loose wire | blog – Page 207 – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

Citizen Pundits

By jeremy | July 29, 2020

Forget citizen journalism. How about citizen punditry? An unnamed ~~taxi driver~~ IT specialist appeared on the BBC’s news 24 after being mistaken for his fare, technology pundit Guy Kewney. Despite the BBC’s apparent efforts to suppress the moment, the Daily Mail has recovered it, according to Guy himself, who is rightly highly amused that his face, and ethnicity, are not particularly well known to BBC staff. You can download the clip here.

As Guy says, “you can watch the classic moment, where the cab driver realises that he is on air, and being mistaken for someone else, here. It’s beyond classic: it’s priceless. Watch his incredible recovery, and his determination to show that this may be a complete surprise to him, but that he can out-Kewney any darned NewsWireless Editor if he has to.”

The Times reports that “it is not the first time that the BBC has been embarrassed by a case of mistaken identity. Last year Rhodri Morgan, the First Minister of Wales, was mistaken for a cast member of Doctor Who when he was due to appear on the BBC Wales political show Dragon’s Eye.

Unfortunately the identity of the cabbie in question has not yet been established. He deserves a medal for his performance and to have his own show. I’m all in favour of this kind of thing. If only more television networks would take a broader, more inclusive view of what it means to be an “expert” we might all benefit.

[Update (thanks, Juha, for pointing out): The cabbie has been found, and he’s not a cabbie, but a data cleansing expert. Not such a good story as the original, but nice to get it right.]

Googling the Tsunami

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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More from Google Trends, the sad rise and fall in our interest in the tsunami: At the end of 2004, the Asian Tsunami piqued/peaked our attention, but the later blips (F, the last little flag on the chart, is the first anniversay) reflect, perhaps, how quickly such things are forgotten.

Mapping Trends With Google

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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Google’s new Trends search is a lot of fun, and useful too. See how some things have taken off over the past couple of years, like Web 2.0:

and Wikipedia (the lower graph is for volume of related pieces on Google News, the upper for ordinary Search):

while others, such as WiMax, are more gradual:

Interest in others, meanwhile, seems to have peaked. 2005, for example, seems to have been RSS’ year:

whereas folk started to get less obsessed about spam in 2004:

Some terms just seem to have leapt out of nowhere, such as “botnet”:

while almost the whole history of interest in others, like phishing, are captured in the three and a half years covered by Google Trends:

The Nigerian Scam As Tragedy

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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Great piece in The New Yorker by Mitchell Zuckoff (thanks, John) about a 419 Nigerian email scam that dates back to 2001 involving an ordained minister, John W. Worley. You think you know how these scams work but read on. These people are much more sophisticated and tenacious than the spam you receive. Also, the gullibility of the victim is not about stupidity. Once you’re in, you throw everything in after it trying to get something back, and to vindicate your faith:

Despite everything, he insisted that he still believed he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha. “I think they were legitimately trying to use me and my resources to get their funds out of Nigeria into a safe place where they could have access to them,” he said. Worley wasn’t sure whom to blame for the bad checks, though Nduka was suspect. “Somehow there was a buyoff, a payoff, or something that went on there, and then it got switched to the point where I was then dealing with fraudsters,” he said.

And they won’t let go:

An enduring trait of Nigerian letter scammers—indeed, of most con artists—is their reluctance to walk away from a mark before his resources are exhausted. On February 5, 2003, several days after the checks were revealed as phony, after Worley was under siege by investigators, after his bank account had been frozen, after he had called his partners “evil bastards,” Worley received one more e-mail from Mercy Nduka.

“I am quite sympathetic about all your predicaments,” she wrote, “but the truth is that we are at the final step and I am not willing to let go, especially with all of these amounts of money that you say that you have to pay back.” She needed just one more thing from Worley and the millions would be theirs: another three thousand dollars.

“You have to trust somebody at times like this,” she wrote. “I am waiting your response.”

Spammers Get Authenticated

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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Until now, most spammers sent their stuff through open relays — Internet-connected computers that were either unprotected, or else had been compromised by viruses or trojans into sending the spam without the owner being aware. But that is changing, says AppRiver, and it has big implications for how spammers work and may render useless today’s big thing: email authentication.

Up until now, AppRiver says, ISPs could presume that if they forced a system to authenticate their message before sending it, they could be trusted because spammers couldn’t have access to the authentication mechanism. Authenticating a message basically means you must use a password to send an email as well as to receive it. Before, so long as you knew the correct server for your ISP, you didn’t need a password.

What the bad guys are doing now, AppRiver says, is hacking into the ISPs, figuring out those passwords, and then sending their email through those compromised accounts. This is not only a security risk, it increases the chance for the spammer that those emails will now get through, since they come from what are called “trusted systems” — email servers that require authentication. A survey in April by the Email Sender and Provider Coalition found that 16 of the 18 top U.S. ISPs were applying applying authentication to outgoing e-mails, and eight of those ISPs were also checking for inbound authenticated e-mail and applying some sort of filter to the mail as a result, according to ClickZ News.

AppRiver’s Chief Science Officer, Peter McNeil, predicts that as this tactic becomes widepsread, sender reputation services touted by the big boys — Microsoft’s Sender ID, for example — would effectively wither on the vine. In the meantime, it’s going to mean that for those spammers who have perfected this new art, their junk is more likely to get through than other junk because it appears to be authenticated. (More on all this at SearchSecurity.com, which wrote a piece on it while I was still trying to figure it out.