being a good employee. He also took other jobs at other firms and outsourced those, ensuring himself hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Now is probably a good time to admit that this post was written by a worker in India who has taken over for Jessica so she can watch Pretty Little Liars reruns.

(h/t The Register)

Mr. Matzner (Photo: Twitter)

Too afraid to talk to the girl you like? New York-based mobile marketing startup founder Eric Matzner has a brilliant solution: Pay a stranger $5 on Fiverr to film himself shouting a compliment about your crush on a public bus. Swoon.

Back in May, Mr. Matzner published a post to his blog about how he'd decided to outsource typical human displays of affection--like telling someone you like them, or wishing a parent a happy birthday--to random Internet strangers using crowdsourcing platforms like Fiverr and oDesk.

Mr. Matzner paid someone in London $5, for example, to shout, "Hailey MacArthur is the most beautiful girl in the world and men would do much more than yell loudly on a bus to even have a slight chance at getting with her," which is actually pretty creepy. It apparently worked, though, so there's really no accounting for taste. (UPDATE: Mr. Matzner called Betabeat to clarify that he had been friends with Ms. MacArthur for some time, and the video was actually a gift to her during the "courting process," which does make it less creepy.)

Of the experience, Mr. Matzner concluded, "If I can outsource something as intangible as courage and seduction, then there is little else that can’t be outsourced."

In related news: romance is dead, probably.

(Trigyn.com)

New York City's AIDS case rate is almost triple the U.S. average, according to the city, and HIV is the third leading cause of death for residents ages 35 to 54. So though the idea of a big list of people with one of the world's most stigmatized diseases is a bit creepy, we can understand why the city would want a robust database to track AIDS/HIV cases. But should we really do it on the cheap?

Trigyn Technologies, Inc., a Mumbai-based outsourcing company with offices in the U.S. and Germany, has won a contract to build the database to track American patients with HIV and AIDS and assess co-morbidity in relation to other conditions such as STDs, tuberculosis and hepititis, as per a new requirement in the state health code. Congratulations, guys!

A tipster wrote in to show us a recruitment pitch for the project, which is seeking a Long Island-based developer to serve as consultant. The recruiter refers to a contract with the The Division of Informatics and Information Technology (DIIT), a division of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

From the listing:

Ultimately this infrastructure will create an ecological model of analysis to support, evaluate and drive comprehensive public health strategies that not only address individual risk factors, but also include broad norms and social and environmental factors.

As the project involves integrating four disparate databases of patient data, our tipster was most concerned about privacy: Even if the data is anonymized, medical records contain loads of identifying information, and identification tends to get easier with cross-referencing. "I'm just concerned about privacy and stigmatization of HIV/AIDS patients - I have no doubt they'll be able to take this data and identify exactly who has what disease when they combine databases like this."

It's cool, we're sure Trigyn knows all about the importance of privacy and HIPAA, the latter which is mentioned on its website once. We've reached out to DOHMH for more information. UPDATE, 5:16 p.m.: DOHMH sent a statement: "The Health Department takes every precaution to protect the identity of all HIV positive New Yorkers, in accordance with State law. All HIV-related information is kept in highly secure databases using protocols for confidentiality and data security that are that are reviewed regularly by the New York State Department of Health."

UPDATE, 5/31: Trigyn writes in to say that only U.S. workers are working on the database.  "The resources that work for Trigyn in the US are US Citizens, Permanent US Residents and to a lesser extent, individuals that are otherwise authorized to work in the US," the company said in an email.