O’Reilly Hacked
So now that it’s hit the mainstream media (which means it’s Old News online), I’m sure you’ve all heard about Sarah Palin’s email getting “hacked.” I say “hacked” because the perpetrator didn’t really hack anything so much as know two or three easily obtainable pieces of information about a public figure. Palin should know know better and I don’t feel sorry for her. I’d like to comment further on the matter, but I think that, according to a mail that was distributed to all techs yesterday, I’m only allowed to say one of the following: “Yahoo! treats issues of security and privacy very seriously” or “To protect the privacy of our users, we are not able to comment on the details of a specific user account” or “Generally, if Yahoo! receives reports that an account has been compromised, we investigate for suspicious activity and take appropriate action” or “As the largest Web mail service in the US, Yahoo! Mail seeks to help educate consumers with online safety tips at security.yahoo.com.” I do have to say that my position as a Yahoo! email tech has put me in an unbelievably difficult predicament: The Palin camp claims the account has been deleted. Are they telling the truth? What was sitting in there? I’m two clicks away from finding out, eight full hours a day. Do I keep my job or check out Palin’s account? Yahoo! will be pleased to know that I have bills to pay (although the self-control involved in curbing this curiosity keeps my brow sweaty for my entire shift).
Anyway, the media surrounding the whole thing is hilarious, because it’s being pegged as politically motivated or that the “hacker” is a member of some extremist left-wing cyberterrorist group. C’mon, it’s /b/. They don’t care if she was potentially using free email services to circumvent the transparency of government emails, I’m sure the original idea was to Goatse everybody in her contacts. So Blubbering Vagina O’Reilly finally threw his two cents in and made the crucial mistake of pissing off The Internet Hate Machine.
Oh, he also made the crucial mistake of not understanding a very simple concept, despite it being drilled into his fat fucking head for four solid minutes, but that’s not why his site was hacked. In a hilarious turn of events, Bill O’Reilly’s site’s database was compromised and the PLAIN TEXT passwords of several hundred of his subscribers were posted online. Now, I’m sure anybody with a subscription to O’Reilly’s site probably isn’t a super-cool human being, but they don’t really deserve to have their information posted all over the net. I think the point should have been made clear to O’Reilly that you don’t make enemies with The Internet, but without the victimizing-his-moron-disciples part.
Whatever, still funny to me.
Workartwork V
Not related.
Selling Things Online is Fun!
I’m buying my GF and I new laptops, so I’m selling my old Fujitsu Lifebook. I’ve sold some NES games recently on Craigslist, so I figured I’d use it to unload my laptop as well. So far all I’ve gotten is a bunch of responses from “Nigerian bank account”-type scammers. It’s pretty obvious which mails are bullshit, but for whatever reason I feel obligated to give them the benefit of the doubt (i.e., treat each response like it’s not Jean Claude Damn Scam). Here’s a sample of the correspondence so far.
From Marx:
is it still avaliable ?????IF YES,pls do u accept payment with paypal? can u ship to west africa? its for my patner abroad on an inspection work for his company and its meant to be a birthday gift for him,am presently in need of it for him and let me know if u are ready, i will add $120for shipping,reply awaited.thanks
Oh! Obviously a scam, so I don’t even bother. However, despite the fact I think it’s a bit odd that the first two hits on my posting are from “Marx” and then “Marc,” I give Marc a chance because his mail is short and to the point.
From Marc:
Hello,
Is this item still up for sale???.From Me to Marc:
Yes, yes it is. Interested in maybe taking a look at it?From Marc:
Thanks allot for the reply……..actually i supposed to come and check the item out but im out of states right now so i wont be able to come over but i will pay $250 for the item and please note that am shipping the item to an overseas partner so i will include $100 shipping fee,i will arrange for the payment of the item via paypal,it is very secure and fast mode of making an online payment or
transfer,to proceed with the transaction asap send me your paypal email address so that i can proceed with the payment of the item.
Thank you very much hope to hear from you soonFrom Me to Marc:
Meh. Nice try.
Because my posting was listed in “electronics” instead of “computers” it is flagged for removal. I repost it in the correct category and get some more emails:
From Kimberly:
I’d like to know if this item is still available.From Me to Kimberly:
…yes?From Kimberly to Me:
Am glad for your quick response..Actually am currently in New Zealand but i want the item for my Daughter who study abroad..Am ready to offer $80 as an extra and i have contact USPS(Global Express) for the shipping cost and they told me it will cost $80 for the shipping..Kindly get back to me with the total cost and your Paypal email so that i can effect the payment to you now if possible you can get the item shipped to her today.Many Thanks.
From Me to Kimberly:
If you’re going to rip people off at least make it believable. Christ.
From Collins:
Do you still have it?From Me to Collins:
*sigh* Yes.From Collins to Me:
Thanks for your reply concerning my enquiry.I am satisfied with the condition of the item and willing to offer you an amount of $240 for the product, I would be glad to make payment with the following payment option: I will be making the payment by CASHIER CHECK which a friend of my who is owing some amount and he is the one to send the check.Once the CASHIER CHECK is received and clears in your bank,there ill be a difference on the amount, there ill be an addition sum added to the amount you have to get.After u recieve the check u take it to ur bank when it clears then deduct your money out of it,then send the rest to the shipper who will get it from you, you will send the rest via western union informaton….What i need now is your full name a address and your cell phone number ok,so as to proceed soonest hope to read from you..From Me to Collins:
Wow you write a lot like Marc, Marx, and Kimberly! And you all handle extremely simple transactions in the same unnecessarily complicated manner! What an amazing coincidence!
From Ben to Me:
How low will you go on this item?From Me to Ben:
…asking 200. But make me an offer.From Ben to Me:
Hi
Thanks for your Reply.. I am happy that you still have the item because i have been searching to see this kind for long now, i am buying it as a special gift to my son. Your price is considered.I will be sending the payment to you can send me your Full name and Home address so that i will send it to you through money order which is also 100% safe for online transaction. I will be taking care of the shipment tax so you don’t need to bother yourself regarding the shipment fee as i will add it when sending the payment to you.
Please i will want you to get the package ready for me and consider it as sold as i will be sending out the payment once i receive the required information as stated.
I will be waiting to receive your reply soon. Have a nice day.
206 666 1926From Me to Ben:
You have got to be kidding me.
I almost want to bite on one of these mails just to see exactly how the scam works. So far this is about how much sense it makes to me:
Step 1: Bill ships laptop to West Africa
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
I have since appended my listing to say “First response that is not spam gets special discount.”
Edit:
Extra super fun - I Googled Yahood Googled the number and got a pretty sweet list of people bitching about the same dude. He’s been doing this for a while and from what I can tell, isn’t very successful.
Bored.
In the time it took me to photograph and blog this, it quit being funny to me.
Blu-Ray Makes Me Steal (More)
I’m not a Blu-Ray fan. In fact, I don’t give a fuck. Oh, and it really only has a little to do with my intense hatred of Sony.
Think of it this way: Back in 1999 I was used to playing video games on the Playstation and Nintendo 64 and when the Dreamcast came out, I think my pants were literally blown off. That was the difference between VHS and DVD. It wasn’t “slightly better.” You got a smaller form factor, you got better picture and sound quality, you didn’t have to rewind when you were done, you could easily skip to any point in the movie, the machine never ate the movie, and you didn’t have to worry about tracking. That’s a fucking upgrade. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD came out and it was a little bit more like the difference between Dreamcast and PS2. “NEW! Does all the exact same things, only a little bit better (if you’re really looking for it).”
In fact, as an interesting aside, the difference is so subtle they have to exaggerate those side-by-side comparisons they run in electronics departments to impress Johnny Clueless Consumer. I was standing in line the other day at Best Buy watching an enormous display of several nature scenes in both standard DVD resolution and HD. Sure, HD looks good. There’s a couple hundred more lines of vertical resolution. But on this demo, there was a very distinct difference in color; the HD side of the screen was much more vivid. Now, last time I checked, resolution had nothing to do with color saturation. I don’t care how you slice it, that’s very unscrupulous marketing. But I digress. Best Buy can eat a bag of dicks anyway.
So I have absolutely no interest in upgrading my player, my TV and my entire library of movies and TV shows for “a little better” and yet, when I find myself standing in front of the DVD case looking at new releases, I can’t help but think “…this is a dead format.”
Really, the only thing an honest consumer can do is just download more. I guess I’ll just download rips of DVDs I would have otherwise bought until Blu-Ray has such deep market penetration that I feel like the guy standing in the clearance cassettes section of the music store when I’m looking at DVDs. That’s my cue to move on, and not a second before. I asked Jesus and he said that’s what he would do. Not Christ, mind you. Jesus is this guy I go to for bargain car stereo parts, but I always trust his judgment when faced with a moral dilemma.
Half-Baked Joke
Was out with mah GF and our friends-that-are-also-another-couple (because we’re apparently old and lame now) and passed a McDonald’s whose marquee read THE McRIB IS BACK. In front of this McDonald’s was a group of men in their early 40s just standing around, hanging out, and half a joke came to my mind, which I blurted out to the car without figuring out the other half:
“Hey, m’crib is back! You guys want to come hang at m’crib?” (Speaking as if I were one of the middle aged dudes in front of the McDonald’s)
Look, I’m really proud of this half joke, even if I never exactly get the rest of it to work. Also I had been drinking for a couple hours by this point.
…
SOMEWHERE IN HERE IS A REALLY CLEVER JOKE. POTENTIALLY.
Whatever, half the car laughed. Which included me and the other guy. Girls don’t get the really high-brow stuff.
Belgian Awful
Are all Belgian beers white beers? I picked up a couple wacky beers at this silly store across the street (because they had cool labels) thinking “Well, just because it’s brewed in Belgium doesn’t mean it’s a Belgian-STYLE white,” but I was wrong.
Let me explain my hate/hate relationship with white beers. For unknown reasons a couple years back I went through this wheat phase where I consumed only wheat beers — primarily Sunshine, Blue Moon and Hefeweizen bullshit. This lasted for several months before I realized that none of these beers taste particularly good. Blue Moon was what finally did me in — after weeks and weeks of drinking the stuff, I was drinking one and realized it tasted like there was dish soap in it. For all I know, there may have been in this instance, but I cannot drink a white beer now without thinking “dish soap” (I just learned on Wikipedia this is due to the presence of lactic acid). They now all taste exactly the same to me and it’s all bad.
As far as I can tell, this is the only way in which Belgians know how to produce beer, a process known as “how not to make beer.” Piraat and Gulden Draak are no exceptions, despite having really cool names and a 10.5% alcohol content. Whatever, here’s some pictures I took of the cool bottles/labels.
Workartwork IV
Yes, I worked today. No, nobody needs goddamn web hosting tech support on Labor Day.
The Audacity of Hope
I know the feeling has been bothering me for a while now, but it wasn’t until today that I was finally able to really put it all together in my head:
Probably the most depressing part of my job is the surprising number of people I talk to every day with these really lofty “let’s start a web business” goals that don’t know the first thing about…well, the web for one — or business for another.
These people aren’t necessarily stupid or anything — it’s normally people trying to approach a very dot-com-bubble-era idea with an analog mentality (e.g. “I’ll promote my searchable restaurant review site with business cards!”) — but I can’t help but wince when a customer explains to me, “Well, basically I want to have a site with _____ on it and people will be able to sign up and search for ______ and do _______ with it.” I can’t just explain to these people “Well, let’s start by getting a book on MySQL and a book on working with databases in PHP, dip your toes into some Photoshop and Dreamweaver and go ahead and give us a call back in three years,” or “You would be better off investing the twelve dollars a month you spend on hosting in high-risk penny stocks.” No, I have to briefly mute my headset so they can’t hear me sigh before adjusting my position in my seat, in some futile attempt to shake off this feeling of unease, while I summon up about 90 minutes’ worth of patience before taking my headset off mute and beginning “Alright, let’s pull up your browser and go to…”
“What’s a browser?”
It never ceases to amaze me the number of people that sign up for web hosting services that don’t know the difference between Yahoo and their web browser, their web browser and their ISP, or even the difference between web addresses and email addresses. My mind reels when a simple instruction like “go to ______.com” turns into a five-minute digression from the actual problem I’m troubleshooting (I’d say at least a third of people that call in for tech support go to URLs by searching for them. I’ve dealt with hundreds of people who are literally afraid to type something in their browser’s address bar and probably just as many who don’t know where the address bar is or what it does). I don’t understand the logic that would convince somebody that they can make a living, or even money on the side, from computers without knowing the first damn thing about computers.
It breaks my heart to sit on the phone with these people until they have the beginnings of a very Web 1.0-style site (it doesn’t help that our site-building software is, in a word, shit), to hear the excitement in their voices as they slowly start to catch on to the basics of getting a page on the web, they thank me and I’m left to only imagine the disappointment when, in a year, their site isn’t in the top 995,000 on Google and their site traffic statistics reflect only their own IP, which is collected when they check their site statistics every day.
*sigh* On the other hand, I understand structural engineers make a lot of money so I think I might pick up some…I don’t know…structural engineering tools or something. Might be able to supplement my tech support income a little bit.
Werther’s Dirigible
Quite by accident the other night a friend discovered that a White Russian in which you substitute vanilla rum for the vodka tastes exactly like Werther’s Original caramels. I showed the drink to Cameron this afternoon and he dubbed the butterscotchy concoction a Werther’s Dirigible. I like it.
Try it yourself: 1 part vanilla rum, 2 parts coffee liqueur, a splash of half and half (over ice), but be aware that they are unbelievably heavy on the stomach and you can generally only finish one in a single sitting. For an even sweeter variation, substitute vanilla Silk (the soy milk brand) creamer for the half and half.
