AG's Tech Test Blog

An aptly titled blog post: Don't f*** with Ovid. Ovid had his identity stolen and many debts racked up on his credit card. However, Ovid, a proactive sort from the look of things, wasn't letting that happen quietly. And so Ovid did some detective work. Read all about it, including a most satisfying ready-for-TV denouement.

Oh, how nice -- Google makes a pretty interface, Apple gets hostile. Are there any programmers left in Cupertino, or has that company become simply a collection of litigation experts? (And if you're a Mac "evangelist" who wants to write huffy letters about how I obviously hate Apple and Steve Jobs after that post: You're quite wrong, but bring it on -- I collect them and will give extra points for the ones that sound most like they were written by a lovesick middle-school girl calling out the classmate she thinks has been mean to her secret crush. And for the record, I owned a Mac years ago and gave it up, regretfully, for a computer I could buy software for.)

A heaping helping of what counts for old money in Seattle -- Paul Allen's -- has been offered for disbursement along the South Lake Union area, where the Microsoft co-founder has been working toward building a sort of biotech-oriented enclave of homes, businesses and greenspace. (For those of you not so familiar with Rain City neighborhood nomenclature, that's the area east of the Space Needle and Allen's Experience Music Project big-ugly-museum-blob, at the top edge of downtown.) But Allen money, as the album title says, don't come for free, and this development project has been controversial for quite some time. Could get interesting, but I wouldn't bet against Allen. Dude who can tolerate owning the Portland Trailblazers can withstand a lot of uproar.

Would-be songwriter and Senate stalwart Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) will now be chairing a panel in charge of writing copyright laws. Hatch, if you remember, was the guy who said that the entertainment industry ought to have the right to remotely destroy the computers of people it claimed were downloading music or movies illegally. (That would be the same entertainment industry that sues 12-year-old honor students and dead people.) Worth keeping an eye on this situation, and perhaps buying yourself a fire extinguisher of some sort.

From the BBC, more nasty news on the computer-security front: It's estimated that fully one million PCs out there have been recruited into the zombie spamming-and-spying armies. We here at USA Today have a good primer on how one's computer ends up zombified (hint: Windows plus incautious security plus about ten minutes online), while the Honeynet Project & Research Alliance does a good job of explaining how they arrived at these particular numbers.

From the good folks at Usernomics, a pointer to an article by Jakob Nielsen, reminding hard-working Web slingers (already, as most will tell you, trying to be all things to all people) that the next wave of folks to come online are going to be a lot less literate and a lot less interested in reading, scrolling, searching or analyzing than today's web surfers. He recommends writing for the Web at no more than a sixth-grade level. That sound you hear is your humble blogger, weeping.

For those who love a good science mystery, or even a bad one (for debunking can be plenty of fun too, right?), the folks at New Scientist have a list of 13 events or anomalies that science hasn't yet adequately explained. At least a few of the wilder speculations will set some technologists' and scientists' teeth on edge (Planet X! advanced radio transmissions from aliens!), but I say there's merit even to that sort of thing, within reason: It gets people thinking about how much there still is to figure out in the universe, and reminds us that usually the actual truth, when we puzzle it out, is even weirder and more wonderful than the X-Files-style explanations. Which makes this a great link for E-day, if you ask me.

One hundred years ago today, Albert Einstein completed the first of the three papers that defined his "annus mirabilis" -- and, after that, the rest of physical science. NPR has a great report today and notes that a century later, it's still hard for us mortals to wrap our heads around it all. Those who find science to be dry, or lacking a sense of mystical reality, are encouraged to take the festivities around this centennial as a chance to correct their misconceptions.

This is also blogged lower down the page, but for the skimming reader: AOL has stepped off the privacy policy that has aroused such ire during the past week. And the crowd goes wild.

A fascinating item from Wired on "nanobacteria," which are (probably) not true bacteria but extraordinarily tiny, naturally-occurring crystal-like entities that share some characteristics of living things such as bacteria and microorganisms. You care because these weird things may be responsible for certain strange, hard-to-treat ailments -- and the existence of entities so tiny and so capable to getting into cells and wreaking havoc... well, makes you wonder about nanotech. The controversy over whether those advances are dangerous probably won't be settled in our lifetimes, but the consequences may be huge...

It's a tech story because it's not a tech story: According to the LA Times, the massive ChoicePoint identity theft -- which CP representatives claim was obvious a highly sophisticated technological onslaught by organized crime -- was in fact probably accomplished with stuff like fax machines and correcting fluid. This puts the ChoicePoint disaster more firmly in the world of "social engineering," in which 133t tech sk1llz are less relevant than good old-fashioned con artistry. Very much Kevin Mitnick territory we're in here, only a decade later and much less fancy.

Here's something you never expected to see: A wooden laptop bag. Oddly gorgeous. And I'll bet it smells really, really good.

Uh-oh. An article in IEEE Spectrum online (a journal for electrical and electronics engineers, but I promise you can understand this article) says that a researcher at Carnegie-Mellon has a method of trolling the Web and scooping up -- mainly from resumes, county-government records and the like -- birth dates, Social Security numbers, and all the other info that ID thieves need to ruin your life. Pray that Latanya Sweeney, the associate professor of computer science who's figured this all out, is both smarter and faster than the bad guys. Sobering, very sobering reading.

[UPDATE NOTE: read clear through, please] Privacy mavens are aghast at a new* clause in AOL Instant Messenger's Terms of Service agreement, which says that

"...by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent,
affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable,
perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute,
adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to
privacy."

Translation: Whatever you say in IM, we reserve the right to keep a copy and use it as we see fit. (A cynical observer might wonder if the brain trust at AOL HQ has it in mind to somehow reuse all those billions and billions of IMs -- to make them searchable, perhaps.) Possible winners in this mess: Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger, the number 2 and 3 IM services respectively. Probable losers: AIM's 31-million-plus subscriber base.

* Update: Slashdot, that most excellent hivemind, is saying that it's not so new as that -- a year old. And that it may or may not apply to IMs as opposed to chats. But as with so many of these ToS agreements, it's rather hard to tell -- and, again, how many chat or IM users mean for their words to becoem endlessly replicable by what amounts to, as AOL is one of the first to argue when it suits their purposes, the phone company?!

** Update 2: They made the change -- a wise choice, we suspect.

...and it feels so good. The data-access problem ended for me sometime Thursday, but on Friday I (and presumably the rest of the affected userbase) got a nice note apologizing for the uproar, promising a $20 credit against our next bill, and hinting at some nice new toys for us to download soon. A cheerful end to what has been a trying week for all, I am certain.

Moment of venting: AARGH!!! Hello, rest of news media: Can we get it straight on the "Harvard hackers" stories? Catching you up, a number of MBA applicants to Harvard and other blue-chip schools found yout that the service tracking those results used a very basic URL that, if you knew some basic information, would pass back info about whether the applicant was accepted for the 2005-06 school year. The info appeared on a Business Week discussion board and was apparently passed along to other applicants via the usual email-and-IM routes. The schools found out and, rather than ask if they were stupid or unethical putting sensitive personal info on the Web like that without telling anyone, are rescinding the acceptances and otherwise crowing about teaching these "hackers" a lesson.

So, can we review? Following instructions pasted on a mesage board is not hacking. Leaving aside the ethics (and whether sneaking a peek at information that affects the rest of your life and no one else's is ethically as disgusting as cooking the books at InfoSpace or offering up your former best friend as the sacrifice at WorldCom, or even thematically related), the party to blame here is the bozo who cobbled that system together. This does not rise to the definition of hacking. And at least a couple of you pixel-stained wretches know better.

And a word to the applicants, by the way? Though it's no comfort at all, you can reflect on the fact that despite the jaw-dropping cost of tuition these days, you actually got a lesson from these school entirely free. It wasn't an ethics lesson, though, as they thought they were teaching: This one, kids, is about marketing, spin control, and CYA -- a lesson in how to reassign blame to someone lower and less protected that you in the hierarchy.

UPDATE 12 March 05: John Adams has a terrific, balanced piece on the whole dustup over at oreilly.com, in which he chastises both the overwrought business community (which certainly has let it dislike of things techish flower in this case, hasn't it?); the technology community that refuses to assign any blame to the folks who were poking around in what was obvioulsy supposed to be hidden, however ineptly; and most pointedly academia for all the B.S. grandstanding that has made the admissions-notification season such a dog-and-pony show.