IT’S never too late to publicise threats to online security, so be warned that around this time last year Rusty Nash received an email appearing to come from the online payment service PayPal asking for account details. These were needed, it said, to implement a new security feature to protect the account from being savagely phished.
It must have been really important, Rusty thought, as the subject line contained not one, but two exclamation marks!! And this was confirmed on opening the urgent message, which read: “PayPal and eBay have over 100000000 people worldwide dedicated to keeping PayPal accounts safe.”
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By his calculation, this means that 1 in every 66 people in the world must be working for PayPal and eBay on security alone. That would be pretty much the same proportion as when the old East Germany in its paranoid heyday hired a quarter of a million of its citizens to watch the 17 million others, and each other.
Unless, of course, this was another example of meta-phishing: “I know,” thought some bright criminal spark, “Let’s scare people about all the nasties who are trying to phish their account details, and reassure them that if they’ll just give us their account details we can make them safe.”
“Sam Warburton appreciated the appropriateness of this notice about a meeting of the Cardiff branch of the Philosophy Society: “The representational and relational character of perceptual experience (room yet to be confirmed)”
STILL on the subject of the innumerable ways that computers make life, er, different: Mike Doyle writes to say that he goes beyond our password-picking method (6 December) by taking words of non-English origin and spelling them phonetically in English.
You can even match the requirement imposed by HSBC bank, that your password be hard for you to remember, he reports: “I once used an alternative spelling of ‘pizza’ as a password. Months later, I spent a desperate half hour typing in alternatives, of which there proved to be a surprising number.”
This brought up a point so painful that Feedback’s brain had hitherto consigned it to the suppressed memory bin. Never, ever enter accented characters when changing your Windows password. Some versions – NT4 at least – will happily accept élan!fatigué as your new password, but then refuse to accept that it could possibly be your password when you try to get back in.
POKING around the less frequently used facilities of the iTunes program, Miles Jay Wells finds it telling him that the file system on his iPod was created on Saturday 25 November 2028 at 17.37. Now, if someone would sell us an iPod preloaded with podcasts of horse races…
Anyway, at the time Miles wrote to us, iTunes also reported that it had last been accessed on Thursday 1 January 1970. How could this be possible? Yes, we know that date is the beginning of the Unix epoch, but the iTunes access time was at 01.07, not 00:00.
UPON checking how much of his 5-gigabyte download limit he had used up, Tim West was helpfully informed that he had used “21.940100000000001045918907038867473602294921875 of 5120.0 Mb”. Internet service provider AT&T then added an important caveat: “This usage information summary is only an estimate.”
Tim wants to know how much more precise the real figure can be. Counting 45 decimal digits there, and knocking off six digits, because the figure is in millions of bytes, Feedback’s mind is boggled wondering exactly what was conveyed by the transmission to Tim of those last 5 fractions of bits – or chicobytes, the proposed but unofficial name for 10-39 bytes, as we reported four years ago (4 December 2004).
VOLCANOES interest Craig Borland. It is not surprising, then, that he was visiting – though it is perhaps surprising that there he found the announcement “Active Volcanoes – Thinking of buying? Compare 100s of retailers’ prices at Shopping.com”. He was disappointed not to find any listed on sale there at the moment – not even any dormant volcanos. Shame: “I had my heart set on a second-hand Kasatochi,” he laments. Keep looking is all we can say. You never know when new purchasing opportunities may erupt.
A WELL-KNOWN online retailer had a recommendation for Sue Mac. “Dear Amazon.com Customer,” she was told, “We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits – and the President – Failed on Iraq by Greg Mitchell have also purchased Town & Country Dogs by The Editors of Town & Country. For this reason, you might like to know that Town & Country Dogs will be released…”
“I know that the minds of computers move in very mysterious ways,” says Sue, “but I simply cannot fathom what caused the relevant software at Amazon to link the conflict in Iraq with a bunch of pampered pooches – except, perhaps, that it’s a dog of a war. Please, can anyone enlighten me?”