Neat Net Tricks

One thing after another to worry about. Swine flu, and now Conflicker is showing its ugly head, weeks after it was supposed to. Details here.

I read in another blog that a UK mechanic, Collin Wells, claims to have the record for the most spam. He says he receives 44,000 unsolicited messages per day and that equates to nearly 16 million a year. He says the reason he gets so much of the stuff is that he posts his email address everywhere and, when he gets spam, he sends all of it back to the spammers (which, of course, confirms that he has an active email account and opens the door to even more spam.)

The first inclination is to sympathize with Collin. The second impulse is to say “you got what you deserve, bubba!”

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but looking out my window, it seems the bird population is heavier this year. I recently mentioned in NNT about the returning eagles at Hornby Island. They’re kind of fun to watch although not always successful in adding to their progeny.

More successful are the red-tailed hawks who have built a nest on a window ledge at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. You can watch them at http://www2.fi.edu/hawknest.php and they have three live nestings, fully hatched and active. Just ignore the occasional dead pigeons and rodents, their housekeeping lacks some but is entirely adequate for hawks. Peek in on them only in daylight hours; there’s been no artificial lighting added for the nightowls.

Want still more evidence of entirely too many software programs that we can do without? A company called Sikalosoft created an iPhone app, Baby Shaker. For 99 cents, the game asks players to see how long they can endure a baby’s cries before shaking the phone to stop it. Apple has apologized, calling the game “deeply offensive” and has removed it from the iPhone App Store. Maybe there’s more than one bite missing from that Apple logo.

Maybe there’s hope for the little guy yet. Time Warner Cable, perhaps better known as the third-largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) RoadRunner.com, was planning to charge its customers under a metered arrangement for their high speed Internet usage. Watching TV or streaming movies over the Internet would become a high-priced activity indeed. Time Warner has been testing this idea in several markets in Texas, New York, and North Carolina.

The good news is that Time Warner has announced it has abandoned these plans. The bad news is that the largest ISP, AT&T will start similar trials on November 1 in Beaumont, Texas and Reno, Nevada. The #2 ISP Comcast is similarly looking at usage caps.

I hope the whole scheme flops. I know the cell phone industry seems to be moving toward a flat unlimited usage fee and I’d welcome that. Life is sure getting complicated and shouldn’t be measured in minutes.

I hear from reading the news that the U.S. government is considering hiring well-qualified hackers to “think like the bad guy”, analyze Internet traffic, and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems. The idea is to better manage and use technology to protect everything from the nation’s electrical grid and stock markets to tax data, airline flight systems, and nuclear launch codes. The Pentagon is increasing its budget in an attempt to hire and train 250 such experts each year by 2011.

Well, ok ……. but is that a little bit like having the fox guard the hen house?

In the next issue of Neat Net Tricks Premium, I’ll tell you about my credit card problems with Skype, that infamous telephone service. Seems they’ve been charging everybody’s credit card even when they’ve never provided any service and they recently hit mine, too. But I’ll tell you more about that in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, at the risk of sounding like I’m waging a one-man war against Skype, I now read where they have launched a mobile application for the iPhone and one for Blackberry devices in May.

Now, I’m not the sharpest blade in the drawer, but will someone please explain to me in 25 words or less why we need a VOIP phone such as Skype on our cell phone? Am I missing something? Is Skype going to let me now make long distance calls which I can already make on my cellphone? This sounds like a big DUH to me, and one more reason why I don’t intend any relationship with Skype. Well, we have a relationship, but it’s one-way. I don’t use their service and never have. But they managed to figure out my credit card number and I hear from them at billing time.

I read in a Verizon study that, in 2008, hackers made off with at least 285 million electronic records, mostly financial. Mine was one of those on two occasions where my credit card identity was apparently compromised. Fortunately, in both instances, the fraudulent charges weren’t my responsibility, but nonetheless it’s a real hassle to establish a new account and inform all the merchants of the new credit card number where payment is arranged under direct bill pay.

Not to be the voice of gloom and doom, but I think it’s going to be even worse in 2009. There’s just too much plastic out there.

Thanks for your help with the recent NNT survey. The results are all tabulated and the survey has now closed.

Complete results can be found at http://www.neatnettricks.com/2009Survey/2009NNTsurvey.htm and your responses will help continue to improve Neat Net Tricks.