Yet another PayPal phishing scam:

This one has a few clues as to its nefarious origins.

1. Its ‘Reply-to’ header reads ‘no-replay@paypal.com’ (No replay?)

2. If you cursor over its link, it displays  213.130.21.170  instead of PayPal’s address.

Checking the email’s headers (Ctrl-u in Thunderbird) shows more aberrations:

1. X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000

PayPal doesn’t use Outlook Express to email its customers.

2. Received: from User ([72.4.204.201]) by grahamserv.grahamfamilylaw.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.6713); Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:33:03 -0700
My guess?  The computer ‘grahamserv’ at grahamfamilylaw.com has either been compromised by a trojan, or its email server is open for the world to email through.
In any event, should you find yourself the recipient of this or any phishing email, report it here (US Computer Emergency Readiness Team) and/or here (antiphishing.org)

Last Friday was the 13th, and — while I don’t typically believe in such things as a specific date being intrinsically ‘bad’ — I have to concur that Friday, October 13th was pretty awful at work; I spent the entire day on a conference call with a bunch of other folks who were having an equally unpleasant day. 7-1/2 hours of conference call. Not recommended.

This Friday, alles ist guet. Go figure.

On the other hand, the news is fascinating.

1. The scales fall off George Bush’s eyes, and he sees the parallel ‘twixt Iraq and Viet Nam.

Oh. So that’s what everyone meant.

It was four years in coming. And what, pray, does the leader of the free world intend to do now that he can see clearly?

More of the same, ‘course. When you have a winning strategy, you stick to it, right?

Why he’d want to replicate America’s failure in SE Asia and concomitantly turn the US into pre-1939 Germany escapes rational analysis. Why he hasn’t been impeached escapes me. Given what prompted impeachment procedings for Mr Clinton, one can only assume Mr Bush has America’s blessing.

2. A lovesick teenaged girl decides to end it all by driving Daddy’s Mercedes into an oncoming car, killing the driver and injuring the occupant . . . the driver’s 6-year-old daughter. 16-year-old Louise Brunstad has — not surprisingly — been charged with murder; as she turned into oncoming traffic, she was texting a countdown to her anticipated death to the girl who’d rejected her.

That she’s gay is immaterial . . . that she killed someone in an effort to kill herself is unconscionable.

3. California’s women exhibitionists — and there’s at least one of ‘em — no doubt hailed Superior Court Judge Robert Armstrong’s ruling that gender-specific text within the law means only male public nudity can be defined as indecent exposure. Subsequently, 40-year-old Alexis Garcia’s full frontal display before a 14-year-old boy (she had an issue with the noise his playing basketball made) didn’t break the law.

- - -

(Source: AP)

(Originally published May 22, 1997)

Spam Squared

Ordinarily, fighting Spam only requires a fork and a healthy appetite — in the wired world, however, meat by-products are not the concern du jour. ‘Spam,’ as most online users know, is the unsolicited advertising that miraculously appears in your emailbox the day after you’ve set up your Internet account. The latest news on the spam-front is particularly unsettling.

It takes little programming savvy to write up a ditty that surfs Web pages and Usenet newsgroups with the sole purpose of isolating email addresses. Such are located in ‘mailto:’ links on Web pages, and in header sender/recipient information inherent to newsgroup postings. The gleaned addresses are appended to an internal database which is later used in mail-merge fashion for bulk spam email. On a difficulty scale, this is ‘Intro to Programming’ stuff.

Given the simplicity of snagging addresses, one might wonder why more spam doesn’t find its way into one’s emailbox. The answer, for the most part, is fear of prosecution. Email spam is almost universally proscribed: Internet Service Providers have proven quite adept at following up promises to terminate accounts from whence spam originates. Lawsuits are pending from ISPs who’ve acted as unwitting relayers of megabytes of undesired text. In short, herein lies the fear of God: Touching a spammer’s wallet is akin to pouring Perrier on the wicked witch of the west.

If there’s a way around such unpleasantries, expect it to be found. Consider television advertising: Regulations were passed that made increasing an advertisement’s volume over that of regular programming a no-no. Yet, if you’ve ever been blown out of your television trance by an ad for third-rate furniture, you may be convinced that someone’s playing fast and loose with the regulators. They’re not; they’ve increased the ads’ amplitude, not their volume. Your assaulted ears are hard-pressed to distinguish ‘twixt the two.

As every email leaves an electronic ‘paper’ trail back to the sender in its header (whether the sender’s name is doctored or not), tricks have been employed to disguise spam’s point of origin — such as bouncing it from unsuspecting ‘third-party’ sites. This sort of opportunism tends to be rewarded by litigation.

Enter Cyber Promotions. For only US$995, you can “SEND OVER 50,000 EMAILS AN HOUR WITH A 28.8 MODEM! YOUR LOCAL DIALUP ACCOUNT WON’T BE SHUT OFF! YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGN WILL BE COMPLETELY LEGAL!”

Splendid. The ‘completely legal’ method in question is a mail redirector site, wherein spam is sent through ’savetrees.com’ using whatever user name the spammer chose when he or she paid the long green. Mail sent to the spammer at savetrees.com can either be cached or redirected by Cyber Promotions to the spammer’s actual address — the sender never sees the spam’s actual originating site or domain. Redirectors are a fairly new innovation, having for the most part replaced the anonymous remailer services of yore. Their intended purpose is to permit people with many ISP accounts — or people who move often from ISP to ISP — the luxury of using just one email address. iName and HotMail are two example companies using this technology: Mail sent to ‘henn@mindless.com,’ f’rinstance, is redirected by iName to my existing ISP emailbox. Should I ever change to another company’s Internet service, mail sent to ‘mindless.com’ will still find me.

The difference, then, is twofold: HotMail and iName don’t permit spamming or other unethical use of their facilities. The gentleman of questionable intelligence who sent death threats to university students over the ‘Net used a HotMail account, and HotMail had no qualms whatsoever in helping Canadian police locate the fool. Setting up a redirection account at either company is free — a shade cheaper than the grand charged for Cyber Promotion’s ‘Cyber-Bomber’ service.

Cyber Promotions, it would seem, needs the money. The company recently settled a suit initiated by CompuServe to the tune of US$65,000.00, and considerably more litigation is pending. Cyber Promotions has other woes, too: Some netizens actively crusade against spamming. A few million malicious download requests (reverse spamchology?) recently mucked up the company’s works for a day.

There is money to be made on the Web, but I suspect most of it comes about by accepted venues: a user sees something useful, clicks on it and orders it. Chances are, if you have to look for loopholes, there’s something very wrong with your advertising strategy . . . or perhaps the product itself.

Mentioned above:

Cyber Promotions (www.cyberpromo.com)

. . .
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .

Related media and reading:
What do you call a guy who\’s filed 1,000 lawsuits? Utah Attorney Jesse Riddle is on a personal crusade–to get bulk e-mailers to stop.(Q&A)(Interview): An article from: San Diego Business Journal		Spam wars–the litigation begins.(Tech Forum): An article from: Strategic Finance

(Originally published May 15, 1997)

Reinfestation

‘Way back when I used to program with some regularity — it was that or actually do work at the magazine — I came up with a ditty I entitled ‘Blort!’ First written as a text-character arcade game in 6502 assembler, I later re-wrote it for the IBM using the then-high-resolution 640×200 graphics screen. Both versions were published in the magazine, and — adding a scrolling title page — I plunked the thing onto CompuServe (this was over a decade ago) as a five-dollar shareware game. Several thousand people downloaded it — CompuServe’s file area counted downloads — five of whom sent cheques. These once-negotiable anomalies are stuffed in a box, somewhere; I’m notoriously bad at cashing cheques.

One day I booted the thing — I’d gotten quite good at popping the aliens from the sky — and noted with some surprise that cursor characters were peppering the text in the instruction screens and the score. I hadn’t changed the code; the problem was a recent addition I’d made to my system: the screen driver ANSI.SYS. It occurred to me then that, as ANSI.SYS was usually used concomitantly with terminal programs, most of the people who downloaded ‘Blort!’ saw not the crisp, clean game I’d written, but rather a cursor-blighted nightmare.

Had I had the screen driver installed when I’d programmed ‘Blort!,’ the problem would have been noted and corrected before I wrote the article for Computing Now!. Rather than using the BIOS and DOS write-to-screen routines, I would have instead written the text directly to screen memory. And if pigs had wings . . .

Though I was certain the program was free of internal bugs when I plunked it onto CompuServe, interactions with screen drivers had never occurred to me. Put bluntly, I had jumped the gun.

Two other gun-jumpers are in the news of late: Intel and Microsoft. Whereas ‘Blort!’ was a one-man show with a few hundred lines of code, these organizations’ products are the result of teams of technicians and programmers — transistors and lines of code numbering in the millions. That bugs pop up under these circumstances should come as no surprise.

About three years ago or so, a fairly obscure bug was noted in Intel’s Pentium chip. Though the likelihood that the bug would bring systems to a crashing halt was slim, it wasn’t inconceivable: Intel chose to recall tens of thousands of their flagship chip and replace them with a corrected version.

If you close your eyes you can feel it: déjà-vu.

Four days before the company was to launch its peppy Pentium-II, a bug was found in the Pentium Pro — a chip that had been in the marketplace to much consumer satisfaction for a year and a half. The bug is also inherent in the new Pentium-II. As bugs go, it’s fairly minor; Intel calls it the ‘Flag Erratum’ because flag bits aren’t properly set when an out-of-range 16- or 32-bit floating point number is sent down the pipes for integer conversion. Range-checking is standard operating procedure in programming. It’s unusual to use a chip’s facility to accomplish this; programmers tend to code the routines themselves, or leave it up to compilers.

Intel currently has no plans to recall its affected Pentiums, but has posted a detailed analysis and coding workaround suggestions at its site, as well as quotations from software companies who’ve tested their products with the Pentium Pro and Pentium-II.

Déjà-vu? Gesundheit. Another bug — the fourth thus far, if memory serves — was uncovered in the Windows 95/NT versions of Internet Explorer versions 3.0x and 4.0. This particular peculiarity won’t affect you unless you’ve also installed Microsoft Office on your system. PowerPoint, a graphics presentation package comprising part of Microsoft Office, can export its productions to the Web. When a PowerPoint link is clicked online, PowerPoint boots automatically on the user’s machine . . . and the user’s files and system are apparently subsequently open to compromise. Microsoft’s present ‘fix’ for this is a pop-up warning. See their site for details.

For no good reason — I’d left Computing Now! by then — I rewrote ‘Blort!’ once again, this time for 256-colour VGA. If I ever get back to it and polish it up, I’ll release it as freeware; knowing my luck, it’ll look like a chimpanzee coded it if the user has installed any program I can’t afford.

Sites Noted Above:

Intel’s Flag Erratum (www.intel.com/design/news/flag/tech.htm)

IE’s Latest Bug (www.microsoft.com/ie/security/powerpoint.htm)

. . .
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .

Related videos and reading:
		Build Your Own Flight Sim in C++: Programming a 3d Flight Simulator Using Oop

(Originally published May 8, 1997)

Stage Craft

“Break a leg!”

I can’t believe how many times I heard that last week. It seemed to have some subliminal yet cumulative effect; it wasn’t ’til Friday evening (the third performance of ‘Nurse Jane‘) that I took a wholly impromptu one-and-one-half gainer from my front porch onto the concrete steps, the walkway, and finally the front lawn. Thus — with insulted foot ligaments and a multi-hued knee — did ‘Bill’ limp visibly through Friday’s performance, then toodle off to the hospital. Happily, I could again put my weight on it by closing night; we had no understudies.

As you may have discerned, this week’s column concerns itself with varied and sundry aspects of the performing arts, with an appropriate emphasis on Canadian sites.

The National Film Board of Canada is a long-time innovator in Canadian performing arts, and a collector of world-wide acclaim and awards. Its web site isn’t half-bad, either. The mandate and history of the NFB is available for browsing, as well as a peek at things to come. Of certain interest is the detailed index of over 9000 NFB productions spanning over a half-century: Find your favourite and see if it’s presently on video.

Not to be missed is Canadian Actors’ Anecdotes, a site from CanAct Enterprises. Over a thousand Canadian actors’ yarns from memory yet green were collected by CanAct for publication with Oxford UP. Some hand-picked selections are posted here. Dave Broadfoot, f’rinstance, relates (with the expected hilarity) an extremely tough crowd in Kamloops, B.C. Mark Breslin (of YukYuks fame) had similar experiences while touring out west with his humour troupe. Perhaps eastern comedy just doesn’t travel well. The backstage and lobby comments will amuse anyone familiar with the work that goes into live theatre, though they may fall flat if the reader hasn’t a passing acquaintance.

More live theatre horror stories are chronicled on GeoCities, an organization that provides free Web pages to the Internet community — I intend to shortly resurrect the Necropolis Bodybag & Smoke Shoppe there under the title ‘hennhaus,’ and GeoCities is certainly worth a look if you want your own niche on the Web on a pauper’s budget. The page ‘Theatrical Calamities’ has been recently constructed, so the pickings are slim, but the stories thus far submitted by actors and stage crewmembers make up for in quality the present dearth of quantity. Theatrical Calamities will cheerfully post your funnies if you’ve ever walked onto or worked behind a stage, be it high school. church, or Broadway: you need only submit it.

Had I gone AWOL (Acting Workshop On Line) prior to auditioning for ‘Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii,’ I probably would have felt somewhat more confident. My subsequent performance would have benefitted as well. The workshop is free (unlike many others floating in the cyberether), is well-written with wry humour, and covers topics both basic and advanced. The site is also to be commended for its Canadian performing arts links. A lot of effort has gone into writing this material, and it shows — if you’ve any interest in trying your hand at the craft, AWOL’s a great place to be.

I was told — after someone had run to retrieve an Ace bandage wrapping for my foot — that the term ‘break a leg’ was actually a strange concatenation of two phrases: ‘break a record,’ and ‘become a legend.’ I did neither, but I take some comfort in that I didn’t fracture my fibula, trash my tibia, nor fissure my femur.

Sites noted above:

NFB (www.nfb.ca/E/index.html)

Canadian Actors’ Anecdotes (web.idirect.com/~canuck/canact.html)

Theatrical Calamities (www.geocities.com/Broadway/8244/index.html)

AWOL (www.execpc.com/~blankda/acting2.html)

. . .
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .

Related reading:

(Originally published April 17, 1997)

Assuming Control

I’ll call him ‘Bob’ — primarily because I don’t remember his name. At the time, I was working in Willowdale (now soon to be part of an engorged ‘Toronto’) as a clerk and minor repair-person in a computer and electronics hobbyist store. The stock was mostly surplus electronics — chips, transistors, resistors, capacitors and the like — and the customers were generally electronics students or hobbyists who were either looking for parts for the computers they were building, or parts for circuits they had designed. Bob liked to design.

“Know what this is?” he asked on a slow day, handing me a crumpled piece of paper. The pencilled schematic had been erased and redrawn in several places. Coil . . . tuner . . . probably either a transmitter or a receiver, I guessed. I can follow schematics well enough to put together electronics projects, but I can’t design anything to save my life.

“It’s a transmitter,” he said, before I could open my mouth. “This!”

He took the schematic from me and replaced it with a black plastic box with an unlabeled knob protruding from its surface — the tuner, presumably. A thick wire poked out one end of the box like a mouse’s tail. Bob was beaming.

“It works!” he grinned, retrieving it from my scrutiny.

“Okay . . .” I mumbled, waiting for the punchline. Bob was a regular customer — a technologist — and I would find it surprising only if something he’d slapped together hadn’t worked.

He looked around the floor at the boxes where the more arcane — and mostly unsaleable — parts were buried in comfortable blankets of dust. “Have you got a radio somewhere ’round here?”

We didn’t. We didn’t sell them, and rarely had occasion to repair them. I related this, and Bob emitted a most colourful word.

In lieu of demonstration, Bob — visibly disappointed — pocketed the contraption, leaned against the counter, and told me how he had spent the morning downtown. He had, it seemed, walked into several stereo and television stores with malice aforethought. He’d tuned all the connected stereo receivers to a popular Toronto station, set their volume low, then tuned his transmitter until nothing came out of the speakers peppered throughout the stores. He’d then turned the receivers’ volume to maximum.

The salespeople hadn’t noticed this, firstly because customers playing with displayed stereo equipment are commonplace, and secondly because Bob’s transmitter sent an inaudible signal — the proximity of his transmitter overpowered the radio station’s signal. What the salespeople (and varied passers-by) did notice, however, took place after Bob had left their establishments and had disconnected his battery: ear-splitting rock music seemingly coming from everywhere.

My reaction, as Bob’s tale ended, disappointed him further. I was expected, I think, to congratulate him on such a ‘neat’ creation, but all I could ask was “Why?” Why had someone with the brains to design electronic circuits wasted time and (albeit minimal) expense to create a practical joke — and break a few laws in its use?

In Emeryville, Ontario, someone has chosen to make a family’s life a living hell — turning their home into an electronic version of The Amityville Horror. ‘Sommy’ — as the perpetrator is known through voice-synthesized phone calls to the victims and police — controls the family’s hydro, their television cable, and their phone line. As evidenced by an officer’s slashed tires, Sommy has added willful destruction of property to the eventual litany of charges that will be laid.

Why is Sommy doing this? Why do computer programmers write and disseminate viruses that destroys other people’s data — and possibly their livelihoods?

I cannot answer these questions to my satisfaction, but it seems that a high-tech wish for power — achieving control through the tools of technology — indicates that intelligence and stupidity are not altogether unrelated.

. . .
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .

Related videos and reading:
The journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery & Pranks at MIT

(Originally published April 10, 1997)

The Noxious Weed

Smoking, wrote King James I in his 1604 “A Counterblaste to Tobacco,” is “[a] custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” This quote is from the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse ‘History of Tobacco Regulation,’ a page in Cliff Schaffer’s Library of Drug Policy site.

King James bolstered his words by increasing Britain’s tobacco import duty, but his actions did little to dampen consumption; popular medical opinion at the time saw tobacco use as both pleasurable and medicinally beneficial — opinion that carried well into the twentieth century.

Tobacco products today are sold with government-composed and -imposed warnings on packaging and advertising. Not only is tobacco generally known as a health issue, for some it is also a moral issue.

Recently, a local newspaper ran a 3/4-page colour advertisement from Player’s. There was little in this particular ad that would hold any attraction to children or teens, but this issue was among those raised in other media. Historically, there’s sound reasoning behind this; a 1996 study in the American Marketing Association’s ‘Journal of Marketing‘ found teenagers are three times more sensitive to cigarette advertising than adults. More frightening, perhaps, was another study quoted therein noting over half of the 3- to 6-year-olds queried made the connection between a cartoon spokescamel and cigarettes.

The ‘BADvertising Institute,’ a vehicle for artist Bonnie Vierthaler, is well aware of these statistics; the Institute’s mandate is to “immuniz[e] kids against tobacco ads.” To accomplish this goal, Vierthaler replaces the fantasies portrayed in cigarette advertisements with realities drawn from medical journals and her own experience. The resultant ‘doctored’ ads are often humourous, and just as often chilling. A number of these BADvertisements may be viewed at the Institute’s site. They’re taken from ‘The Joy of Smoking . . . a spoof on cigarette ads,’ Vierthaler’s acclaimed 63-piece collage art exhibit. Aside from receiving critical success as artwork, the ads have enjoyed much media and journal coverage. The ads’ educational intent is taken seriously; an interested group sent a selection of Vierthaler posters to every school in America.

Rather than simply whining about misleading tobacco advertising, Vierthaler can rightly be said to be actively crusading against it: the Institute has slide-shows, posters and t-shirts for sale to groups alarmed at the link between cigarette ads and children; suggestions are offered in mounting your own counter-offense; Vierthaler even conducts workshops at schools.

Typically — as with many complex issues — the main stumbling-block with tobacco is money. Logically, governments are loath to permit the manufacture and sale of substances that provide no discernable benefit, are addictive, and can kill their consumers. This logic, however, is tempered with the need for tax revenue. Other problems include employment issues regarding tobacco farming and tobacco companies, tobacco company-sponsored arts and events, and investment revenue.

If you have moral problems with the tobacco industry, but are among the estimated 66 per cent of mutual fund investors who haven’t a clue what businesses their funds invest in, you may find to your surprise that you’re pumping money into tobacco. The Calvert Group, a Maryland-based investment company, offers a service — ‘Know What You Own’ — that addresses this. Type in a fund name; its top ten holdings — with special emphasis on tobacco concerns — are presented. I suspect that all the funds in the database are American; none of the Canadian funds I entered were recognized.

King James was well ahead of his time — not only in discerning smoking’s dangers, but also in seeing its potential for state revenue. Little has changed between government and tobacco in the ensuing four centuries.

History of Tobacco Regulation (http://calyx.com/~schaffer/LIBRARY/studies/nc/nc2b.html)

AMA Journal of Marketing (http://www.ama.org/amanews/smokeweb.htm)

BADvertising Institute (http://world.std.com/~batteryb/)

Know What You Own (http://www.calvertgroup.com/KNOW/Search.htm)

. . .
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .

Related media and reading:
		Tobacco Advertising: The Great Seduction (Schiffer Book for Collectors)

(Originally published April 3, 1997)

The Medium & the Message

The name she used was ‘Barb’, and she was a thorn in my side.

“Hello,” she’d say, “this is Barb.”

It was a fairly innocuous greeting — certainly not offensive — but cause nonetheless for panic when we heard it. We’d estimated that Barb was perhaps twelve years old, and it was for this reason alone that we kicked her off the system countless times during our shifts. For a twelve-year-old, she was remarkably tenacious.

Telephone ‘chat-lines’ are little more than glorified phone-mail systems run by computer software, storing voice into memory and awaiting touch-tone input at prompts. The public greetings of those currently online, such as Barb’s ‘hello,’ were what other users would use as criteria in determining if they wished to send a recorded response to the greeter — or if they wanted to send a ‘live chat’ request.

As system operators, these greetings were what we endlessly cycled through in determining their validity or suitability. We disconnected users whose greetings contained profanity, or whose intent was left little to the imagination. We disconnected men on the women’s line — women used the system free — and the occasional woman (despite her having paid) from the men’s line. More commonly, however, we removed under-aged girls from the system; most commonly, it seemed, Barb. Under-aged males were by comparison rare; the payment process aided in weeding them out.

An under-age girl on the system was dangerous; men who were paying a set sum for each minute of access had just cause to complain after discovering they’d invested ten of those minutes talking to someone currently in grade seven. A far greater danger, however, was the possibility of no complaint whatsoever — that the arrangement was deemed acceptable by the parties. And thus we were vigilant.

There is danger, too, on the ‘Net. Some time ago, a boy in the States killed his parents because they cut off his Internet access. A woman specifically sought out and found someone on the ‘Net who would bind her up and kill her. A man and a woman — though the ‘woman’ was a man — met online, and then in person, to carry out a suicide pact. At least one of the 39 Heaven’s Gate suicides was drawn into the cult by its Web page. Women at three universities received anonymous death threats from a 21-year-old student who — happily — was caught and charged with uttering death threats, extortion and mischief.

A policeman investigating the man-transvestite suicide pact blamed the Internet for their deaths; they wouldn’t have met, otherwise. True, but had the ‘Net not been available, they would have used other media to seek out same-minded individuals, as would the woman who wished to be murdered. Patricides and matricides have historically occurred for markedly petty reasons. The bulk of most cults’ members are initiated through personal contact, rather than through advertising. Anonymous death threats, too, long antecede the Internet, though the ‘Net — as does a photocopier — enables multiple recipients.

The ‘Net expands communications, but no matter what medium is used, the communicants are sometimes dangerous.

On one shift, an operator confided to us that she’d heard a young girl accessing another company’s telephone chat-line had met a man and he had killed her. We shuddered.

“Hello,” said a voice through my headphones, “this is Barb.”

. . .
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .

(Originally published March 6, 1997)

Kiss Your Cash Goodbye

In Kingston, it’s called the Exact card; in Guelph, the Mondex card. They’re generally known as ’smart cards’, and there seems little doubt that they’ll find their way here in the near future; the number of financial institutions backing them is impressive.

Over the past few years, here, debit card use has boomed. A debit card’s magnetic strip is scanned by a retailer’s reader, its information and the purchase price are sent via modem to the bank, and — assuming sufficient funds are in the customer’s account — the money is transferred from the customer’s account to the retailer’s. As indicated by their popularity, debit cards are a convenient, ‘cashless’ form of commerce. So why mess with success?

In theory, smart cards would see more use than debit cards. It is estimated that consumers who use debit cards usually pay cash for goods and services costing less than twenty dollars. Smart cards, also known as ‘electronic purses’, address this phenomenon. The user ‘fills’ the card to a given dollar figure, that amount is debited from his or her bank account, and from that point purchases are debited from the balance in the card. In this fashion, the card emulates a visit to a cash machine, and then the dwindling sum of the cash obtained as various purchases are made throughout the day.

There is a notable difference, however. Unlike smart cards, cash is absolutely anonymous — oblivious as to who is holding it at a given moment, or what it is being used for. Smart cards aren’t that stupid. The micro-circuitry in a smart card makes a list and checks it twice. If you bought two $2.00 double espressos and a package of cigarettes at Bob’s Café (far out of town) at 3:10pm on Tuesday, the card will ‘know’ that; some card readers allow you scroll through past purchases. This information, however, may also be of interest to your boss — you begged off sick, Tuesday; your life insurance company, to whom you swore you were a non-smoker; and your spouse — who was that second espresso for?

I doubt that a bank customer’s smart card audit trail would be open for all to see, but its existence alone is somewhat unnerving. Considerable information about an individual can be compiled by their purchasing habits. Also somewhat unsettling is Gemplus’ (one of the largest smart card manufacturers) recognition that card PINs are a weak link: “The way that people give a password with a PIN is not yet ideal. Biometric techniques will soon mean that a person can be reliably identified by his hand, finger print, the color of his eyes or the sound of his voice.”

Proponents of smart cards cite consumer ease of use: No more fumbling for, or losing, change. No more being short-changed by tired cashiers. Fast transactions; modem communications with the bank aren’t necessary at purchase time. This is true, but the protection the cards provide businesses against consumer and employee fraud may do more to ensure their forward momentum.

Related Sites:

Schlumberger Electronic Transactions (http://www.slb.com/et/index.html)

Mondex International (http://www.mondex.com)

Gemplus Smart Card Homepage (http://www.gemplus.com)

. . .
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
. . .

Related videos and reading:
		When Your Money Fails…the \”666 System\” is Here

(Originally published January 9, 1997)

Sweating Out the Orders

“Mffphello?”

The woman I’d awakened at home was a complete stranger. It was 3:00 am or so, but I had called a ‘24-hour order line’ expecting to reach someone on night-shift in a cheerless ‘phone room.’ I had reason for this assumption; I’d worked in a phone room in Toronto — I’ll get to that shortly.

She typed the order into her computer, apparently situated near her bedside. After I’d hung up, she verified my credit card’s validity and then called me back — still half-asleep — with the total cost. She’d sent the order by modem and all was well: my grandmother would get her birthday flowers, and the order-taker would be paid a set per-order sum. I found out recently that a fast food company I’d worked for had switched to a similar method of order-taking — a method far different from the electronic sweatshop I’d experienced.

The phone room was fully computerized. We sat wearing telephone headsets in front of our terminals, processing up to 300 orders each on busy nights. Customer calls announced themselves as a ‘beep’ in our ears. Speed was of the essence; every call was timed from beep to disconnection.

We were trained to ask specific questions of the customer at various points in the order. Only after phone number and address information was entered or checked, for instance, would the software permit the actual food order to be typed in . . . a problem if the first thing a customer iterated after our greeting was a litany of ingredients for their pizza-to-be.

Assuming the ritual was followed by both ends of the conversation, the order itself could drag on. Customers who wanted to chat. Customers who weren’t certain what they wanted to order. Customers who had difficulty with English. Customers who were well and truly plastered. Typing speed was irrelevant, then, and the clock was ticking.

Once the order was completed, it was verified by someone else — if deemed necessary — and then sent by modem to the franchise closest to the caller.

We were rated by the number of orders we had taken during a shift. If that number was below quota — the room average that shift– warnings or reprimands were given; if above, incentives applied. Breaks were timed to the second, and orders that took too long to deal with required explanation. Our previous shift’s performance ratings were posted at shift’s start — evidence of warnings to come, or of impending dismissals.

Through it all, Big Brother was listening. Management could listen in even if we weren’t taking orders: The period between disconnection of one caller and notification of the next required that the headsets — with their microphones — be worn, otherwise the next customer’s ‘beep’ would be missed.

It was the late 1980s, and I was a phone room denizen for perhaps seven months before I quit to preserve what sanity I possessed. In truth, I don’t know if the electronic cottage industry method of order-taking is necessarily better; hopefully phone room frenzy and paranoia haven’t just been transferred to the home.

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Copyright © 1997, 2006 by John Rudzinski. Note the date the column was originally published; any links contained therein are probably outdated.
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