social experiment by mistake

Moving into my new apartment earlier this month presented the opportunity to perform a social experiment. I have an old 27” CRT TV from my college days which due to some strange reasons has continued to follow me.

When I moved in I left this TV outside of my apartment for about six days. Half on purpose hoping that someone would take it, and half out of sheer laziness.

No one stole the damn TV. This means one of two things is true, either everyone in my new building is super honest, or even thieves have become snobs and would never be seen with anything less than a shiny flat LCD.

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the cloud?

Earlier today I read an article in Business Week entitled “Hacking for Dummies.” (Please forgive the inaccurate use of the word.) The article discussed how easy and cheap it is for anyone to “rent a botnet” for the day and performed DDoS attacks. The article made me wonder how easy and cost effective it might be to use something like Amazon’s EC2 to accomplish the same thing.

What kind of safeguards do these “cloud computing” companies really have in place to mitigate the risk of rouge applications. I’m sure reputable companies would shut down disruptive services in a reasonable amount of time, but what if you only need a few minutes of distraction. Would it really be that hard to use a stolen credit card to sign up for service leaving virtually no trail.

Perhaps I am way off…

Posted in computers | 2 Comments

PennDOT dosn’t understand risk

How trying to protect individuals from one form of identity theft may create another.

Late last week I filled out a form on the PennDOT website notifying the Department of Motor Vehicles that I moved.  A few days later I received a letter at my new address containing my updated registration and license.

A few days later I received another letter from PennDOT with the little yellow forwarding service label sent to my former address.

Let me reiterate, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Transportation sent a letter to my former address with all of the information on my license, including the license number and personal traits. What if I didn’t have a chance to provide forwarding information to the post office, or worse, if the post office decided to ignore (or delay) my forwarding information. I would never have received this letter and it would be sitting in the mailbox of some stranger.

I understand the purpose of this letter is to notify people who might not have moved and had their license address changed by some random person as a result of identity theft. However, in order to change your address with PennDOT you have to provide your old license, and both the title and registration from your vehicle. (Which seems odd, since you might have a license, but not own a vehicle, but whatever.)

I guess PennDOT determined that the risk of disclosing personal information to strangers was a lower risk than distributing licenses to people who were able to obtain not only someones original drivers license, but the title and registration from their car.

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the neighborhood crazy

So I am officially all “moved-in” to my new place. Now, this doesn’t mean that the 40 boxes in my living room are unpacked, but that is neither here nor there…

I went to the in-house gym today and was the only one there for a while. About halfway through my workout a strange woman came in, fully dressed and wearing a Sunday Hat. She then proceeded to turn off all of the lights. At this point, I did not say anything, as it was my first day and I really didn’t want to rock the boat. Maybe I was breaking some rule, using the lights at 8am? (There were lots of windows, so this was okay). Next, she takes some cleaning supplies and wipes down one of the machines. She then sits down on the machine and starts laughing at the show I was watching. A few moments later she walks over to where I am, sets up her mat and starts using the free weight. At this point she comments that she doesn’t think he (Stephen Colbert) writes his own material. I shrug and put my headphones back on. She then puts all of her stuff away and leaves.

All of this occurred in approximately ten minutes. Did I just meet the neighborhood crazy??

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pay-for TV woe

I learned something new today, even if you a) live in the city where Comcast is based, and b) Comcast has a franchise in the city where you live, you might still not be able to get cable in your new building. 🙁 Condos can negotiate with, for lack of a better term, what I am going to call TV management companies. These companies control the type of service offered in the condos and basically add overhead.

My options are limited to Verizon FiOS for Internet (not a bad choice), and severely crippled 12 or 24 month contract encumbered packages of Dish Network or DirecTV re-sold by Hotwire Communications. Stupid MDUs.

Of course, I don’ really care about pay-for TV. I’m just as happy streaming Hulu to my TV or watching whatever I happen to have in my Blockbuster Queue. Although, TrueBlood has been awesome this season.

I’m still holding out hope that Comcast will offer to run a line just to my unit… I promise I’ll sign up for all of the packages which make you the most money!

Posted in computers, philly | 1 Comment

argh, craigslist!

Nothing is every simple, is it?

All I wanted to do was post two items I wanted to give away on Craigslist (CL). I spent a few minutes this morning taking and cropping pictures, writing witty little descriptions and (what I think is) posting on CL.

I end up getting two emails which look like confirmations that the ads have posted. Fast forward 12 hours and I started to get a little depressed. I’m thinking to myself, “Honestly, does no one want a free TV…? My how the world has changed…”

Then it dawns on me, I check my email. I re-read what was sent and I realize that I had to click a link to confirm my email address AND THEN click a link to confirm the posting & post it. ARGH!

Nothing was ever posted on CL, however it is now Saturday evening and I doubt anyone will really be perusing the thing for my free crap tonight.

Anyone want a 26” CRT TV or dining room table?

_______

Update 7/27: After successfully posting the ads I received approximately 200 emails in twelve hours. Did I mention that these 8 hours were between 7:30pm and 7:30am Saturday evening – Sunday morning. Apparently ‘free’ interests a lot of people. I had to remove the posts just to be able to read through the emails.

Unfortunately even though a ton of people seemed interested, everyone one who I contacted either ignored my emails or phone calls. It took me until today to find someone who was willing to drive to my place and remove the items. Apparently it’s one thing to be interested, but its another to be interested and have the ability to get off the couch and do some light lifting…

All-in-all not a bad experience, but it still would have been easier to take an axe to the thing and throw it in the trash. America, you have failed me with your indifference.

Posted in computers, insanity | 1 Comment

que?

Comcast is really starting to annoy me with all of the Spanish language direct mail I have been receiving. I guess this is surname profiling? Should I fill them in that ‘Brito’ is Portuguese?I really want to know what got me onto this list. I sure as hell never pressed ‘2’ while calling them. The funny thing is, I still get tons of ads in English as well. Isn’t this all just a big waste of money?

The ad I received depicts a remote control as part of the family. (A remote control whose buttons are written in English.) For only &.95 a month I can get all the rock en espanol I want…

Posted in general, insanity | 1 Comment