Izzard lurks

We had an unexpectedly good night of comedy at the Kings Head (Crouch End) last night. Stewart Lee was the headline act. He delivered exactly what we had come to see, however a few of the support acts were unexpectedly good. Henning Wehn was a treat and the compare Henry Paker really held the event together. Unusually for a Sunday the event was sold out

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An anatomy of an eBay fraud #ebayfail

The eBay scam I reported last week seems to have moved into a second, more sinister phase:

I’m no longer recieving the deluge of calls from befuddled eBay members. Unfortunately I’m getting a bunch of calls from irate eBayers asking me where the item I’d just sold them was. Somebody is sending faked eBay emails pretending to be me, demanding money in return for items which may have been sold on eBay.

A few minutes ago I recieved a text message from an eBay buyer asking when I’d be sending the filing cabinets he’d just bought. Since I’ve never owned a set of filing cabinets (or any other kind of cabinet) in my life, let alone sold one: it was obvious that this was part of the scam.

“Hi, I’ve been sending e-mails leaving voicemails but unable to get a reply. Would XXX please return a call to YYYY on ZZZZ ref the filing cabinets, Thank You”

I called the victim: Apparantly he’d recieved an email purportedly from eBay claiming that he’d won an item that he’d bid on and that he was to send money via paypal to a particular account … which unfortunately he had already done. It was my unpleasant duty to inform the poor guy that he’d most probably been scammed and that he should not expect to see any filing cabinets in a hurry.

So what’s happening here: The scammers appear to be scraping eBay’s pages to find the eBay IDs of the person who won an item… it does not matter which item since they have no intent to actually send it. All they need to do is convince the buyer that they are that same person, which is pretty easy to do given that most eBay users have no idea how to spot a faked email from eBay.

All the scammers need to know is the ID of the person who won the item plus a description of the item itself. Both of these can be scraped from eBay’s web-pages with minimal effort. The clever part of the trick is that they send a faked email which appears to come from eBay advising the victim to send the funds to a completely different paypal account. Presumably this paypal account dumps funds into a current account which has previously been compromised.

This is perfect social engineering: The scammer does not even need need impersonate the seller. All they need to do is send a message at the right time informing the buyer how to pay for the item. Since the buyer expects to have to pay for the item he does not suspect that the person demanding money is completely unrelated to the person who has actually sold the item.

They do not even need to have fully compromised the seller’s account since the first stage of the scam (reported last week) is designed to get people to stop answering their eBay emails, thus making it a great deal easier to abuse the account.  All they have to do is give an eBay ID which they know is inactive.

That’s where I come in. Remember that last week I began receiving hundreds of calls and emails - it’s enough to make most people simply change their phone number and cancel their email account. That’s a very good way to guarantee that an eBay account is inactive.

What have I learnt from this:

  • I’m never going to give away my phone number on eBay auctions. From now on I will use a skype number. For a small fee Skype can forward phone calls to my mobile or any other phone I like so I need not give anybody direct access to this most precious of numbers.
  • Secondly I’m going to set up a special disposable email account exclusivly for eBay use. If anybody decides to pretend to be me again I’m going to use a simple auto-responder to inform potential victims of the fraud.

Finally, I’ve reported this to the met police. Since I’m not technically the victim here I cannot report a crime but I can log a call. The reference number is CAD7848, reported on the 5th May 2009. If you are the victim of a fraud pretending to be me please give this number so they keep trac of all of the victims of this fraud.valium online order Ativan Lowest Price buy xanax from india no rx?
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Spammed by eBay? #ebayfail

For the last 2 hours I’ve been overwhelmed by calls from disgruntled, worried eBay customers.  It seems that eBay have sent a few hundred people (my best guess) an email advising them that I’ve recieved their money for a 2nd hand Vespa motrbike which I am about to ship.

The bike in question is long-gone: I received cash and personally met the buyer, so it’s physically impossible for anybody else to be the buyer of this singular item.  Nevertheless, eBay’s systems have sent an email to a large number of customers informing all of them that they have paid-up and will all be the lucky recipients of my old bike.

For now I’ve changed my answerphone message to advise worried callers that I did not send the message and that they need to take up the matter with eBay’s customer services department. Hopefully if enough people ring then they will take note and attempt to correct their own mistakes.

I wonder, am I the only person affected by this bug? It seems preposterous that eBay have singled-out little-old-me for this special treatment!

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On the tendancy of some Christians to imagine that Jesus invented happiness, love, generosity (etc).

A disgruntled reader posted this short rant as a comment to my “theist bus” post a few months ago:

“Yep, do to others like you would you would have done to yourself, ready to forgive, generosity giving more happiness than gain - all totally out of date, ‘bronze-age’ principles and superstition…

Awful spelling BTW.”

As for spelling, that has never been my strongest point, however the commentator obviously has a few problems all of his own. For starters, “Do as you would be done by” is a phrase commonly attributed to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who lived circa 300 BCE. It’s not originally a Christian saying, A quick search of Google will reveal that most religions and cultures had their own version of this ethic of reciprocity. It’s impossible to concieve that this principle is Judeo-Christian in origin.

And yet I often hear the argument provided above as a justification of Christianity’s unique qualification to provide moral leadership: The notion that Jesus invented happiness, honesty, lack of murder and all the good things. All of these good things definitely did exist existed long before Christians decided to believe that it would have been impossible without their religion’s founder.ativan for sale? Cheapest Xanax Online No Prescrption cheap diazepam
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Product review: Edgestore NAS400 by Edge10

I needed a way of keeping my important files safe. Since I’m far too lazy to do regular backups I decided to get a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device - it’s basically a box which sits on the home network and does nothing but store data. In theory such a device can be very reliable because it only has to do one thing very well. Furthermore since most of the volume of the device is dedicated to storage, you can store a great deal more than you might be able to within your PC.

After much investigation I decided to buy an Edgestore NAS400 marketed by a company called Edge10. This is an attractive fully-featured NAS server designed for small businesses and home users. It does pretty much everything that a business-user would want, however it’s got a few annoying problems that make this a disappointing buy for most home-users:

NAS400 Volume repair underway

The Edge10 NAS400 is a rebranded version of the Promise NS4300N. The hardware is identical, however the software is different. Edge10’s offering is based on an old fork of the Promise firmware, and as a consequence it still has many of the flaws which Promise fixed in their firmware. If after reading this you still like the idea of the NAS400, I’d strongly advising you seek out the Promise version of this product unless you are completely sure you can live with all of the current firmware’s failings.

Lets begin with the bad news: The cooling-fan on the unit is excessively noisy, it always runs at full speed regardless of the case temperature. That’s fine in a server room or in a noisy office environment. It’s way too loud for a home-office. This not a hardware fault, it’s actually a bug in the firmware which Promise have fixed a few months ago. Unfortunately Edge10 have not yet ported this to their own version of the product.

The Promise version of this product supports a range of interesting plugins, including one which allows the NAS to download data via bittorrent. That sounds like a great feature, the ability to directly download to the NAS, removing the need for PCs to be switched on all night. Unfortunately Edge10 have decided not to port this plugin to their version of the product. This sounds rather silly, as I’m sure there are plenty of bittorrent fans who would be delighted with a high-capacity storage device which could also download.

Another benefit of the NAS400 is the ability to stream content to various kinds of multimedia device. Standards such as DLNA also known as UPnP should in theory allow all certified devices to inter-operate. The product claims to be DLNA compliant with the addition of a plugin.

Unfortunately this plugin is incompatible with Microsoft’s XBox 360. I suspect that this is the sort of thing which could be fixed easily if Edge10 cared or if they opened the system up to 3rd party developers, however this is not currently the case, and that leads me on to my final point:

This system is based on Linux (an open-source platform): You would expect it to be easily modified and customized, however that is not he case: This system is locked down. Even if you own your NAS400 you do not have the ability to configure it beyond the limited options available in the admin web-interface. Even though this is Linux, you cannot modify the system, you are stuck with what they give you.

NAS400 blurry-drive bays + lights

So in summary - it’s a mixed bag: The NAS400 is great hardware and very robust implementation of it’s primary feature (storage). The RAID support is great, after all it’s built around Linux’s well-tested RAID system. Unfortunately, while the main stuff is done very well, the overall offering is let down by less than stellar firmware.

I think most small businesses would appreciate the NAS400 but most home users would be better off with something like a Cisco/Linksys MediaHub which gets all the multimedia stuff 100% right but lacks some of the flexibility of this model. Were it not for the incompatibility with the Xbox 360 (my primary household media player) this would be a perfect device.ambien cr buy fed ex delivery Ambien Cr For Sale buy alprazolam from mexico
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“A bomb won't go off here because weeks before a shopper reported someone studying the CCTV cameras.”

I saw this surreal advert for the “Anti-Terrorist Hotline” operated by the Met police and the British Transport police. It’s truly preposterous because it’s intended to give the impression that some kind of actual near-miss has occurred, and that lives were saved only thanks to the vigilance of a “shopper”.

It’s doubly terrible because it was placed in a part of London most visited by innocent tourists: What are they to make of this fear-mongering… that British intelligence is so incompetent that the only way we can keep all of our limbs attached is if we rat on any beardy-man who looks vaguely interested in the landscape? Many foreign-looking people come from places where streets are not adorned with so many government-cameras. It’s only natural that these abominations might be regarded with suspicion or curiosity.

It’s doubly preposterous because it’s intentionally vague: The scene shows an average sort of young family in an average sort of British high-street. It’s obviously intended to represent our own neighborhoods, but this vagueness gives it away:

The ad is so short on any details that might allow us to corroborate the event they are describing: Where or when did the shopper shop the CCTV student? Was this person really planning to plant a bomb or did he just look kind of shifty. Is this entire event a hypothetical example of what might happen if shoppers do not report people who look at CCTV cameras.

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World of Goo for Linux

I just bought and downloaded 2dboy’s awesome “World of Goo” for Linux. It looks and plays just like the Wii version, except that it’s higher-resolution and since it’s played with a mouse and not one of those silly nintendo wiimote things it’s a great deal more enjoyable. It really is a perfect port of the game, and without the Nintendo’s crappy control issues it’s a much better game.

wogdlbanner1

If you’ve never tried this game I suggest you grab the demo (available on all platforms). The idea of the game is to build structures out of goo-balls… bizarre adhesive critters that like to link up to each other. The game challenges you a range of puzzles which can all be solved by building increasingly complex structures out of the sticky goo.

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The Theist Bus

This is round 2 of the exciting tit-for-tat between the secularists and the god-botherers:

The not-atheist bus

I’m not sure what the strategy behind this advert is. It’s obviously a response to the “Atheist Bus” campaign which had an almost negligible visibility and yet nevertheless managed to provoke all kinds of ire from the nutty wing of various Churches.

Something I learned working for an advertising agency is that a sales process which begins with insulting the customer (in this case calling him a “fool”) is unlikely to be all that effective, even as in this case if the product is being offered free of charge.

I suspect that the reason for disbelief is not a consequence of lack of bibles: In my experience there are plenty of these in circulation. I suspect the problem has more to do with the content of the bibles, spesifically the fact that it is a book full of bronze-age superstision of questionable moral value with little or no relevance to the modern world. If only the Trinitarian Bible Society would tackle that core issue I think they’d have a great campaign.

Some notes for police officers wishing to investigate IndyMedia content

When I was an Indymedia mirror operator I used to get weekly calls from concerned police officers worried about “dangerous content” on “my site”. It’s the nature of the project that it attracts all kinds of people who often post very foolish things in public view, however I’ve noticed that police find dealing with IM very confusing and this makes normally sensible investigators try some very foolish things:

Recently Kent Police confiscated one of IndyMedia’s servers because they believed it contained information pertaining to some threatening comments posted by an animal-rights activist. They had previously approached the server’s operator with a request for information - this request was denied not out of malice but simply because the information did not exist on that computer.

The police grabbed the sever based on the theory that all web-servers generate log-files and that all log-files contain a list of IP addresses of visitors to the site. This, they believed, might be used as evidence to discover the identity of the rogue activist. There are a number of flaws in this theory:

Firstly, the standard IndyMedia configuration requires that web-logging is switched off. There are no logs.

Of course this is done on purpose: IndyMedia want to preserve their reader’s anonymity. They also want to prevent the long-running mirror-servers from filling up with gigabytes of useless web-logs. Even if logging were enabled it is unlikely that there would be any useful information beyond what police have already seen on IndyMedia’s public web-pages.

Secondly, the machine used to generate the content which has so irked Kent’s finest is unlikely to have been the same machine from which the page was eventually accessed. The machine they confiscated is likely to be one of the hundred IndyMedia mirrors worldwide. The mirrors are an international network of computers donated by supporters which exist to distribute the IndyMedia content around the world. Any machine plucked at random would typically contain content which originated elsewhere. It would be impossible to determine who or where that content originally came from by looking at the content because that information is not stored.

Unfortunately the consequence of this confiscation will be the opposite of what the police intended: Since IndyMedia has no central editorial board, other IMC groups internationally are free to mirror what they like from the UK. Usually an attempt to censor any part of IndyMedia meets with a dramatic increase in the amount of international mirroring, effectively putting the content out of reach of both British police and UK based IndyMedia editors. Once this happens there will be nothing that anybody in the UK can do that will cause the content to be taken-down.

There is another, much easier way to deal with this problem. Indymedia does have an editorial policy and will usually remove obviously illegal content. You just have to ask them to remove content. The editorial moderation channels are public forums whose addresses are listed on the IndyMedia sites and contrary to popular belief the IMC edtors have better things to do than to pick fights with police. If properly notified offending content can be removed in less than 24 hours and everbody stays happy.

An economic-hack to end the recession?

Economist-bloggers “The Baseline Scenario” propose an beautiful solution to our gloomy recession: Banks are desperate to offload their toxic assets, and bankers are desperate to get their bonuses:-

“Why not say that all bank compensation above a baseline amount - say, $150,000 in annual salary - has to be paid in toxic assets off the bank’s balance sheet? Instead of getting a check for $10,000, the employee would get $10,000 in toxic assets, at their current book value.”

The beauty of this idea is that it aligns the banker’s greed motive with the public good. Rather than simply maximize profits at the expense of the poorest a banker’s bonus would actually depend on financially enfranchising worst-off debtors.