Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Spies in Our Midst

Posted on March 15, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

American Civil Liberties Union Releases First Concrete Evidence of FBI Spying Based Solely on Groups’ Anti-War Views.

Posted in Civil Liberties | Comments Off on Spies in Our Midst

Bush Bird Flu Plan: Tuna Under the Bed

Posted on March 14, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

The Bush administration unveiled its bird flu plan for the US this weekend. And you can’t make this stuff up,

ABC News: Ready or Not, Bird Flu Is Coming to America: In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans start storing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a dealy bird flu outbreak approaches the United States.

See, if everything breaks down and the government isn’t ready, there aren’t enough ventilators, it was your own fault for not listening to their warnings.

Yesterday New Orleans, tomorrow the nation.

Posted in Science/Medicine | 8 Comments

Go Eat Your Own Dog Food

Posted on March 14, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

We get e-mail. Today’s seemed especially absurd. I’ve altered the domain name in the URLs and in the text, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, but the typo was in the original:

Hi,

I manage a website called [canine]foodlist.com and I think your site would be of interest to the visitors that regularly browse my site.

I have gone ahead and given you a link plus a description of your site from my page at http://[canine]foodlist.com/metalautomaticdogfoodfeeder and I’m just contacting you to check it is ok to have done this for you?

I would greatly appreciate a link back to my site and if you are happy to do this then to make it easy for you I have included the following code…

Dog Food List Everything about dog food from best dog food to wysong dog food.

Feel free to change the suggested code if you would like to. I look forward to a mutually beneficial link partnership and I wish you all the best with your site for the future. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

Kind regards

Greg

P.S. Keep up the good work!

Disclaimer: If this email has reached you in error or if you would not like to be contacted again then please accept my sincere apologies. Let me know by sending an email to remove@[canine]foodlist.com if this is the case and I will make sure [canine]foodlist.com never contacts you again.

//

Dog Food?!? I’m not even chopped liver???

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

More Like 30 Seconds

Posted on March 13, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Over at Daily Kos, they estimate it’s a five minute job,

Daily Kos: 5 Minutes, For Democracy’s Sake: Five minutes is all it takes, really.  Less, if you’re not that chatty. In five minutes, you can speak up for the rule of the law. In five minutes, you can put your own footprint in history, as one of the mass of millions who advocated for the censure of a President who broke the law.  Years from now, no matter what the outcome, you can look back and say you stood up when Congress stood down, you pushed your party forward no matter how much it wanted to cower back in the shadows.  Are you ready?

Today, I ask each of you to take a few minutes and contact your Senator and ask them to sign on as a co-sponsor to Senator Russ Feingold’s censure resolution.  You can find your Democratic Senator’s full contact info, including fax and local numbers, here.

So I called Bill Nelson’s office in DC, not that there’s much hope for the shrinking violet to stick out his neck the week he will likely lose his patsy opponent and maybe collect a real one. But what the heck, I called his office anyway.

I got about 30 seconds. They didn’t even want my name and address, just my zip code, and whether I’m for or against. (On the very rare occasions I’ve called legislators in the past, they’ve always asked for contact info so they could write me a polite brush-off letter later.)

Either they’re not listening, or they’re getting a lot of calls. Or both.

Bonus Kos link: CNN Reporter claims Feingold has his facts wrong, ends up with egg on face.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 7 Comments

Strange Phish

Posted on March 13, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

I got a scam email, reproduced below. I was going to write a post about how phishers keep upping their game because, while I get tons of scam e-mail every week this is the first of its type I’ve seen, and it seemed to be a cut above the crowd. “I bet they catch a lot of people,” I thought.

But looking under the hood, it’s odder than I thought.

First, here’s the email (without the live links):

PLEASE READ THIS NOTICE CAREFULLY.

You have received this Notice because the records of PayPal, Inc. indicate you are a current or former PayPal account holder who has been deemed eligible to receive a payment from the class action settlement in accordance with PayPal Litigation, Case No. 02 1227 JF PVT, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose.

In your specific case you have been found to be eligible for a payment of $48.99 USD.

The aforementioned settlement funds may be transferred directly to your bank account providing you have a linked card. The funds may not be credited directly to your PayPal account as this would render Paypal to be accumulating interest and thus profiting on litigation settlement funds which contravenes Federal law. Your bank account will be credited within 7 days upon submission of account details.

To credit your bank account please click here. [there was a URL attached to “click here”]

If you are seeking an alternate method of receiving your funds PayPal will be contacting those who do not submit their details by the 31th of March with instructions to receive a cheque in the mail. However this will incur a 7.5% processing fee deducted from the settlement amount and therefore PayPal only recommends this option to those users who do not currently have a bank account with linked Bank Card.

Please Note that under United States federal law credit cards are not a legally approved method of settlement for Class Action suits and cannot be processed for transferal of funds in this case.

This notice is a summary and does not describe all details of the settlement. For full details of the matters discussed in this notice, you may wish to review the Settlement Agreement dated January 11, 2006 and on file with the Court or visit https://www.paypal.com/settlement/. Complete copies of the Settlement Agreement and all other pleadings and papers filed in the lawsuit are also available for inspection and copying during regular business hours, at the Office of the Clerk of the Court, United States District Court for the Northern District of California, 280 South First Street, San Jose, California 95113.

PLEASE DO NOT TELEPHONE THE COURT REGARDING THIS NOTICE.

DATED: March 13, 2006

BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF U.S.A.

This PayPal notification was sent in accordance with your PayPal notification preferences. To modify your notification preferences, go to https://www.paypal.com/PREFS-NOTI and log in to your account. PayPal will not sell or rent any of your personally identifiable information to third parties. For more information about the security of your information, read our Privacy Policy at https://www.paypal.com/privacy. Replies to this email will not be processed. Copyright© 2006 PayPal, Inc. All rights reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners. PayPal is located at 2211 N. First St., San Jose, CA 95131.

To the trained eye it’s obviously a fraud. The paragraph about how paypal can’t hold the money is silly — if Paypal were paying it it would be Paypal’s money; if the funds were in escrow the interest would go somewhere agreed as part of the deal. And the last line is wrong too: “BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF U.S.A.” Um, what state please?

And anyone who went and looked at https://www.paypal.com/settlement/ would be redirected to the In re PayPal Litigation Settlement Website, where they’d learn the period for making claims ended years ago. So it’s a total scam. Even so, I could see how many people might be taken in by it and might “click here” without investigating.

But that’s not what I found so strange. Sadly, that’s all too commonplace. What’s odd is the URL that “click here” leads to is “http://12012068097/003.paypal.com” which isn’t properly formed. And the URL to which most browsers would proably default is 12012068097.com, which points to a site that doesn’t exist for a domain name that is not even registered.

I understand phishing exercises designed to get your credit card or banking info. But relatively elegant phishing exercises that just waste your time?

Posted in Internet | 7 Comments

Settle in for a Long Haul?

Posted on March 12, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Picketline blog reports that the national SEIU has raised half a million dollars for the UM strike fund. And promises that much again if needed.

This sounds to me like a very strategic development in that it means the strikers are unlikely to fold soon. My solar-powered calculator suggests that $500,000 is enough to support the entire would-be bargaining unit at $7.50 for 40 hours a week for almost four weeks. And if UNICCO is right that only 25% of the employees are actually not showing up for work (presumably the only ones eligible for strike pay), that means we should multiply that times four, which carries us well into the summer. And that’s not even considering the other donations they may have received, or the possibility that strike pay may be less than 100% of lost wages.

UNICCO’s latest line is that everything should be on hold until Shalala’s committee issues its report. While the committee report certainly offers a face-saving way for the University to get out of this mess, and I hope it takes it, from its make-up this isn’t a committee which looks very independent of President’s office, nor one that has any great history of pro-worker sentiment. Rather the contrary, so while I’m hopeful, I’m also not that confident.

Meanwhile, other than the obvious facts that (1) card-check elections are more likely to result in a union than NLRB-managed elections, and (2) both sides say the method they dislike is too easily manipulated by the other side, and (3) the apparent fact that UNICCO has allowed card-check elections elsewhere, but doesn’t want want here for some reason, is there anyone who can point me to a discussion of the merits and demerits of card check vs. elections as a fair means of measuring what workers actually want?

Posted in U.Miami: Strike'06 | Comments Off on Settle in for a Long Haul?