Rubenerd

I’m invoking Betteridge’s Law here, because turns out this email wasn’t as clear cut as I thought it was. Today’s spam comes from someone purporting to be PayPal. I didn’t alter the text or formatting in any way:

Hello, Ruben Schade

For the safety and security of the PayPal network, we are writing to notify you that we need to collect some additional information from you to continue using your PayPal account.
We need you to please update this by20 March 2022 (+60 days),otherwise the "functionality of your PayPal account will be impacted". It should only take a few minutes to complete. To keep using your account and all its features, please:
- "Log in " to"" your PayPal account.
- Click on the notification icon.
- Update your details.
Forgotten your password? Don't worry – you can reset it in just a few simple steps by following the instructions
here

Note the giveaway signs of this being a phishing attack:

• Referring to it as the PayPal network

• Amateurish paragraphs and weird carriage returns, such as in that last line.

• Incorrect or missing spaces, such as by20 March 2022 (+60 days),otherwise

• Inconsistent quotation marks, such as "Log in " to""

• Redundant use of punctuation, such as "functionality of your PayPal account will be impacted"

Except, as you’ve probably guessed by my tone, this email was legitimate. I logged into my PayPal account directly without clicking any links in the email, and sure enough they needed to verify some of my information.

I won’t mince words here. This is bad!

Basic spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes are poor form in any corporate communication, but the stakes are so much higher when it comes to financial services, for reasons I’m sure you appreciate.

Phishing attacks broadly exploit three facts:

1. People don’t look too closely at their email

2. People implicitly trust email from a company they do business with

3. People don’t know how to spot fakes

Our collective efforts to train people to protect themselves are undermined the moment a legitimate outfit sends email like this. I cannot stress how dangerous this precedent is. We worry about malicious email looking legitimate, but what hope does a layperson have if the reverse is also true?

The potential customer impact is just as frustrating at a personal level. I sent this email to spam, but on a hunch checked my PayPal account just in case. Had I not, my account may have eventually been terminated, and my email provider’s spam filters would have been trained to ignore any further communications. Imagine the consequences if I ran a business through a PayPal account, or had large sums of money sitting in it.

Companies like PayPal have a responsibility to the Internet that made their services possible. They can, should, and must do better, or we will continue to lose this fight against scams.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

21:50 – The risk of ordering clothes online, Simon Whistler, AviationTag memorabilia from the A380 and B757, humans needing physical contact, appreciating technological and medical progress, and giving people permission to have new year resolutions!

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released January 2022 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

This is so good! Image via HippopoPenguin’s Pixiv profile.

There’s a lot of context here, but in brief Tohsaka Rin serves as the human vessel for the Ishtar and Ereshkigal psuedo-servants in the Fate/Grand Order game… or so it’s explained. In reality, Rin is a hugely popular character from the Fate franchise (and the gentleman’s story arc choice), so this was a way for TYPE-MOON to plausibly* add her as a servant in the game.

All that said, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any fanart of Rin as one of those characters before.

I dream about weird things. Last week it was a pool party where everyone was playing pool in a pool, only the pool was badminton. The week before that I was haggling with someone for train tickets to get to a flower nursery next door, because I wanted to buy groceries.

Last night’s dream was both cruel and unusual. I’d come into some money, and proceeded to spend a chunk of it on a home NAS that only used a stack of SSDs for bulk storage. They were installed into a tiny DAN A4 case with an SFX power supply, a Mini-ITX board with ECC, and FreeBSD with OpenZFS to handle the storage. I could lift and spin the whole ensemble with one hand.

I woke up, and went into our loungeroom to look at the heavy Antec 300 loaded to the gills with heavy, slow, hot spinning rust in OpenZFS arrays. It looked so antiquated, like I’d stepped back in time and built a cupboard full of punch cards or ticker tape.

One day I’ll have a cute little FreeBSD hypervisor and storage NAS that I could fit in a small case. Silicon shortages notwithstanding, here’s hoping SSD prices keep dropping over time. Spinning disks have been (mostly!) my loyal servants until now, but I feel like they deserve a retirement.

Today I bid farewell to my last ebook reader. I’ve migrated to an iPad, and the Kobo store for books.

eInk screens are crisp and paper-like, but I’ve been spoiled by the screen and flexibility of my iPad Mini. I can read full colour RSS feeds, newspapers, manga, ebooks, light novels, and books all on a device that’s barely larger than the Kindle. The iPad’s significantly higher resolution, coupled with a textured, matte screen protector makes manga really pop.

The iPad is easier to make annotations on, highlight and copy passages for quoting, take screenshots, and read content from multiple sources and stores. I have it hooked up with our local Chatswood library, and use Apple’s default ebook reader for DRM-free epubs and PDFs I source from other stores.

But its nighttime performance is what most surprised me. The Kobo app, like other book readers, lets you invert the screen in low light. Reading grey text on a dark background on this amazing screen feels less harsh than the white backlight of the eInk display. I also don’t feel the same fatigue looking at the iPad that I do other LCDs for extended periods; whether that has to do with the Retina+ display resolution, refresh rates, a better quality backlight, or some other technical achievement I’m not sure.

(This doesn’t apply to manga, which would look downright weird with inverted blacks and whites, even if it were possible. But then, I prefer reading manga during the day and books before sleep).

I wasn’t sure if I was ready to move on from eInk, and I’ll miss its battery life. But given how much more reading I’ve been doing on the iPad, I think the proof is in the pudding.

This has to be one of the most beautifully shot rail videos I’ve ever seen. Those slices of Americana flying by has only reinforced my need to go to the US and explore all these places. I’ve long had the Empire Builder at the top of my list, but now the California Zephyr has made the list too.

Jeb Brooks has a new subscriber :).

Bagel.

Thank you. Wait, damn it.

I can hear the faint sound of The Smiths asking How Soon is Now in relation to the title of this post. I used to think some of their music was interesting, but insufferable hipsters and Morrisey ruined them for me. But I digress.

Beyond 2000 was one of the first shows I remember watching as a kid. It detailed all the new inventions and live improvements we’d have by the turn of the new millennium, including fusion power and self-driving cars. Gateway 2000 wanted to sell us futuristic computers before they pivoted to those awesome cow boxes.

And say, remember The New Millennium? Microsoft went as far as to break from their year-based nomenclature and called Windows 98 Third Edition Windows Millennium Edition instead, given Windows 2000 wasn’t the unifying OS they expected it would be. Is it a coincidence that Windows 2000 had the best UI before and since of any Microsoft OS? I think not.

The year 2000 was a big deal for obvious reasons, but its passing lead futurists, politicians, and planners to pin their hopes on a new one. When I lived in Singapore, I remember going across the Causeway (or the Tuas Second Link!) and seeing the billboards for the Malaysian Government’s bold Wawasan 2020 plan. I’m sure they had no idea how right they were about needing rapid development and world-class healthcare to combat a changing landscape.

Now that 2020 has faded into memory, with the collective middle fingers of the world squarely aimed at it, what year is the future now?

I’ve seen a few discussions about 2030, but it doesn’t have the same satisfying repetition. 2036 2038 (thanks Peter Molnar!) will be another Y2K moment when the 32-bit timestamps used by older Unix and NTP roll over, but I doubt it’ll generate the same fervour as the former. 2048 would be a fun number for computer nerds, but likely few others.

2050 seems to be the new darling. It’s what governments around the world are pinning their reductions in carbon to, despite it long being too late. 2100 nay gets a mention at all, which surprises me.

Personally, I’m pinning my hopes on 2024, when we can all travel and see each other again. Clara and I have wanted to tick off Nagoya, Hiroshima, Taipei, and Boston for years!

I wish I could remember where I first read this, but someone commented that she was accused of only doing it “for the money” in response to her work. She could have been working for a charity, or she wrote a book on Bitcoin… a lot of things have melded together in my mind over the last few weeks.

Richard Dawkins, the gentleman behind the term meme, refers to such tactics as thought-terminating clichés. They’re devices designed to derail a discussion when a debate is descending (I couldn’t keep that alliteration going) away from their control. Rather than respond to points, these dishonest people retreat to arguing that the motive must only be financial.

Pineapple on pizza is tasty? Pfft, you’re only saying that because you have a cookbook you’re trying to spruik!

It’s not entirely without basis, unfortunately. Televangelists, politicians, and charlatans have trained us to be skeptical when someone passes around a collection plate, only to lavish it on themselves or in corrupt ways. Someone comes along spouting an opinion or view you don’t agree with, and its easy to ascribe malicious intent.

But it’s not always true, and it’s usually dishonest and lazy to level the charge against someone unless you have proof. It’s especially silly when claimed about someone in academia, given how much more they’d be making in the private sector if that were their primary motivation! But then, nobody is making such a claim while thinking rationally.

I guess it’s just projection again. If you only see your work as a source of money, or manipulate people to part with theirs, you assume everyone else is motivated the same way. In the words of Simon Phipps, people tell you where their weaknesses are by what they attack.

We all have to eat, so I don’t begrudge anyone for just doing jobs for the money. In some cases I can see where it’d be a coping mechanism, especially if they company paying for your food treats you like rubbish. But there are other goals out there too.

@metkis@merveilles.town:

Really, what good is a programming language if it doesn’t have a cool name?

I’d also add: a name that’s easy to search for without appending “lang”.