Monday, February 02, 2009

Worst phishing attempt ever

Over the past years, scammers have taken to sending people really targeted email that looks like it comes from a trusted source in hopes of tricking the victim into giving up sensitive information -- passwords to corporate networks or banking accounts. Stuff like that. It's called spear phishing, and I write about it quite a lot. I think that a spearphishing email designed to look like it came from Network Solutions was probably responsible for one of the worst data breaches in the past few months. It's not really even a phishing attempt, just a mishmash spam that borrows from spearphishing techniques.

Anyhow, not all spear phishers are geniuses.

Check out this one I got today from my "IDG commander"

Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 16:49:28 +0530
From: "idg . com commander"
To:
Subject: Renewal of Your Account

Dear lovely purchaser,

Our site - http://www.4idiots[--don't go to this site it may be malicious -- Bob ]weightLossTheCrown.net

"four days into the program and lost 7 lbs"

"I bought FatLoss4Idiots and lost 6 pounds during the first 11 days.

So, it has a fair chance of working for you as well, but, only if you are 100% dedicated to follow the diet - and if you don't get bored of it.

I have tried many diets, this one offers immediate results, which is motivating and keeps you going.

I want to encourage people who have not been successful in the past with dieting to TRY THIS ONE."

So, go visit http://www.4idiotsweigh[--don't go to this site it may be malicious -- Bob ]tLossTheCrown.net if you have made up your mind to buy it.

All the best,
idg.com commander


Thursday, January 29, 2009

Going all night

I'm working late, not worrying about my early start tomorrow. Writing. Listening to music I like. Alone. No distractions. Making progress. I want it to last all night. When I was young and pulled all-nighters it was all dread and distraction. Tonight is more fun, maybe because this time seems rarer and more precious. And it seems like somehow, slightly, I'll get it done. I just know it. I'm enjoying my thoughts right now. The strange guy being pushed out of a car in the tenderloin. Memories of Stockton tunnel and Chinatown at night, that idiot I spoke with today who clearly hates me in a way that makes me feel good. Time to get back to work, but first, a distraction from the past...

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Seen on Filbert Street

A good use of dead wood.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Dreams of Steel

Anna and I have been fighting lately about bags and the fine line between garbage and adventure.

The way, I see it, Dreams of Steel was an act of divine inspiration. Three years ago one of the nuns next door asked me if she could have our old cans and beer bottles. It was for a field trip to Germany. A simple girl, a little bit worn, but like all of our neighborhood nuns, solid and clean as a bar of soap. Of course I said yes. The nuns work on missions here, teaching at the local school and they have a way of disappearing one day, as if abducted by aliens. After a year or so of trash segregation, that's what happened with our bottle collector. For a week I kept putting bottles in the milk crates she'd set aside for me, as though feeding an alley cat that had picked up and moved on. Then it was back to the deep blue recycling bin.

The nun told me she'd take the bottles and cans to the dump, for the nickel or eight cents or ten cents a pop. In Canada, where I grew up, we return bottles to a corner store. I can remember muggy summer afternoons spent trawling through ditches. I'd collect mossy bottles and then trade them in at the corner store for one more set of Star Wars collector cards, or gum or fudge. Here in the US we just throw them away or recycle them. I'd never thought of returning them in San Francisco.

I don't know what made me start, but sometime this summer I began sneaking cans into a black garbage bag in our basement. I didn't tell Anna about it. I didn't reflect. Just squish the aluminum cans with your foot and put them in the bag. What a divinely satisfying sound that is, to destroy something made of metal on the concrete floor. I remember this as my Dreams of Steel period (I didn't know it, but I was about to become mightily depressed) but if you could fairly call it anything, "fantasy of consumption," would be appropriate. In retrospect, I think maybe I saw drinking -- synecdoche for the nonstop consumption of this enterprise we call family -- as a way of somehow building something. The plan was simple: I'd take the $30 I'd eventually make from cans, invest that in some kind of wickedly clever investment scheme (penny stocks preferred) and presto: one fortune!

This idea of building something up from nothing via luck has been a lifelong obsession of mine. Here was my chance.

Only things didn't go quite as planned. Sometime around my third garbage bag, Anna clued in. There was discussion. Loving, but firm, she told me to move the cans out of doors, preferably into the recycling bin behind our house.

Even then, busted, I couldn't let go of Dreams of Steel. I moved the cans behind the house, peering nervously over the balcony as our new neighbor cleaned up the back yard. He wasn't going to take my cans away. Just to be safe, I moved them to the wall, to mark my ownership. Weeks were going by.

At this point, I had to confront another grim reality. I had no idea how or where to return these cans. I had lost all sense of how many cans there were in all these garbage bags, but clearly we were talking about a windfall in the $16 to $30 range. Thanksgiving was approaching and I was getting that crazy project that shall never be completed vibe from Anna. "No," I told myself, banishing all thoughts of Gigi's baby book, our cork collection and that very promising anthology of poems. "This thing is for real."

I chose the day after Thanksgiving to act, dubbing it. Dreams of Steel; Day of Action. Thanksgiving itself was devoted to eating and reconnaissance, learning the ins and outs of the California Refund Value system. Here's how it works: anyone can charge you money for your cans and bottles, but only a handful of select "recycling centers" can actually give you money back. I imagined something like a pop machine, but in reverse. 20 minutes of shoveling crushed cans and I'd be on my way to a fortune.

Islay,1, being the least likely to squawk, became my co-conspirator. We got up early, with the house still sleeping, and headed out to the park for a warm-up walk. Thanksgiving always draws a large number of homeless to our neighborhood to score free eats at the church next door and, inspired by their shopping carts and get-up-and-go, we shortened our walk and headed into the garage.

I put a cardboard box in the back of the car (I really had thought of everything) to cover my tracks and loaded her up with empties. The bags were like too-big discarded candy wrappers but the weight of them with all of those valuable cans felt fertile and good.

I should mention that it was more than the inspiration of my fellow man that put me and my two year-old in that car that day. There was also the matter of the mouse, who had been nibbling away at our trash for a few days before. This happens from time to time when you live next to a church. I like to think of their fall visits as a quaint seasonal occurrence, like pumpkins on doorsteps or the summer fog. But for Anna, they have a more squalid subtext and, given the unspoken tension beneath her recent Dreams of Steel discovery, there was a nastier vibe this time around.

"I want those cans out of here," she'd told me after surveying the ripped bag trimmed with torn garbage and mouse droppings. "They're attracting rats."

I'm still pretty sure we were only talking about mice, but let me get back to the shining moment of this whole enterprise: Me and Islay -- the genesis moment of a family legacy, perhaps? -- in the Subaru, backing out of the garage, heading to Cala Foods to cash in our booty. Islay is indiscriminate in her enthusiasm for car rides, whether we roll out of the garage or not, so she was the perfect co-conspirator. Happy and gurgling, we backed out of the garage into the damp sunlight.

After casing out Cala, we concluded that the can return had to be in the lower parking lot, and so we took the spiral ramp down and into a scene that was reminiscent of several choice Places You'd Not Want To Be Caught Dead In: county jails, third-world homes for the aged, Reno's Greyhound depot. Junky cars lurked in the darkness. Were those people living in them? At the back corner of the garage there was a line of maybe a dozen of the most broken people you could imagine standing in front of shopping carts. The wrong kind of laugh; a grey beard, unkempt; a stained blue jacket, unkempt as well. They looked like they'd been waiting forever. In front of them there was a bin and maybe a guy. I looked down at the trash gathered at the bottom of the ramp. There was a broken plastic bag of shit there, oozing out brown the size of a baby. I picked up Islay and left.

Maybe a post-Thanksgiving rush at recycling centers is traditional, I told myself. I'll come back during low season, whenever that is.

But there was to be no comeback for the Dream of Steel. After one more conversation, this one angry, with both Anna and I feeling that the other was somehow missing some fundamental sense of decency, I backed down and threw our future into the recycling bin behind our house. At first, it was like giving up on a living thing, but that feeling passed. Who knows, maybe letting go of an illusion.

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Tuesday, December 09, 2008

A gas tax. Hell yes!

Driving home from Cisco last night, I passed a gas station: $1.95 a gallon. That's expensive, compared to the rest of America but cheap cheap cheap compared to the $4 or so I was paying in the summer. In fact, the steep drop in gas prices here in the U.S. has pretty much amounted to a multibillion dollar economic stimulus package for most Americans. A lot of that money we were previously spending on gas, we can now spend on other stuff, those of us who still have jobs, anyway.

But now we're supposed to be spending money on bailing out an auto industry which, through its own short-sightedness and inefficiency has build a strong market-based argument to be left alone over the past decade. Of course this being America, we're not talking about ways to actually pay for this bailout, just whether or not we should do the bailout. As if we could deficit finance our way out of any problem.

If things were really that easy, we wouldn't actually have any economic problems. Everyone talks as though the US could just borrow indefinitely, but that's not really the case. The Treasury can print all the money it wants, but at some point, people will lose confidence and simply stop taking it. So we'll have to print more, while watching it become worth less. Now this is a great way to inflate away with a massive debt, but it's also a wonderful way to ruin the world's strongest economies and destroy the savings of everyday Americans. Who knows how close we are to all of this. If we've learned one thing over the past few months it's that no one really understands these complex global financial systems. Every disaster comes as a complete shock to our economic oracles.

Much as it was previously taboo to suggest market intervention and now taboo to suggest laissez faire, there is a prohibition in the us against talking about raising the money to pay for any of this profligacy. But I'm going to suggest it anyway: If we're going to bail out the auto industry, why not do it via a gas tax? Let that money back whatever loans we make to the auto industry. If they pay it back, introduce a gas rebate to make it even cheaper (when it heads to the inevitable $4 a gallon range again). Make the people who buy the biggest cars and drive the most miles pay the most for this bailout that not everybody wants. Give people a choice to not pay for the bailout by driving less.

Of course it'll never happen. The Democrats have been too bullied and frightened into ever suggesting anything approximating fiscal responsibility. Imagine! That anyone would ever actually have to pay for anything. Tax and spend bad. Borrow and spend good.

But you think that with all these countless hours of debate on this bailout that someone would be at least talking about ways to pay for it.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

There's now a blog for all things Gardencourt (a.k.a. McGarrigle folk music compound) featuring a just superb illustration of the grand old place done by Kathleen Weldon. I love it.

Monday, November 03, 2008

Obama's name used to flog anti gay marriage prop in california


Saw this ad on Facebook today. It links to this ad.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Wanted: #2 boss for free world (some executive experience required)



(thanks Timmy)

Bailout bill bails out cyclists

From the San Francisco Bicycle coalition.

The SFBC is happy to announce that after seven years of slogging, the federal Bicycle Commuter Benefit suddenly became a reality last week as part of the $850 billion bailout bill signed by the President on Friday. The "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" contains language (scroll to p. 205) that will amend the U.S. Tax Code to permit employers to reimburse employees, tax free, for "reasonable" expenses related to bike commutes, including bike and equipment purchases, repairs, and storage if the bicycle is used as a "substantial part" of the commuter's trip to work for the month. The benefit option will go into effect for tax year 2009 (so start saving those receipts come January). Thanks to Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Senator Ron Wyden for their years of work on this initiative (though, as it happens, neither Blumenauer nor Wyden voted in favor of the massive bailout bill!).

Monday, October 06, 2008

Hindsight is allright

I have to hand it to the NY Times's Gretchen Morgenson. She's been on top of this mortgage meltdown every step of the way. She's the first person I remember writing about the credit default swap implosion, and it's interesting to read her Feb 2008 column about these products today.

Equally interesting is this Aug 2007 column by Ben Stein, downplaying the whole situation. Stein writes:

The rate of loss in subprime mortgages keeps climbing. In time, perhaps it will double, maybe back to $67 billion. This is a large sum by absolute standards, and I would sure like to have it in my bank account.

But by the metrics of a large economy, it is nothing. The total wealth of the United States is about $70 trillion. The value of the stocks listed in the United States is very roughly $15 trillion to $20 trillion. The bond market is even larger.

Much more to the point, the fears and terrors about subprime mortgages have helped knock off 6.7 percent of the stock market’s value in recent weeks. This amounts to about $1.1 trillion, or more than 30 times the losses so far in the subprime market. In other words, these subprime losses are wildly out of all proportion to the likely damage to the economy from the subprime problems.


In that same issue of the NYT, Morgenson explained why the mortgage crisis had begun to spread, or the reason that traders were giving at the time.

It's easy to do a quick superficial analysis of something and come up with an opinion. But to do some real reporting, and figure out what's really going on when it's not conventionally understood. That takes real reporting. It's comforting that some people, like Morgenson, are allowed to do that in this era of click-whoring and superficial journalism.

The Glob is back

After a, what, 1 year hiatus, James MacDougall's Glob & Wail is back, along with many cat, dog & bird photos. Let's hope we don't have to wait much longer or the crazy video postings. That was always my favorite part. Good to have you back, Jimmy.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Ralph Stanley's Obama ad



Wow.

From the Boston Herald.

With banjos picking in the background, Stanley opens the folksy 60-second ad with, "Howdy, friends ..." He claims Obama will cut taxes for "everyday folks" and invest in rural areas to keep children from leaving home to find jobs.

I can't sleep, but not because of the bailout

When we reporters talk about CEOs we sometimes make it sound like they are somehow the owners of the companies they run, or manage really. Usually that's not true. In publicly traded companies the CEO owns, at best, a fraction of the enterprise. Bill Gates owns way more than a typical CEO -- just under 9 percent of Microsoft -- the company's current CEO, Steve Ballmer, even less.

We forget this, but CEOs are really middle managers -- people in between the real owners, the shareholders, and the company.

So what is their real incentive? To help out those faceless shareholders, or to do the best they can for themselves and their families? Nobody hires a CEO for his sense of altruism.

I think Americans intuitively understand this. That's why some many of us are upset about this bailout. We don't want to pay for someone else's mistakes... not if we don't have to.

Take AIG. A few years ago, a middle manager there named Joseph J. Cassano came up with the idea of selling insurance on debt to protect the policy holder in the event that the debt couldn't be repaid. These credit default swap products were a pretty good business for AIG, and other insurers. According to the NYT credit default swap market has grown fast:

Since 2000, it has ballooned from $900 billion to more than $45.5 trillion — roughly twice the size of the entire United States stock market.


At AIG, Cassano's group of 377 employees was soon generating 5 percent of the 116,000 person company's revenue. Because the credit default swap market was unregulated, AIG could write policies without having a whole heck of a lot of cash to back them up, so it was a gamble for the company, but it paid off for Cassano & his team. Over the past seven years this 377-person group was paid $3.56 billion (yes billion) in compensation. (the whole story is here)

So AIG is now part of the federal government, because nobody wants to buy up all the money they own, now that these gambles have gone south. But will anyone recoup this $3.56 billion? Of course not. Though this intuitively feels like fraud, there's no mechanism to get the money back or to punish those who cocked up.

In the free market world, the company is supposed to go out of business, and people who make bad bets and risky business decisions shouldn't be able to get jobs. But when everyone is doing it... time for a bailout.

This American life had a great episode about this scandal today, and how it was starting to affect short-term corporate credit. I don't remember reading this in any of the reporting I'd seen, but apparently these credit default swaps could be purchased by anyone on any type of debt. I guess it was a hedging instrument, but as the show points out, it was really just a form of gambling, like short selling. They say it was as if your neighbor could take out fire insurance on your house. So if it burned down, he'd collect too. That's what helped it really get out of hand.

This American Life also notes that there's supposedly an option in this bailout bill for the Treasury to buy a stake in these banks instead of just purchasing the bad loans. It may be socialism, but in these bailout days, the argument against socialism seems to amount to "screw the taxpayer," so this also may be good business for the US government.

Anyhow, Dave (my oracle on all things financial) says we've hit a fork in the road. Bailout=inflation. No bailout=deflation. Makes sense to me. I don't see any other way of paying for these big-government Bush administration programs except inflating the debt away.

That's why I'm putting all my money into gold and Martian real estate. I want to be on the ground floor for the next speculative boom in 2100.