Technology

I just read this email this morning, which has to win a prize for the best Nigerian 419 scam I’ve ever seen: Reply-To: [email protected] From: “Mrs. Mary S. Derrick”[email protected] Subject: Stop Contacting those people !!! Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:43:50 +0100 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 To: undisclosed-recipients:; X-NetStation-Status: PASS Attn: My Dear, I am Mrs Mary Susan Derrick, I am a US citizen, 48 years Old. I reside here in New Braunfels Texas. My residential address is as follows. 108 Crockett Court. Apt 303, New Braunfels Texas, United States, am thinking of relocating since I am now rich. I am one of those that took part in the Compensation in Nigeria many years ago and they refused to pay me, I had paid over $20,000 while in the US, trying to get my payment all to no avail. So I decided to travel down to Nigeria with all my compensation documents, And I was directed to meet Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson, who is the member of COMPENSATION AWARD COMMITTEE, and I contacted him and he explained everything to me. He said whoever is contacting us through emails are fake. He took me to the paying bank for the claim of my Compensation payment. Right now I am the most happiest woman on earth because I have received my compensation funds of $1,500,000.00 Moreover, Mr Henshaw I. Anderson, showed me the full information of those that are yet to receive their payments and I saw your name as one of the beneficiaries, and your email address, that is why I decided to email you to stop dealing with those people, they are not with your fund, they are only making money out of you. I will advise you to contact Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson You have to contact him directly on this information below. COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE Name : Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson Email: [email protected] Phone: +234 802 739 4935 You really have to stop dealing with those people that are contacting you and telling you that your fund is with them, it is not in anyway with them, they are only taking advantage of you and they will dry you up until you have nothing. The only money I paid after I met Mr. Henshaw I. Anderson was just $580 for the paper works, take note of that. Once again stop contacting those people, I will advise you to contact Mr Henshaw I. Anderson so that he can help you to Deliver your fund instead of dealing with those liars that will be turning you around asking for different kind of money to complete your transaction. Thank You and Be Blessed. Mrs. Mary Susan Derrick.She’s being so honest about those other Nigerian scammers that ripped her off, so surely she must be honest about this compensation fund. The sad thing is that those who have been ripped off multiple times already will probably fall for this one, too. ...

My mortgage has been purchased by Chase Bank a couple of times (after the first time, I refinanced with another bank and then Chase bought my mortgage from them), and they’re my current lender. I pay extra principal with every payment, usually about 30% more. For my February payment, I decided to reduce the extra principal a bit, for various reasons including keeping a bit more cash on hand in current economic conditions. Unfortunately, I made a $100 error in my payment. Rather than paying an extra $40.37, I underpaid the monthly payment by $59.63. I learned my mistake when I received my mortgage statement, indicating that my entire payment was in “suspense funds received” and had not been applied to my mortgage at all. I immediately called Chase. Even though it was an hour before their call center closed, I was unable to get to a human being. Instead, after being told I was being transferred to customer service, I got an automated message saying that my call could not by completed. I looked for online options for payment, but the Chase website referred me instead to their phone-based “FastPay” system. The “FastPay” system by phone charges a $15 fee (which the phone system says can be avoided by using the online payment system) and only allows making a full payment. I tried again the next morning, and got through to Tonja, a customer service rep who told me that I could only make a full payment through the phone (not the $100 I wanted to pay), but said if I connected an external bank account online, I could make the payment that way, and as soon as the extra $100 was received, the payment would be applied as normal. I’m also well within the 15-day grace period for a payment, so I don’t have to worry about late fees. Online, I searched through some counter-intuitive menu options–within the mortgage account, payment options send you to the page about FastPay over the phone–I finally found that from the front page I could get to an option to connect an external account. I started the process, and learned that my bank could not be connected instantly by putting in my online banking authentication information, but had to use a method of verification where Chase puts two small deposits in my account and I come back later and input those amounts back to Chase to prove that it’s my account (or at least that I have access to it). It then allowed me to attempt the instant verification method, despite its previous claim that my bank didn’t accept it, but that failed (and I probably shouldn’t have tried–Chase shouldn’t have my authentication credentials to another bank). It then said it would take up to two business days for these deposits to go through. The next day, my bank showed me that there were two pending deposits from Chase (yet another cost Chase is incurring), so I went back to the verification page and entered those amounts. Chase’s website informed me that because those deposits had not been made yet, I was not allowed to verify the amounts yet. Dumb design. I tried again later in the evening, and my verification was accepted. Now I went to the page to make a payment, only to find that once again, the only option is to make an entire payment. Contrary to what Tonja told me, I cannot pay just an additional $100, because there is an outstanding payment that hasn’t been made, and my $1100 sitting in “suspense funds” doesn’t count and can’t be used. Well, I’ve got the money in savings, so I decided that if Chase is going to make things so difficult, I’m going to go ahead and make a full extra payment and deprive them of a little more interest over the life of my loan, in addition to the overhead costs they’ve incurred through this episode. The website told me it would take two business days to process, so it will be applied on February 11–still during the grace period. But now I still am not sure that the $1100 will be applied to principal reduction, so I called in again and spoke with Kim. I explained what has happened, and pointed out to her that Chase is losing money from its inflexibility, and she offered to move $100 from my January extra payment to February so that I could cancel the additional payment. I thanked her for the option (which I would have needed to take if I didn’t have the money to spare), but declined, since that would result in an increase in interest. I asked if she could verify that the $1100 would be applied correctly, and she suggested that I call in again after I see online that the new payment is applied–which will incur yet further costs to Chase. This is a nice demonstration of how an inflexible payment system doesn’t deal well with partial payments can cost a company money and customer goodwill. ...

The Sunlight Foundation, promoting transparency in government, has issued an invitation to check out the beta of Little Sis, a wiki described as “an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans,” created by the Public Accountability Initiative. You can sign up for an account to edit the wiki at http://www.littlesis.org/join, or just check out the site at http://www.littlesis.org.

The record labels and the RIAA have insisted that peer-to-peer filesharing is cannibalizing the music industry and that aggressive lawsuits and copy protection are necessary to protect the industry. But Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV under a Creative Commons license which allowed free redistribution from its initial release, while also selling it in MP3 format from its website and via Amazon.com, with no copy protection. The result–it’s the #1 selling MP3 album on Amazon.com for 2008 and generated $1.6 million in revenue for the band in its first week, with no cut to a record label. Looks like record labels are now superfluous for established artists, who no longer need to see their revenue cannibalized by middlemen. ...

Jeff Jacobsen and Mark Bunker are hosting a 90-minute Internet radio show on the battle between Scientology and the Internet that took place before Anonymous, and it’s about to start now (4 p.m. Arizona time, 3 p.m. PST, 6 p.m. EST). A number of old-timers from alt.religion.scientology will likely be calling in. It’s on blogtalkradio, show title is “Old-Timers give a history lesson." First guest: Modemac, skeptic, SubGenius, and author of an Introduction to Scientology website, on the early history of alt.religion.scientology. Second guest: Paulette Cooper, author of The Scandal of Scientology, an early major book-length criticism of Scientology, who was the victim of dirty tricks including framing her for a bomb threat and filing 19 lawsuits against her. Third guest: Ron Newman, author of the Church of Scientology vs. the Net web pages and alt.religion.scientology regular. Fourth guest: Yours truly. UPDATE (January 5, 2009): A few clarifications and additional links: The “Miss Bloodybutt” story Modemac referred to is described in the article Jeff and I wrote in Skeptic magazine, which includes dates. The -AB- posting didn’t predate the event and included information from the police report. I interviewed Tom Klemesrud and Linda Woolard as part of my research for that story. I was taken out to lunch by Scientology’s Mesa Org OSA Director, Ginny Leeson, who asked what they could do to stop the criticism and pickets. My reply was that if they stopped suing people and trying to stop criticism, the pickets would probably stop. Ginny Leeson was soon replaced by a new OSA Director, Leslie Duhrman, who was a lot more hostile and aggressive–she went after picketer Bruce Pettycrew with legal action. I have received legal threats from Scientology and a DMCA notice, but nothing ever came of them; I periodically see Church of Scientology IP addresses visiting my web sites (also here). My Scientology private investigators page is still online, though woefully out-of-date. I wasn’t the one who first called for coordinated international pickets, that was Jeff Jacobsen. I did issue (on behalf of the “Ad Hoc Committee Against Internet Censorship”) the first coordinated press release about why the picketing was occurring, in response to Scientology’s “Cancelbunny” that was issuing cancellations of Usenet posts containing their secrets. There was a Salon.com article in 1999 about Susan Mullaney (“xenubat”)’s posted audio files of L. Ron Hubbard saying embarrassing things, which Scientology used the DMCA to shut down. She issued a counter-notice and the material came back online. Some of those clips were used in very funny Scientology-critical songs by “Enturbulator 009” or the “El Queso All-Stars." I’ve previously posted a “Scientology sampler” of my history of Scientology criticism and some posts about the “Anonymous” protests. This blog has a “Scientology” label you can click to find all my Scientology-related posts.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, teens have found a new use for speed cameras–getting revenge on people they don’t like or who have wronged them. Since the tickets from photo radar cameras are issued to the owners of the cars whose license plates are captured, they print out fake license plates on glossy photo paper, stick them over their own license plates, and then go out speeding. This shows yet another flaw in the photo radar ticket process. I’ve speculated that registering your cars in the name of an LLC or trust is probably sufficient to make it difficult to assign individual responsibility to a speeding incident. UPDATE (December 23, 2008): In Australia, an even more creative revenge against a mobile speed camera–have it issue tickets to itself! They could have just noted the plate number and followed the example of the Maryland teens, rather than stealing the actual plate… (Thanks, Adam, for the link.) ...

Jeff Jacobsen has written a detailed article about the Anonymous protests against Scientology, which brings the reader up-to-date on Internet-supported counter-Scientology protesting since the article we wrote for Skeptic in 1995, “Scientology v. the Internet: Free Speech and Copyright Infringement on the Information Superhighway." The new article is called “We Are Legion: Anonymous and the War on Scientology." Check it out. Historical Comments Reed (2008-12-19): I've read the first chapter. Jacobsen provides much detail on the CoS's missteps of which I've heard only bits and pieces over the years. Excellent stuff.What made it especially engaging was having read and studied Shirky's book beforehand. Anonymous' protest serves as a fascinating example of undirected collective action of which Shirky basically said "it's coming."IIRC, Shirky's book hit the shelves about the same time the Anonymous thing got big. ...

Lawsuits by the National Security Archive of George Washington University and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have won a ruling from a U.S. district court judge that the White House can be forced to recover the five million “lost” emails that were deleted between March 2003 and October 2005. Those emails were required to have been preserved under the Presidential Records Act. Another set of emails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney from September 30, 2003 to October 6, 2003 were found to be “lost and unrecoverable” by an Office of Administration investigation. 65,000 backup tapes have been preserved as part of the litigation, and those tapes will apparently be available for review to recover some of the five million lost emails. More details at IntelDaily.

Google is closing its office in Tempe, Arizona on November 21. It’s also closing offices in Denver and Dallas. Alan Eustace, SVP of Engineering & Research, writes at Google’s blog: At Google, engineering is everything - no great engineers, no life enhancing products, no happy users. So we’ve spent a lot of time structuring our engineering operations to make the most of the exceptional talent that’s available across America - developing local centers that give engineers the autonomy and opportunity to be truly innovative. These principles have served us well as we’ve grown, so when the model fails, it’s doubly disappointing. We opened our Phoenix office in 2006 and hoped that it would develop to support many of our internal engineering projects, the systems that make Google, well, Google. But we’ve found that despite everyone’s best efforts, the projects our engineers have been working on in Arizona have been, and remain, highly fragmented. So after a lot of soul searching we have decided to incorporate work on these projects into teams elsewhere at Google. We will therefore be closing our Arizona office on November 21, 2008. We’d like to thank everyone involved in this project for their energy and enthusiasm: our engineers; the engineering community in Arizona; Arizona State University; the city of Tempe; and the greater Phoenix area. We are now working with the Phoenix Googlers to transition them to other locations, or to identify other opportunities for them at Google.I’ve been expecting to see Google start cutting back on expenses in various ways, as it seems to me that their model of business, with huge per-employee expenses, isn’t sustainable for the long term. Apparently it’s also the case that it’s not cost-effective to put separate engineering centers in many locations–they probably need a critical mass of engineers and profitable projects that they didn’t get here. This is probably good news for other high-tech companies and startups in Phoenix, as those Googlers who wish to stay in the Valley become available talent. ...

At Trading Markets is a story about the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history, with the recent Chapter 11 filing of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. at the top of the list. At #9 on the list is my employer, Global Crossing Ltd., about which the article says: Hurt by a sluggish demand and declining prices for bandwidth capacity, and burdened by a heavy debt load, telecom company Global Crossing Ltd. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on January 28, 2002. At the time of filing, Global Crossing had $30 billion in assets and $12 billion in debts. ...