Michael Gracie

Senator Charles Shumer (D-NY) is calling for a probe on purported gasoline price fixing.

“The bottom line is they are producing at 85 percent capacity when they should be producing over 90 percent. Are they scaling back production? Only by subpoenaing the companies and looking in their books will we get that answer.”

I wonder what anyone is going to get from a pile of corporate books and records, other than smoke and mirrors. Chances are, even if you get straight talk, it isn’t going to be of much help.

You want to find answers? Look here instead. If you are lazy, let me clue you in - all you are going to find is free markets at work. You want a 400 horsepower V-8 in that 7,000 pound vehicle that you drive 100 miles round trip to work each day, back and forth from your sprawling suburban home?

Well then. You are going to have to pay the price.

Computers infected with a Bagel variant have been recently updated with new spamming software. These operations happen right under computer owners’ noses - no “check for updates” button needs clicking, nor any EULA read and agreed to.

The crews that assemble and distribute these viruses must be singing praises of the “always on” broadband connection.

Rootkits, a stealth technology for hiding files on systems, was not long ago a relatively unknown quantity. But Sony BMG changed all that (like a scary movie). Quickly, rootkits popped up in other places (like the bedroom closet).

According to a just released report from McAfee, rootkit use is on the rise. Don’t look under the bed.

It is hard to tell how effective spam laws are, as you don’t hear much about prosecutions for their violation. I suspect the reason is that such events are few and far between. Case in point: Australia just nailed the first spammer under their law - one that has been in place for a few years now.

It took the US a little over a year to nab their first spammer under CAN-SPAM. The bust resulted in a settlement that some would consider a bit weak.

A law without teeth is hardly a law at all. How tough do you have to get to stop the nonsense?

That is essentially what is happening, as Bruce Schneier suggests. ATM networks are upgrading their encryption algorithms. Meanwhile, they are moving off old dedicated lines (I think a lot used frame relay and POTS lines) and onto the internet. That is what is opening them up to potential hacks, not the Triple-DES upgrade.

Tax season is winding up, and phishers are hot on the trail of those refunds. The scam is posing as the IRS, and then offering to help lure recipients in tracking down their refunds.

The ploy is supposed to be representative of the increasing sophistication of online criminals. The thieves are supposed to be chasing the money nowadays - maybe they should be targeting employees of corporate treasury departments instead of individuals desperate for their tax refunds.

Here are some quick thoughts, compliments of Lockergnome, on tying up loose ends in your network (as in home or small office) to keep you safe from malcreants.

Declan McCullagh over at Politech makes note of the problems the DearAOL campaign is having getting through to AOL subscribers, and the email threads he has posted are worth a quick read.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation sent out a press release claiming AOL is deliberately blocking all messages with “www.DearAOL.com” in the body. The EFF makes no mention of the fact that AOL subscribers themselves might be responsible, by marking the unsolicited messages they received as spam. They also quoted Wes Boyd of MoveOn regarding the issue, but failed to mention that MoveOn has a reputation for less than diligent list management.

Rather than debate the issue, I’d like to hear from some AOL subscribers on this one. If you are an AOLer, and you marked one of these “DearAOL” messages as spam, let the world know. And to be fair, if you are an AOL subscriber who opted-in for these messages, only to have them blocked thereafter, speak up as well (and make sure to say whether you added the sender to your acceptable senders list too).
Read more »

Those who succeed through diligence and perseverance, or rigor, are excellent. Those who stride, appointed or elected, are simply popular. Excellence is hard to ignore, while popularity can fade with the next strong crosswind. Which do you think is a more valuable attainment - setting a standard which your peers recognize and appreciate, or being a byproduct of collective preference?

If you are a motivated individual, bent on making a positive contribution to the world, you already have more than half the battle won. Of course, a little intelligence doesn’t hurt either, but you’ve already got most of what it takes to succeed - and that kind of success will ensure you are remembered for all the right reasons. And if you find yourself tiring of red tape, it may be an additional sign you are on the right path. The bureaucrats in our world seem to be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
Read more »

For a merger to work, the whole has to wind up greater than the sum of the parts. A while back I pondered whether the swathe of telco mergers would make things better. I couldn’t come up with an answer.

Someone else now asks the same questions:

“How would they be able to take, in each case, two companies with already broken processes and mediocre customer support and successfully merge them? How could they continue to provide me with the support I need to keep my company’s networks functioning as they need to in this age of the bandwidth junkie?”

What’s a telecomm manager’s answer? The telcos can’t.