Con artists: Setting the standard for global outreach since 1920 September 10, 2006
Posted by fluencyfumble in eGovernance Nugget.2 comments
Fark.com reports news of yet another e-mail scam from the desks of apparent faraway lands. Nearly everyone has caught wind of the old refrain:
WE ARE TOP OFFICIAL OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONTRACT REVIEW PANEL WHO ARE INTERESTED IN IMPORATION OF GOODS INTO OUR COUNTRY WITH FUNDS WHICH ARE PRESENTLY TRAPPED IN NIGERIA. IN ORDER TO COMMENCE THIS BUSINESS WE SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE TO ENABLE US TRANSFER INTO YOUR ACCOUNT THE SAID TRAPPED FUNDS.
Something like that.
One well-meaning eBayer was roughly introduced to a realization that such scammers are by no means restricted to e-mail inboxes. Apparently, the winning bidder in ravitek’s cellphone auction agreed to pay hundreds of dollars over the purchase price upon receipt of shipment — which appeared to be $70.
NIGERIA?! That’s exotic! I wonder if they’ve got lions and tigers! And oh, how nice, the phone is a birthday present for her friend. So that’s where the $70 shipping amount came from. I guess the package travels by cheetah. You don’t know what those crazy Africans are up to these days.
After putting two and two together, the blogger thought better of sending his product (and $70) overseas on the promise of an enigmatic “payment code.”
Good for him.
You would think that such obvious Internet scams are easily avoided by, well, anyone (or, more fairly, anyone who’s heard of them, which has to be just about everyone by now). Not so. Snopes, the Internet’s finest in mythbusting, alarmingly reported in 1997 that more than $100,000 had been drained from naive American pockets — that’s only the reported sum.
Snopes also adds that the scam has been around since 1920, in one form or another. Using huge databases of unsuspecting victims, overseas scanners used to send official-looking fishing docs penned in broken English to anyone with a mailbox.
I, for one, am pleased to observe that they have kept up with times and now respond with the kind of digital global outreach that many local public and non-profit entities could envy. Scammers are gallantly crossing boundaries, translating “funding opportunities” so that they’re available for the perusal of everyone — not just those fortunate enough to have made it into the e-mail database. Nigerian scams are showing up in auctions, googlings, blogs and everywhere else.
A fine example of the spoils of the digital age working to someone’s benefit.
Award-winning Package Design, “Elegant Interface” … What More Is There? September 9, 2006
Posted by fluencyfumble in Milestone.1 comment so far
This week’s FLAG presentation on Snyder Chapter 23, “Computers Can Do Almost [] Everything [] Nothing,” got me thinking.
The Mac v. PC debate was really a minor part of the material presented, but as I sat there watching the slideshow, I kept returning to Snyder’s universality principle: Could it be that my MacMini, Apple’s tiny box of computer joy sitting on my desk at home, was NOT actually superior to the clunky PCs running Windows ‘95 in the lab?
The differences, Snyder says (processors, OS facilities, software), are not fundamental. After all, it is possible to simulate each OS on the other platform — they do the same things differently.
Given that prospect, which Snyder accepts as fact, I posit that the most important difference between Mac and PC — the defining difference — is marketing. Mac users, like most drivers of Jettas and sippers of lattes, tend to define their personal image by consumer choices. Apple’s marketing department has been phenomenally successful in selling an image, not necessarily a kind of computer.
Mac users like to think themselves independent, young, hip, nimble-minded individuals. Hence the snarky TV commercials, hence the facebook.com group Apple Students (in which thousands of college students have willfully aligned their personal profiles to a corporation), hence people plastering little Apple stickers onto the bumpers of their Jettas.
Well, pasting an Apple sticker to your car is like pasting a HEFTY sticker to your car because you thoroughly appreciate the style of their 30-gallon bags.
My reasons for choosing the Apple platform were as follows:
1. Elegant interface
2. Seamless program integration
3. Security, and
4. Cultlike superiority complex
For my purposes (design, facebook stalking and writing windy essays, mostly), the machine does what it’s supposed to. But really, the reasons I chose are the same differences that Snyder discusses — surface only — and shouldn’t matter, with the exception of security.
Here’s the thing about security.
It is no secret that Mac users take their security for granted — not because Mac offers fantastic, cutting-edge protection from viruses and data-miners, but because no one cares about infecting or spying on Macs. Who would bother writing a virus for an OS with 10 percent of market share?
This difference as well is not built into the programming or design of the machine, but is a very nice side benefit of Mac’s relative obscurity.
The milestone here, then, is that I could probably be doing much better things with my time than touting the superiority of my OS … because, apparently, the discussion is moot.
However, in the halls of the Internet, the battle rages on:
Links for your approval:
1. Black Hat conference disables MacBook Pro security to infect it with a virus to which its driver was previously immune — to make a point about Macs being vulnerable … which, to that virus, they are not.
2. TechWorld predicts in February that this will be the year that new malware threats kick complacent Mac users are off the smug pedestial. Still waiting.
3. A list of reasons Windows is inherently “at greater risk of catastrophic attacks”
And, for a bit of color, a nice, green pie.
This data is based on Apple’s response rate to fixing up security problems discovered by Secunia Advisories.
password1 .. PassWord1 … passWORD1 September 8, 2006
Posted by fluencyfumble in Milestone.1 comment so far
Snyder’s Chapter 12, “Computers in Polite Society — Social Implications of IT,” prescribes heuristics as a non-algorithmic solution to the password problem. Pick a “personally interesting topic,” the author suggests, or create a password based on a memorable phrase. As news reports of scams and large-scale password cracks continually flow into the public consciousness, perhaps people are starting to listen to such advice.
A recent snip from Wired news relates a positive trend. In the name of research (surely!), phishers harvested more than 34,000 user names and passwords from myspace.com. Analysis indicates that the average myspace password is eight characters long, and 81 percent are alphanumeric.
However, some things never change.
The most common password among scammed users, according to the Wired report, was … you guessed it, “password1.” (Runners up include: abc123, myspace1, password, blink182, qwerty1, 123abc, baseball1, football1, 123456, soccer, monkey1, liverpool1, princess1, jordan23, slipknot1, superman1, iloveyou1 and monkey.)
Assuming that no one could ever be remotely interested in my accounts, I have never changed any of my passwords. And really, I only have two passwords. Snyder addresses this with a discussion of security assessment: “Assess the risk in each case,” meaning that my home computer probably does not need a screensaver lock (I live alone), but that my six-year-old e-mail passwords are likely a bit stale.
I will take this learning moment to go switch them up.
If I don’t post here again, it’s because I’ve lost my new password. Cheers!
The Yellowed Pages August 31, 2006
Posted by fluencyfumble in eGovernance Nugget.2 comments
BusinessWeek online reports that Google has added a service to its search lineup. With the help of the new news archive search, curious Googlers will find at their fingertips old — sometimes really old — snips from more than 250 years of scanned-in print publications. BW writes:
One of the prevailing beliefs about Google is that its search engine inevitably devalues Internet content. Why pay $2.50 for, say, an archived magazine article when you can use Google to find a free (and possibly illegal) copy of it on the Internet? Taking that reasoning to its logical conclusion, online publishers of paid content are destined for extinction.
A new product being released by Google (GOOG ) on Sept. 6 undermines such notions. Google News Archive Search will make more than 200 years of news content searchable to all users, the company says. The content will come from publishers and aggregators such as The New York Times, Time magazine, The Guardian, LexisNexis, and Factiva, many of which charge fees for archived content.
Fees for archived content?
This service, by virtue of that stumbling block alone, is rendered pretty close to useless, at least for anyone who does not happen to have subscriptions to the databases searched. A quick trial run of the service will return a list of results from archiving sites that demand cash for articles — so Google is simply presenting me with a list of sites that would like to charge me money. “Awesome.”
Before writing it off entirely, I decided to see what I could get for free. I was granted whole-article access to two articles:
Time.com, a 1938 article about butter
USA Today baseball scores from 1990
And denied access from four:
The New York Times ($4.95)
The Boston Globe ($6.95)
The Philadelphia Inquirer ($2.95)
The Washington Post ($3.95)
So, at least, Time.com and USA Today online are willing to fork over content for the reasonable return of me looking at (or not looking at) the ads crowding the articles.
It certainly makes sense that Google isn’t going to pay subscription fees to the media giants so that its users the world over will have access to 250 years of archived content. I don’t blame them. And I’m not exactly sure why everyone on Slashdot (thread here) seems to have their drawers in a twist over the whole program. However, one commenter on that site makes a valid point that Project Gutenberg, a library of 17,000 free e-books, seems like a much better (read: free-er) way to lead Internet researchers to old-text paydirt.
Google “isn’t making money” from this enterprise.
Researchers probably aren’t getting much from this enterprise.
But publishers and their advertisers are sure to love not only the free traffic to news sites directed from the new Google search, but also the (theoretical) increase in archive sales.
… and they’re not paying Google for this?
