The old "we're from windows" scam

Three times this past week, I've gotten phone calls with the "Windows tech support" scam.

For those unfamiliar, you get a phone call from someone (often with a Russian accent) claiming to be an employee of "Windows". No, not Microsoft, they are very clear to point that out. They claim your computer is full of viruses and that you need to install their software to let them clean it up.

If you're dumb enough to do this, their software locks your computer. You then have to pay these people several hundred dollars every months in order to use your computer. When you stop paying, their software bricks your computer.

So far, I've been threatening to report these people to the FBI, but unfortunately, they are using spoofed caller ID numbers (the most recent one is from 474-475-1328 - which is a non-existent area code. As a result, the national do-not-call list is useless, as is Verizon's service for tracking down criminal abuse of the phone system.

Does anyone have a clue what else I can do to find the bastards and nail their balls to the floor? If you know someone in the FBI or other appropriate government agency and can forward this to them, please do so. I'll testify in court. Heck, I'll flip the switch if they can be given the death penalty.

Dilbert for September 16, 2013

If only it was that easy...

EZ-Pass is watching you all over New York

Forbes writes, in E-ZPasses Get Read All Over New York (Not Just At Toll Booths) that New York City has EZ-Pass readers all over the city. They track the devices, allegedly for the purpose of detecting congestion and directing traffic:

It's part of Midtown in Motion, an initiative to feed information from lots of sensors into New York's traffic management center. A spokesperson for the New York Department of Transportation, Scott Gastel, says the E-Z Pass readers are on highways across the city, and on streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and have been in use for years. The city uses the data from the readers to provide real-time traffic information, as for this tool.

Maybe so, but, as the article cites, the EZ-Pass terms and conditions do not state that this is a permitted use of the device. And if one agency is using it for one purpose, you can be sure that in the future, more agencies in more jurisdictions will use it for more purposes, and some may be a lot more intrusive than dynamically adjusting on-line traffic maps.

I never got EZ-Pass, because I don't travel through toll booths that often, and I don't like the idea of paying a monthly service fee to have the device. With this piece of news, now I think I've got a much stronger reason than "I don't want to pay for it."

Slate: The Lewis Model Explains Every Culture In The World

A recent article in Slate briefly discusses British linguist Richard Lewis's theory of how to categorize the behavior of every culture in the world.

I don't think I agree with every aspect of the theory, but it is interesting. I think it will be especially useful in helping to manage business relationships with individuals from around the world. I think it will be far less useful in understanding global politics, since governments often behave in ways contrary to the local culture.

Slate: Tales of an Ex–Microsoft Manager

This Slate article describes a Microsoft practice called "stack ranking" where the actual competence of employees is irrelevant to their compensation, instead dishing out awards and punishments based solely on how they compare against their coworkers.

The result is that instead of A-players wanting to be teamed with other A-players (as Steve Jobs described the natural state of a development organization), you end up with A-players wanting to be teamed with B-players, in order to ensure that their achievements will result in rewards and not punishments. The result is lousy products, engineers that don't care, and managers that are required to make the problem worse.

Why do I get the sinking feeling that most corporations do this, or something equally brain-dead?

Washington Post: Archives readies a schoolgirl’s records and a trove of Jewish treasures for return to Iraq

Washington Post: Archives readies a schoolgirl’s records and a trove of Jewish treasures for return to Iraq

Wow! This find is incredible. I am just very saddened by the fact that all this Jewish material is going to be sent back to Iraq. No Muslim government is going to treat this with the respect it deserves. It should be sent to Israel, where the majority of the formerly-Iraqi Jews now live.

The US Holocaust museum would be another appropriate place.

TechDirt: Feds Threaten To Arrest Lavabit Founder For Shutting Down His Service

Here's the link to the TechDirt article, and the link to the NBC News article it references.

In case you haven't been following this case, Lavabit is (or was) a secure e-mail service. All mail is encrypted so no unwanted third parties (not even Lavabit) can snoop the content. The US government didn't like the idea of an e-mail service they couldn't spy on so they sent him threatening letters demanding access. According to the above linked articles, they wanted a full tap into the content of all messages from all users. Rather than comply with this blatantly unconstitutional abuse of power, the owner shut down the service.

And now the Feds are threatening to prosecute him for doing that!

I'm sure my left-wing friends will see no problem with this, but for the rest of us, this is just another example of the abusive totalitarian nature of the US government today.

CNBC: Xerox machines swap numbers during scans

If someone told me about this in passing, I would assume it to be a big joke, but apparently not:

D. Kriesel, a German Ph.D. student studying computational geometry, encountered a strange problem when scanning a blueprint on a common Xerox office scanner. The numbers denoting the square footage of rooms were totally wrong, and what's more, they changed when he scanned the blueprint again.

Intrigued, Kriesel tried scanning a table of costs and figures. Numbers changed again—but not wildly, just by a little bit: 54.60 became 54.80, for instance. And it wasn't just a blurry scan or a misplaced pixel—these were fully formed, unmistakable characters.

...

it quickly became clear what the culprit was: an image compression algorithm called JBIG2, built into the scanner as the "normal" quality option for those who wanted to save a bit of space on their hard drive (versus "high" and "higher," which made for much bigger files).

Unlike an analog photocopier, or a digital one that simply records the black-and-white values of pixels, JBIG2 examines the whole image and finds pieces that are highly similar, replacing them with a sort of clone-stamped version that saves space. Examples of such pieces of an image might be the pattern on some wallpaper or the top of a fence—or, as it turns out, small letters and numbers that look similar, like 6s and 8s.

All I can say is "d'Oh!"

Terry Moore: How To Tie Your Shoes

I didn't know this either.

Wired: The right way to coil a cable

I didn't know this either. I'll have to start doing this with my own cables.