Inside the Pocket of a Productivity Porn Star

By | November 22, 2011
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Merlin Mann does a great blog on personal productivity at 43 Folders. After foodies watching and reading about food without actually cooking anything (food porn) and travel shows about places you’d never actually go or activities you’d never actually do (travel porn) this is productivity porn: an obsession with the detritus, in this case the books, pens, notebooks and gadgets, of the action, in this case productivity, without actually becoming more productive.

Anyway, occasionally Merlin catches the zeitgeist, and when he posted something on this blog referring to a NYT/IHT piece about the Jimi, a minimalist plastic wallet with an ideological goal of reducing the amount of stuff you store and carry in your wallet, readers were excited. A request for readers to share how they carried their money and credit cards around drew a slew of responses – 130 at the current count – which manage to be informative and, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious at the same time. Always a risk, I guess, when you ask people what they have got in their pocket.

I personally prefer the Viz Top Tip-esque (“Don’t waste money on a lead. Simply walk your dog backwards holding its tail”) home-made money solutions, which may or may not be written with tongue in cheek (you never know with the productivity porn lot), like this one:

Five years ago, I bought a bag of rubber bands for $0.99 and they have been my wallet ever since. A few times a year, the band breaks and I grab another from the bag. Besides being economical, it adds practically zero bulk to my pocket, and it’s quick to access. Cash tends to get a tad crumpled, but it’s worth it.

WalletAnother guy said his favorite was a metal cigarette case. It held a few cards and some cash perfectly, and looked really cool. I used it for years, until one of the corners got kind of scraggly, and it started poking me in the ass. Another touts a red binder clip, another a bungie cord case, another a 3×5 index card wrapped around his stash, while someone called trevor uses his girlfriend’s “’Yasmin’ birth control pill sleeve. It holds 3 credit cards (MC, Discover, ATM) on one side, driver license, insurance cards (auto/medical) on the other. It’s super slim, pretty durable and I get a new “wallet” for free each time my girlfriend gets a new supply of the pills.”

Sadly none of these solutions work in a country where the highest denomination bill/note is less than $10 and you use a credit card at your peril. But that’s my fault for living in Indonesia.

Decoding the Pizzini

By | November 22, 2011
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From the pages of the International Herald Tribune comes a glimpse of a world where clandestine communication retains the old and tested methods of hand to hand. When a godfather becomes expendable  is a piece by Andrea Camilleri, the author of “The Smell of the Night” and other novels in the Inspector Montalbano series. In it he describes the way that captured Mafia boss communicated with his subordinates while on the run:

The authorities said that Provenzano would transmit his orders – regarding such matters as who should be rewarded with government contracts, whom one should vote for in local and national elections, how one should act on specific occasions – by means of pizzini, little scraps of paper folded several times over, which his trusty couriers (mostly peasants with spotless records) would pass from hand to hand along lengthy and seemingly random routes.

These were necessary precautions to reduce, as much as possible, the risk of interception. One pizzino, for example, took more than 48 hours to travel the mile between the boss’s cottage and Corleone. Others could take weeks to reach a nearby destination. The telephone was out of the question.

Amazing that such methods are still in use today — and a sober reminder of several things.

  • Not much the Internet, or police forces, or intelligence agencies, can do to monitor this kind of thing unless they get off their heinies;
  • Is it just the Mafia using this kind of thing? Or are other underground organisations doing it? The organisation I know a little about — Jemaah Islamiyah, the al Qaeda-linked Indonesian terrorist group — use a combination, and while their technical skills have grown quickly, far more quickly than the people monitoring them, they still retain networks that don’t use any form of modern communication;
  • This ageless form of communication may yet be around for a lot longer than our beloved Internet.

Anyway, I find this whole ‘pizzini’ thing fascinating. It has more to do with The Da Vinci Code than with Mafia-watching, but technology could offer some clues to deciphering them. Some 350 of these encoded messages exist, apparently, mostly in the form of numbers. Other messages were left in a bible, with certain passages underlined.

Some notes, according to The Guardian, have been deciphered, illustrating recruitment problems and that Bernardo Provenzano was addressed as “vossia”, the deeply respectful and indeed archaic, form of “you”. What it doesn’t say is how they were decoded, and whether that breaks the code for the others.

If it doesn’t I call on the Italian police to release them to on the Internet and let us have a crack at them. I’ll never manage it, being useless at this kind of thing, but now everyone does Sudoku puzzles in the bath, I suspect your average commuter will make short work of decoding them.

 

Google Finance Raises the Bar (Chart)

By | November 22, 2011
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Google’s new Finance site is worth a look, but it’s only when you look at the graphs do you realise how good it is. Take this snippet from the chart on the Apple page:

Gfin

The overall chart is a great example of beauty and graphical simplicity. The letters correspond to a scrolling column of stories that tie in date-wise to the stock price. Drag the main chart around and the column of stories moves up or down to reflect the period now visible in the chart window. The bit at the top, meanwhile, is a longer timeline+chart which can be used to narrow or expand the larger chart below (by grabbing the two vertical little tweezer things, there’s probably a fancy name for them) and pulling together or apart.

There’s nothing revolutionary in here, but it’s executed very well, and to me is the first time that Google has really shown that it intends to eat into Yahoo!’s core market big time. There’s lots of other data on the page — all that one would need to make an investment decision, I’d wager — but the chart is the thing. What would be an afterthought elsewhere turns into a really dynamic tool. Exciting stuff.

RFID — Ready For Imminent Destruction?

By | November 22, 2011
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RFID (radio frequency ID) tags are soon going to be in everything. But do we really know what we’re letting ourselves in for?

Last month some Dutch researchers said they had created a virus capable of infecting RFID tags, an assertion that was poo-pooed by quite a few security folk. The researchers said the virus could infect back-end systems, making it possible, they said, to a prankster replace an RFID tag on a jar of peanut butter with an infected tag to infect a supermarket chain’s database; a subdermal (i.e., under-the-skin) RFID tag on a pet used to upload a virus into a veterinarian or ASPCA computer system; and, most alarmingly, a radio-frequency bag tag used to infect an airport baggage-handling system.

This was all very theoretical, which is a nice way of saying far-fetched and somewhat Bondsian. But now a bunch of Australian researchers, according to Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK, has “proven that effective attacks can be launched against RFID tags.” Basically, the tags stop functioning after they’re overloaded with data.

In the tests, the Australian researchers saturated the frequency range used by the tags, which prevented the tags from talking to the readers. … They demonstrated that from a range of about 3 feet, they could disrupt communications between tags and readers, putting the tag into a “communication fault state.”

This is techie-speak for “broken”.

This is somewhat worrying, because RFID tags are not just used in peanut butter. The military uses them for keeping tag of supplies; hospitals of supplies and patients. That kind of thing. Imagine the chaos if folk found out how to put tags in important installations into “communication fault state”. And, much more importantly, for gambling. A recently approved patent, for example, envisages lottery tickets carrying RFID so they can be validated and tracked. I’d not like to be around if someone found their winning lottery ticket had been converted by a jealous neighbour into a “communication fault state.”

Who knows whether these kind of attacks might find their way out of the lab and into the hands of bad guys? We were probably asking this question of ourselves back when computer viruses were silly little things that threw up messages about freeing hashish from the strictures of law. Now look what viruses are doing. Not much fun, I grant you, but we ignore these warning signs about RFID at our peril. If RFID is going to be in everything, let’s make sure it works. As the Australian researchers themselves conclude:

Vulnerabilities in the newer UHF style of RFID tags have been found and are of concern for anyone trying to implement a RFID system that would have mission critical or human life issues involved in it.

It’s All About the Backstory

By | November 22, 2011
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If you’re going to do a scam, have a good backstory. Here’s how.

It’s from a Mrs. Sarah Welsh of 26 Kensington Court, London, W8 5DL, England who says in an unsolicited email that illustrates how best to do the old Nigerian email scam:

I am Mrs. Sarah Welsh, an English woman who is suffering from cancerous ailment. I am married to Sir Jim Welsh who also is an Englishman though dead now. My husband worked with the British Railways for over two decade before the cold hand of death took him away on the 23rd of July 2003 at about 2:00AM.

I am glad she still feels married to Sir Jim, despite the clammy hand of death. That’s loyalty for you. But this is good stuff; it sets up the story nicely, although perhaps actually giving the time of death might be a superfluous detail.

Unfortunately their decade-long marriage was without “any fruit of the womb.” This might have been because the late Sir Jim spent too much time on a very modest and narrowly focused effort “to uplift the down-trodden and the less-privileged individuals within the United Kingdom, Europe, North and South America, Africa and the rest of the globe as he had passion for persons who can not help themselves due to physical disability or financial predicament.” This must have taken up quite a bit of his time for pottering around in the garden. His widow, showing perhaps a trace of bitterness, says “I can adduce this to the fact that he needed a Child from this relationship, which never came.”

Anyway, this timeless sadness aside, there’s dosh. Ten million quid, to be precise. It’s not clear how a career with British Rail secured this kind of money but it might explain why British Rail had to be privatised. Sadly Mrs. W. is not going to be around to spend it, since “my Doctor told me that I have a limited or numbered days on earth and that my life span will not exceed 150 days due to the cancerous problems I am suffering from.” A precise doctor indeed. Still, that’s not what is really bothering Mrs. W. “What bothers me most,” she says, “is the stroke that I have in addition to the cancer.” Good little extra layer of ailment, though some might think it’s being laid on a bit thick. Anyway, here comes the denouement, better known as The Bit Where You Get Ripped Off:

Mrs. Welsh (shouldn’t she really be Lady Sarah, what with Sir Jim and all that? Points deducted for not knowing the English honours system) has decided to give the 10 mill to “a non governmental, or a non religious, and or a non profit organization or better still an individual, that will use this gift which comes from my husbands sweat to fund the upkeep of widows, widowers, orphans, destitute, the down-trodden, physically challenged children, barren-women and persons who prove to be genuinely handicapped financially.” Another tightly focused project, it seems.

If you were the suspicious reader you might wonder: Aren’t there other members of the family who could make use of this money? Mrs. W/Lady Sarah has already thought of this, and helpfully sets up another strand to the story: “I took this decision because I do not have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are bourgeois and very wealthy persons and I do not want my husband Jim Welsh hard earned money to be misused or invested into ill perceived ventures.” Sounds like it’s not the first time that Sir Jim has bailed out his wastrel siblings and others from his side of the family. In-laws. A nice touch, bound to win over the most skeptical of readers. Who doesn’t have some ne’er-do-well relative?

Indeed, they are already proving a bit of a pest. Lady Sarah asks for help urgently to distribute this cash via the usual power of attorney, bank account numbers and transfer fee scam, but doesn’t want phone calls. “I do not need any telephone communication in this regard due to my deteriorating health and because of the presence of my husband relatives around me. I do not want them to know about this development.” A very good idea. They’re bound to be eavesdropping on the line in the spare bedroom, the leeches. (Not to mention the difficulty of disguising the fact that an elderly female member of the British aristocracy on the phone sounds a lot like a man with a West African accent.)

As Mrs. W. points out, “with God, all things are possible.” But a good back story helps. If you need one you can always copy it off one of the numerous websites collecting this kind of thing. Sir Jim’s has appeared on several, including here and at Scam o Rama, which helpfully organizes them according to ill person, cancer type, life expectancy, sum involved, purpose and location of money.