Typosquatting

Read how "typosquatters" hijacked several thousand expired domain names in order to build traffic for a tawdry commercial Web site.


A Case Study of "Tina's Free Live Webcam"

Northwest Airlines shared confidential data with government

Well it turns out that Jetblue isn't the only airline that shared confidential passenger information with the government; Northwest did so as well. You have to wonder why Northwest told the press that they weren't sharing such data precisely as Jetblue was apologizing profusely for doing so; why make a statement at all? The Northwest news is all over the NY Times, CNN, and media around the world.

You also have to wonder why NASA was entrusted with the data; wouldn't this be a job for the NSA or the FBI -- or even DARPA? Hmmm, kind of makes you wonder what else NASA is up to besides sending robots to Mars, contemplating sending humans to Mars, and allowing the Hubble Space Telescope to die.

It's also interesting to note that the Jetblue incident involved a small contractor in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville (my dad worked there as an engineer for many years). Any connection between that contractor and NASA Ames?

NASA and Northwest haven't been very forthcoming about exactly what data they shared. For instance, did Northwest send stored customer credit card numbers to NASA? How many people at Ames saw such personal information?

Northwest Airlines and I go way back. I'm a long-time Northwest customer -- a frequent flyer since 1985. In 1996 I contributed to Internet World magazine's "Best and Worst" issue, and I listed NWA.com as the "Best Airline Web Site." For years thereafter, Northwest boasted "Voted best airline Web site by Internet World!" Later, after a few missed flights and some bad customer service, I registered Northwestsucks.com -- though I've never bothered to do much with it.

As a customer, this morning I wrote the NWA customer support line asking a few questions:

Do you see the arrow in the FedEx logo?

Recently "60 Minutes" did a piece on a Harvard professor who teaches a class on observation. This prof argues that we value highly the ability to process words and math, but not the old fashioned ability to look about us in everyday life and observe obscure, but potentially important, things. He takes his students on walks through Cambridge and has them observe the vintage of the manhole covers.

One example he gives is the arrow in the FedEx logo. Take a look at the logo on this FedEx truck... Do you see an arrow?



So: do you see an arrow? If not, look very closely between the "e" and the "x". Hint: it points to the right.

Another hint: the arrow is white.

Ahh, now you see it. Would you admit that you never did before?

I sure didn't. And it turns out if you Google for "FedEx logo arrow" you'll find lots of other folks never saw it, either. I was glad to see that a well-known photographer, Jay Maisel, missed the arrow as well: Seen the arrow in the FedEx logo? Not many have. FedEx claims the logo design incorporates the arrow deliberately. Even if you don't consciously see it, subconsciously it's supposed to convey motion.

We all have so many things to pay attention to. Sometimes it's hard to notice little details and important background cues, when it's all so obvious later.

Like the FedEx driver this particular day. When you looked at the photo of the truck, did you observe that it's stuck in the mud? The front wheels are thoroughly embedded in muck. The driver chose to back into the driveway of her next delivery address. Makes sense; unload from the back of the truck close to the house, right?

Unfortunately, the truck had two wheels times two on the rear axle; the front axle only had two wheels. This meant that when she backed up, the rear axle didn't sink -- but the front sure did. You see, it was an unusually warm afternoon on Christmas Eve 2002, and the unpaved strip between road and paved driveway wasn't frozen. Easy to observe -- after the truck is stuck. The arrow is pointing the right way, but until the tow truck comes, that truck -- still full of Christmas deliveries -- isn't moving.

"Please fax us your Web site"

The morning spam included a very strange one:


Subject: To Secetarial Staff - Please Print Your Website Pages For Us
Sender: ""<>

Dear Secetarial Staff

We have been trying to print your promotional literature from the
pages on your website.
But unfortunately for us, we have lost our connection to the internet
for the next 48 hours because of a computer network crash in our offices.

Now no one in our office has access to the internet or your web pages.
Even worse still - although we can send e-mail, we are unable to recieve e-mail.

Please help us by simply printing any 20 pages or more, from your
website, and then fax them to us on 0871 7811 411.
Thankyou very much.

Yours Sincerely
Leslie Goodman, Managing Director
Goodman Mathews & Associates.
Direct Lines: 07963 550 253 or 07906 861 547
Switch Board: +44(0)7817 865 117 or +44(0)7903 058 821
Facsimile: 0871 7811 411



A little Googling reveals that 0871 numbers are national non-geographic (but not toll-free) phone numbers in the UK. It's not clear to me if the called party can somehow gain revenue through this scam (e.g. by forwarding the call to another number that works like a 900 number in the U.S.). Maybe they just want people to waste money making a long fax call.

In any event it's pretty funny receiving an electronic mail message that says they lost their Internet connection, and it's pretty dumb for them to waste time mailing UK phone numbers to a US mailbox -- even unwary Americans who try to call are likely to fail, not knowing international direct dial procedures.

And for the record, the relevant header:

Received: from dsl-80-46-0-15.access.tiscali-business.co.uk ([80.46.0.15]

Has MoveOn.org stopped moving?

Every Web site owner confronts a basic choice: Do we publish a relatively static brochure, or do we offer news about the things we care about?

If you decide that your site offers news about the things you care about, then you have a very real obligation: Keep the home page current. If someone visits you once a week, they'd better see something new every time they visit.

They say nothing is deader than a dead Web site. If your site publishes stale headlines, visitors will assume it is dead. Recently when I posted to Dave Farber's mailing list about a project to connect 100 million homes at 100 megabits/second, the professor heading the project sent me a polite note that my personal Web site is horribly outdated. He's right - many of the links to articles I've written are broken -- because Internet World and New Media have deleted their archives from the 1990s. And if I don't list recent speaking gigs and articles, I'm not doing a very good job of promoting my ideas.

Today I found what appears to be a very dead site: that of the political advocacy group MoveOn.org. This group famously launched their Web presence to urge the country to "move on" from its obsession with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Curious what they are up to now, I headed to their corner of Webspace.

At least on this day, MoveOn.org is indeed a very stale site. Their lead article pleas for people to attend house parties to watch a documentary they've made; they even offer a local party locator implemented as a fancy Flash animation. The only problem: the locator map refers to past parties held on December 7.

There's more:

-- They tout their contest for a "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad -- but the deadline for submissions is long since past.

-- They promote a policy speech that Al Gore gave at their premises last November. Yes they may want to highlight the text, but a photo of Gore "above the fold" after Gore has endorsed Howard Dean may be misleading.

--- They call for Attorney General Ashcroft to appoint someone else to investigate the leak that outed a CIA operative -- which Ashcroft recently did.

-- The button labeled "Media Coverage" brings up an item from November; their most recent press release is from October.

-- They deride Fox News for a cheap shot they took against MoveOn "last week" -- but the complaint is dated December 19.

You get the impression that MoveOn's main products are television commercials and full page ads in the NY Times, and their Web site is an afterthought. If you think I'm being a tad harsh, compare their site to Democrats.org, the official Democratic Party site, or Democrats.com, the site operated by David Lytel (founder of Whitehouse.gov) and a small group of partners. Every news element on those sites is fresh.

Obviously things tend to slow down over the holidays, but if MoveOn wants to retain momentum, their Web site needs to get moving again soon.

I suppose after saying all this it's time get back to editing my personal site...

Airport Departure Display Shows Windows Error Message; How Do I Click "OK"?

You know those monitors at the airport that show when flights are supposed to depart? The ones you stare at in case of delay? Imagine if the display was your Windows desktop computer -- and it's showing an error message. That's what happened to me recently.

My Christmas trip to Alabama began at the Lansing airport. LAN is very small as airports go: a handful of airlines offers a handful of daily flights. The only direct flights are to hubs such as Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, or Cincinnati. Northwest flies a couple of DC-9s in and out but the other flights are turboprops or regional jets. LAN struggles to compete with Detroit Metro and with Flint Bishop – and often loses.

The airport authority hired a new director several months ago, and he’s taken some visible steps to spiff up the facility. He’s added a new business center, joined the local airlines in a “Fly Lansing” marketing campaign, and launched a FlyLansing.com Web site. I noticed on this trip that he’s also replaced aging CRT flight status monitors with plasma screens.

The new monitors are a welcome improvement; the old displays at LAN were showing their age. The screens suffered from “burn-in” so severe that they were barely legible. There wasn’t much screen real estate to work with, so they jammed in abbreviated information. It was kind of like the old days, when airport monitors showed video images of real push-pin white letters on black felt backboards. Actually, it was worse; those old black and white monitors were more readable.

Sadly, on this trip there were many more occasions to stare at the new monitors than I desired. My Holmesian powers of observation told me that the flight to Detroit obviously was going to be late: there was no jet at the gate about 10 minutes before usual boarding time. I knew that the plane was supposed to fly in from Detroit and then turn around and fly back. If it was more than 45 minutes late, I'd miss my connection, so I really wanted to know the status.

As I was checking and re-checking the monitors, I noticed what appeared to be a Windows dialog box with an error message on screen. My wife says I should've pressed the OK button to see if the message went away.

Googling the error message reveals that this is probably a Visual Basic application, and the programmer either is looking for a file in the wrong place (e.g. his own hard drive) or a separate error causes a needed file to be missing on the server driving the monitors. In any event the programmer failed to code up an error handler; too bad, because all the essential information appears to be on-screen. I wonder if someone at plasmaairportdisplays.com is reading this?

I told this story to my buddy Chuck Severance who had an even better tale: recently while driving on an LA freeway, he spied a billboard that was in fact a giant monitor screen. Nice if you can afford it; the billboard can be updated instantly. But there's a downside: technology goofs in ways that paint or paper cannot. In this case thousands of passing motorists stared at a strange error message -- obviously a Windows error display writ large.

This isn't a life or death application -- though you do hope air traffic control displays never behave this way. So what's the answer? Hire better programmers? Test more carefully? Use some other programming environment besides Visual Basic? Somehow I bet those old push-pin letters with a camera pointed at them never suddenly emitted a strange Windows error dialog box.

The Hilarious Snowglobe

My buddy Gabe Goldberg forwarded this link:



One friend proclaimed this "The funniest thing I've ever seen on the Internet." If you think about it, many of the funniest "Far Side" cartoons were funny because they took a metaphor a little too seriously. The effect of the Snowglobe is much stronger if you have sound (headphone or speakers) enabled the first time you try it.

Memo to TiVo: How to Handle Long-Running Events

November 17, 1968 was a red-letter day in the life of an NBC TV executive named Dick Cline. With a minute showing on the clock and the Jets leading the Raiders, he ordered a national football broadcast to cut away to a scheduled showing of the movie Heidi.

The only problem is the Raiders scored two quick touchdowns and millions of viewers were angry.

Dick Cline and his peer TV execs learned an important lesson that day: never cut away from a live event that has millions of eyeballs watching closely for the outcome. Of course that means that when you're covering an event whose time span is unknown, your regular schedule will have to slip. As a viewer if you want to record the event, you don't know when it will end.

TiVo lovers have learned to avoid time-shifting frustration by padding the recording time for sports events. An idea hit me today on how TiVo could handle that problem.

TiVo downloads the starting and ending time for scheduled programs, which works well because most of television is rigidly scheduled. But we don't know how long a sporting event will last in 2003 any better than in 1968.

But TiVo could solve this. All you need is a way for the TiVo to determine when the event actually ends. That wouldn't be that hard to accomplish; for instance, the TiVo could interrogate a special Web site that keeps up with actual ending times. You also could encode the information in the NTSC video signal, much as TV Guide schedules are downloaded to my RCA television. For the latter, you'd need the cooperation of a broadcaster.

You could even imagine TiVo recording breaking news in this manner; a special signal would tell it a special bulletin had started, and the recording would last until the end of coverage signal.

Meanwhile the new NFL Network is going to get even with Heidi:

Elsewhere: The new NFL Network, so far available only to DirecTV subscribers, will commemorate one of the horrors of TV football history at 9 p.m. Monday when it shows the movie Heidi.
....
The telecast of the movie will include interviews with Delbert Mann, who directed it; Dick Cline, the NBC executive who ordered the switch from the game to the movie, and Jets cornerback Johnny Sample. You'll also get to see the two touchdowns that weren't televised.

The telecast may also pay Heidi back for interrupting football. An NFL Network spokesman wouldn't promise that all the movie will air.


http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/entertainment/television/7268916.htm

Detroit News Quote: Michigan Dems to Caucus over the Internet

The national Democratic party has approved the use of Internet polling for conducting the state Democratic Presidential caucus in February. The plan is controversial: some complain that this gives an unfair advantage to those who have better Internet access. If you support Howard Dean, who's used the Web to organize supporters and donors far more effectively than other candidates, you like the plan. Other than Wesley Clark, all the other contenders for the Presidential nomination denounce it.

My friend Mark Grebner, far more expert about elections than I will ever be, says the concerns are misplaced because:
-- The instructions for voting online are mailed to caucus voters along with a paper ballot. Voters can vote by mail, in person, or online.
-- This is not a secret ballot. If there were allegations of fraud, the record of how an individual voted could be reviewed during a challenge.

Along with Grebner and myself, the piece quotes the Michigan Secretary of State, Terri Land, and others. Land opposes Internet voting for general elections. I agree wholeheartedly. This is a different situation. It's a party caucus, not a primary or a general election; if you worry about caucuses representing the will of party members, go immediately to Iowa and do not pass Go. The Michigan Democratic caucus scheme lets you vote by mail, by Internet, or in person at hundreds of union halls and other sites statewide. No one among the party faithful is disenfranchised or disadvantaged.

See this article excerpt:

Richard Wiggins, a senior information technologist at the Michigan State University Computer Center, added:

"Nothing in the world of computing is ever 100 percent secure. Security experts would say, 'How much risk are you willing to undergo and how much are you willing to spend to see that people only vote once
and that votes are correctly tabulated?'

"But we can't be 100 percent assured that whatever system we use cannot possibly be tampered with."

Michigan's chief election official, Secretary of State Terri Land, said she's not interested in statewide Internet voting any time soon.

"There are so many different ways bad things could happen," Land said.

Mark Grebner, an East Lansing-based voter list consultant, countered that potential for tampering is minimized partly because voters must identify themselves.

He added that most voters are likely to use mail-in ballots, diminishing the digital divide issue.

What happened to the IT Skills Shortage?

Today's news included an estimate that half a million IT jobs vanished last year. This put me in mind of a conversation with some friends a few years ago, when companies large and small were hiring programmers from overseas because they couldn't find enough skilled workers.

I remember arguing with one friend that post-Y2K and post-improved productivity, the skills shortage would vanish. Here's what I said to her in an e-mail:

Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 15:25:09 EDT
From: Rich Wiggins
Subject: ITAA says IT worker shortfall now at 850,000
To: XXXX XXXXXX
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 11 Apr 2000 12:23:30 -0400

>yes, but when the "webification" occurs, there will be some other new IT
>initiative to which e-commerce technologists can transfer their skills.
>That is the way of the IT world. We've been doing that (retraining and
>redeploying talent) since forever.
>
>-----Original Message-----


Well, as it happens Microsoft says they feel the pain, too:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/issues/04-03h1b.asp

But I stand by my claim. This IT stuff is gonna get easy, it's
gonna get integrated. The Web is going to be as easy as
running a fax machine, including Web-integrated databases.

So I challenge you, XXXX XXXXXX, to a bet. I bet that as
of April 11, 2005, there is no reported IT skills shortage.
I bet their may be a white collar talent shortage, but
that's for people who are literate, who have basic
management skills, or people who can manage technology.
But the shortage of programmers and programming project
leaders will be gone.

I bet you $100, or a share of XXXX stock as of that day,
whichever is worth more. :-)

______

Sadly I was off by a few years. Not only did the bubble burst and IT jobs vanish, but my friend, herself an employee of a high tech company, was laid off several months ago.

Our cat is radioactive; self-styled thyroid expert has the facts wrong

Our cat Sophie is radioactive right now.

Let me explain. She was recently diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, a condition that can afflict humans as well as cats. It's a common condition in older cats; usually a benign tumor causes one of the cat's two thyroid glands to go into overdrive, producing far more hormone than the cat needs.

This is one area in which a cat is superior to humans. (Wait a minute! If you ask Sophie, she's superior to all creatures in all ways!) With the human, the thyroid is a single gland shaped like a butterfly and wrapped around the windpipe. (Remember from high school anatomy that the "isthmus" is the part that's around the windpipe, connecting the larger parts on either side?)

http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/thyroid/anatomy.html

Whether a human or a cat, treatments for hyperthyroidism include medication, surgery, or radiation therapy. The standard radiation treatment is to administer radioactive iodine. In cats or humans the body sends iodine to the thyroid. It's very rare for both of the cat's thyroids to be diseased, and the radiation attacks the gland that has the tumor.

The cool part is that the thyroid that isn't diseased doesn't get zapped but the other gland does. The healthy one has been dormant because the pituitary has been shouting "Hey! Enough thyroid hormone already!" After a while the good gland wakes up, and in a month or so Sophie will be neither hyper- nor hypo-thyroidic.

Only 1% of cats require supplements after radiation treatment, and 97% are cured. http://www.catthyroid.com/treatment.htm By contrast, it's common for humans to produce too little hormone after treatment, requiring supplemental hormones for the rest of their lives. (Some people think the first President Bush ran a lethargic re-election campaign in 1992 because his supplemental hormone wasn't properly calibrated after he had radiation treatment for hyperthyroidism.)

We had Sophie treated by Dr. Judy Violante, who operates one of only a handful of clinics in Michigan licensed to perform the procedure. She administered the medicine to Sophie and kept her in a lead-lined room for 4 days. Dr. Violante explained that the authorities, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, police their procedures very carefully.

We picked Sophie up this morning. Dr. Violante went over the safety procedures for us. We have to be careful for a couple of weeks; the half-life of I-131 is 8 days. We have to wash our hands and be careful to flush her waste:

W H I T M A N, Mass. — Be careful what you do with your radioactive cat poop.

William Jenness agreed to pay a $3,856.47 fee for mishandling his cat Mitzi's litter box.

Jenness took Mitzi, 11, to a local clinic to treat her hyperthyroidism. The treatment involved giving the feline an injection of radioactive iodine, and Jenness was given strict instructions to flush his pet's waste down the toilet, rather than throw it out.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/CrimeBlotter/021030crimeblotter.html

The funniest part was when the vet brought out a Geiger counter and went close to Sophie so we could tell she really is a radioactive cat. The meter jumped at the sound leapt from tick... tick to tickety-tickety as she approached our newly hot feline.

Sophie was glad to be home after a few days' absence but Judy is understandably shy about petting her; you've got to wash your hands frequently. I told Judy "Geez, you're avoiding Sophie as is she were radioactive!"

There is a lot of good information on this topic on the Internet. I was surprised to find one self-styled "expert" getting the facts wrong. The author's ignorance of cat anatomy is an object lesson in the risks of Googling without a skeptical mindset. Herself a thyroid patient, she writes about the cat as if it had a single gland as humans do:




http://www.thyroid-info.com/articles/cat-hyper.htm

Unfortunately the author confuses human and feline anatomy. The single "butterfly" gland describes the human setup, not the cat's. The author also states that the radioiodine is injected into the cat; while that's a common scenario, Dr. Violante administered an oral dose to Sophie using a pill pusher.

The author, one Mary Shomon, has written a lot about health issues; she authors the Thyroid section of About.com. Her other qualifications include writing the 1993 Washington, DC bestseller, "The Single Woman's Guide to the Available Men of Washington." She also says "I have a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgetown University in Washington D.C." Er, a BS in what area?

You would think that About.com would choose someone with scientific or medical credentials to cover health matters. A friend once told me that the About.com "guide" on Mexican cooking is a numbskull who knows very little about Mexican cooking. In that case the risk is obviously minimal. If About.com's guide on thyroid disease has no relevant credentials (beyond having had thyroid disease and writing a lot) then you've got to ask how serious they are about providing authoritative information. My dad had an electrical engineering degree, became an aerospace engineer for NASA -- and also had heart disease. All respect to my dear departed dad, if he'd written about heart disease I wouldn't take his words as medical advice.

Reminds me of the old skit on NPR where the guy gives a whole bunch of bogus science info and then says you can trust him because "I have a master's degree ... in SCIENCE!!" No thanks, Ms. Shomon, I'll get my information from veterinarians and from trusted university sources.

Automated syndication doesn't replace an editor

Curious what ESPN pundits might say about today's football game between Michigan State and Illinois, I went to espn.com and drilled down until I found the Michigan State team page. Look what I found:



The two articles are from October 8, and they have nothing to do with Michigan State. Obviously some automated syndicator robot has found "Michigan State" tangentially mentioned in these articles, and serves up irrelevant content to the reader.

ESPN's main presence is of course cable TV, but they syndicate content for their Web site as well as their magazine. The Web presence needs a smarter robot or a human editor.