News: The Ugly Truth About The Self-Checkout Lane

By | November 24, 2011
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 I live in Indonesia, which teaches you tons about credit cards and how easy they are to get fraudulent with. But at least here they don’t allow you to swan past security with riding lawn-mowers you haven’t paid for. From the Sacramento Bee, a cautionary tale about the self-checkout lane in supermarkets where you swipe your credit card, wave a scanner over your goodies, and leave.
 
 
Speed and convenience, the paper says, have made the most basic fraud deterrent — checking IDs — nearly obsolete. Crooks know this, police say, and are abusing the technology with frequency. Sacramento County sheriff’s detectives estimate they receive 140 cases of credit card fraud each month.
 
Another interesting snippet: Most credit card companies and retailers don’t reveal their fraud numbers because if consumers knew how much fraud really occurs, they might lose faith in the credit system and the technology that accompanies it, said Stuart Taylor, vice president of VeriFone, the leading manufacturer of point-of-sale terminals. The company reports that payment systems fraud is growing at an alarming rate in many countries, including the United States.

Mail: Apple Chomps Spam

By | November 24, 2011
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 This from reader Rulf Neigenfind about Windows, Macs and Spam: “You have certainly heard about the built-in mail client in Mac OS X that
comes with an AI equipped spam filter. This filter uses “adaptive latent semantic analysis” to identify junk mail and works amazingly well. Once more I can only state how lucky I am that I’m not forced to bear with Windows.”
 
Thanks Rulf. I’ve tried the filter and while it’s very good, I don’t see it as vastly better than the Bayesian Filters available for Windows-based email. What’s good, I guess, is that it comes preloaded, and it’s very easy to use.

News: Newsfeeds With Bite

By | November 24, 2011
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 For those of you who haven’t tried RSS feed, I’d suggest it’s a great way to subscribe to newletters without too much hassle. But where is RSS going to go? PaidContent.org, the award-winning independent news blog, has launched its RSS version, reports Poynter.org. The feed will include ads, prompting the question: when will we see spam RSS? And how might that work?

Update: Blasting the Worm

By | November 24, 2011
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 From the guys at Security Magazine, an update on the Blaster worm, or LovSan, as they call it:
  • Malware writers have spawned multiple variants of the Lovsan worm, the most dangerous of which installs a remote-access Trojan on infected systems.
  • LovSan “is similar in magnitude to Code Red and Nimda, but its ramifications are much greater because it targets a wide range of
    Microsoft OSes instead of just Web servers,” says Forrester analyst Michael Rasmussen.
  • “Pretty much the entire world will have to run the update to Windows XP and 2000,” said David Perry, global director of education for antivirus software vendor Trend Micro. “I think it will take a year or more to get the word out to people.”
  • Computer Economics estimates that Lovsan.A has already caused $500 million globally and $100 million in the U.S. in damages and lost productivity.
 

Software: Cut Out The Bull

By | November 24, 2011
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 Here’s an interesting download for ya: software from a consulting firm that scours your company’s documents for ‘biz-buzz’ and suggests alternatives. It’s called Bullfighter (get it?) from Deloitte Consulting and it’s a plug-in that attaches itself to Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. I read about it in a NYT/IHT column by Randall Rothenberg, who describes himself as director of intellectual capital at Booz Allen Hamilton, another consulting firm.
 
 
I’m downloading it now. But I have to take issue with Rothenberg, who suggests that biz buzz is a legitimate construct that helps companies, sorry enterprises, communicate better within and without. That may be true in the upper echelons, where language is just another political tool. But what about the poor saps on the factory floor, struggling to figure what is going on in the company they work for, or folk like me who have to wade through piles of badly-written, jargon-laden press releases every day to figure out what companies are trying to say? Language that is not simple simply obfuscates. Hey, I just made that up. I think I’ll run it past Bullfighter and see what he thinks of it.