What a story: a man who fell for a Nigerian “419” email scam.
He’s ruined.
The piece is by Mitchell Zuckoff at The New Yorker.
Category Archives: Internet
Tell “goto” where to go. To.
I received an email today, at my blogsite addy, from The Editor. It struck a kind of familiar tone, which is strange because I don’t recall having been introduced to The Editor before.
And now he/she has popped up with a polite note reminding me to re-list my website in his/her directory . . .
Hmmmm.
So I did a little googling and look what I found:
For three years now, there has been a “website directory” scam running, where webmasters are sent bogus “renewal” notices via email, encouraging them to sign up for a web directory service, various hosted at www-goto.com or dirs.org . . .
As we have already demonstrated in the past, this is part of a exercise that is designed to collect fees from webmasters from a service they did not ask for.
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression “don’t feed the trolls.” Here’s another nice motto for a gorgeous First of May: don’t feed the snakes, either.
Over the Borders
Sometimes I wonder if corporations understand what computers can do.
Take Borders, for instance. The last time I shopped there, the clerk pounced on me, as I paid for my purchases, and pitched their new “rewards” program. I would get a gift, he said. And money off purchases, he said.
Oh great, I thought. Yet another marketing gauntlet to run, when all I want is to pay and get home.
But I did it. I gave in. I gave him my email address. Reluctantly. I don’t need to be on any more email lists, I really don’t. And I walked away with yet another customer rewards card for my burdgeoning collection. I hope soon I’m able to get on the customer rewards program for a luggage company, because I’m going to need a suitcase to carry around all my customer rewards program cards. One with wheels, thank you.
Anyway, within a week I’d already received about five happy happy joy joy emails from Borders, each of which I deleted unread. Then, this morning, another one, with a subject line that mentioned the “free gift” promised by the clerk. Ah, I said.
So I clicked the email hotlink and went out to their site, and right away I’m faced with an online form which I have to fill out. “All fields required.”
Here’s where I get to the “don’t understand computers” part. I already gave them my information in the store. I gave them my email address. That’s how they found me online to start with.
Why, now, is it MY job to type in all this information? Why is it my job to go find my card and key in my ID number?
Wouldn’t you think that this all would be tracked in some database they’ve got?
How is it rewarding for me to become an unpaid data entry staffer for Borders????
And of course it took me 10 minutes to find the stupid card. It’s not like I can keep it in my purse, since I’m a small purse person. Or on my keyring, since I’m a keyring-in-my-front-pocket person.
Found it, finally. And of course I’m supposed to tell them everything. Name, phone number. Date of birth, so they can step up the email harassment on my next birthday.
User name and password. I actually need a user name and password to enter the hallowed website of a corporate rewards program. Oh, brother.
But here’s the funny part.
For my user name, I typed in “Ihatethis.”
And guess what?
It was TAKEN!!!!
LOL
I had to use “Ireallyhatethis”!!!!
LOL
So that cheered me up.
The free gift didn’t, though. Of course it wasn’t really a “gift.” There were three choices. The closest to an actual gift was a free cup of coffee. But they didn’t offer to bring it to me, and I’ll be damned if I’ll accept a free cup of crappy coffee as incentive to add my warm body to their “store traffic” tallies. So that left the other two “gifts” which were discounts.
So my “gift,” in other words, is to shop at Borders.
No toaster. No tote bag (one with 5 billion compartments for carrying customer reward cards would be mighty handy, Borders).
Give me a break. And show me how to get myself unsubscribed from your stupid emails.
And now: reader reviews are crooked (yawn)
A few weeks ago, on the occasion of my birthday, I decided to buy a bottle of champagne.
I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I didn’t want to buy something icky, either.
So I stood in front of the bank of sparkling wines offered by my favorite wine shop and considered my choices.
It happened that two other women were there, also shopping for champagne. They were apparently friends, and having a lively conversation, recalling different wineries they’d visited. After eavesdropping on them as they discussed four or five different bottles, I decided, on impulse, to consult with them.
I’d picked up a bottle of Konstantine Frank sparkling wine (which interested me because it’s an Upstate New York State vitner) and asked them if they were familiar with it, and whether it was any good.
They were gracious from the start, but also, at first, cautious. The reason soon became clear: they didn’t want to recommend something without knowing a bit about my taste. So wisely, they asked me which of the wines I did like. I pointed to the Veuve Clicquot, heh. “This, only I’d rather not spend quite that much.” And at that point, they relaxed. “Oh,” they said. Now they could help me. They knew my taste was close enough to theirs.
And they recommended a $20 Roederer Estate Brut sparkling wine.
I took it home, chilled it, opened it later that night, and was thrilled. It was delicious — at that price, perfect, in fact.
Which brings me to this 12,000-word article (excuse me, “paper”) at First Monday (tagline: “Peer-reviewed journal on the internet”).
The paper proposes to examine the scandalous behavior of on-line user reviews, with a focus on Amazon book reviews.
First, we have the reviews that are blatant plants. The article authors (Shay David and Trevor Pinch) remind us that
in 2004 both the New York Times (Harmon, 2004) and the Washington Post (Marcus, 2004) reported that a technical fault on the Canadian division of Amazon.com exposed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers, and alarming discoveries were made. It was established that a large number of authors had “gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues or paid professionals.” A few had even “reviewed” their own books, and, unsurprisingly, some had unfairly slurred the competition.
(The authors don’t realize how oh-so 2004 this particular scandal is. Today’s writers are urged, quite blatantly, by their handlers to call in every favor owed them since they left the cradle in exchange for glowing Amazon reviews.)
Next comes the point that many Amazon reviews are essentially spam. The text is copied from one review to another — outright plagiarism is involved in some cases — and often the review is merely a clever pretext for publicizing a website URL. (Rather like the spammers who pretend they love my blog as a pretext for adding their business site url to my comments. Yeah, that’ll work.)
Other reviews are falsely flattering: reviewers give books five stars in order to raise their own reviewer standing. Still others are obviously written more to satisfy a reviewer’s emotional needs than to provide information about a book. (Ya, no kidding.)
And then (worst of all! :-D) are the reviews that are simply crap.
What the paper’s authors don’t consider is whether anyone really takes online user reviews seriously.
I bet not. I bet most people — like me — read Amazon reviews (if at all) for the entertainment value, not to help them make purchase decisions.
It’s simple human nature. In most cases, we take advice from people whose judgement we decide we can trust — a common sense criteria that de facto excludes anonymous online reviews.
That’s not to say we have to know the person giving the advice, but we have to know something about them. Perhaps we’ve observed that they seem engaged and knowledgeable — like the two women I met in the wine shop. A well-written review in a print publication can fall into that category, even if the reviewer’s name is unfamiliar.
Maybe it’s someone with whom we simply identify — a blogger we read, or Oprah, or someone we know from work.
But taking advice from anonymous people on the ‘net?
Maybe some of us do that, once or twice. But I’m betting that people who do quickly learn how useless that advice can be.
And here’s the thing. Even if you do buy a book based on a bogus review, that’s the end of the chain, right there. You’re not going to recommend that book yourself.
So although the Internet can be a medium for word-of-mouth, it’s a foolish marketer who thinks a post on the Internet is equivalent to word-of-mouth.
The real chain is, and always has been, trust.
Or to put another way: the number of Amazon reviews is as much (maybe more) the result of a book’s popularity as the cause of it.
The “future of fiction”?
In the Boston Globe, Sven Birkerts reviews the online novel-to-date by Walter Kim that is being published by Slate.
Birkerts is not persuaded that the novel will live up to its promise of somehow delivering real-time art, i.e., to be a novel and at the same time to “respond to events as they happen.”
I believe that real time and the time of art, the consciousness that makes art, are contradictory concepts-“real-time art” is an oxymoron . . . The traditional aim of art, in response to deeply planted human needs, has from the first been fundamentally contemplative. The work offers a deliberate distancing from the chaos and turbulence of the immediate and allows the reader or viewer to process its tensions through the recognition of underlying patterns.
I suppose so. But that’s pretty, um, abstruse. lol.
He goes on a bit more in this vein, then writes:
And yet, if Kim can successfully deploy some of the energies and capabilities of this extraordinary technology, if he can intensify the participatory dynamic of reading-real-time interaction with real-time output-and win a readership, others will quickly follow.
This gets a bit closer to the crux of the matter. People don’t go to Borders or click on Amazon.com because they decide they need the “prophylactic” benefit of “artistic distance” to keep their sanity “in the face of the boggling complexity of living.”
They — we — buy books because they transport us and affirm what we know ourselves to be.
If writers figure out how to harness the Internet in a way that engages and excites people, and that enables readers to connect emotionally with an online fictional world, it will work.
It’s really pretty simple, in the end. Although not necessarily easy . . .
Just try to stop it
Three weeks ago, when the story first broke that Google would be cooperating with the Chinese government to help it censor searches, Mr. Snitch predicted that this, too, would pass:
Not that some serious stuff isn’t missing from China’s Google. Tibet can’t be Googled anywhere in the country. But this is the Internet, where things change fast. Whatever Google can’t offer the world’s largest nation is going to be seen as an opportunity for some stealthy ‘net entrepreneur out there.
Has his finger on the pulse, does Mr. Snitch. This Monday’s Wall Street Journal featured a front page article (subscription required) on the growing number of workarounds that are enabling Chinese citizens to access forbidden content, courtesy of a new class of netizen, the Hacktivist:
Bennett Haselton, a security consultant and former Microsoft programmer, has developed a system called the Circumventor. It connects volunteers around the world with Web users in China and the Middle East so they can use their hosts’ personal computers to read forbidden sites.
Susan Stevens, a Las Vegas graphic designer, belongs to an “adopt a blog” program. She has adopted a Chinese blogger by using her own server in the U.S. to broadcast his very personal musings on religion to the world. She has never left the U.S., but “this is where technology excels,” she says. “We don’t have to have anything in common. We barely have to speak the same language.”
In Boston, computer scientist Roger Dingledine tends to Tor, a modified version of a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project, which disguises the identities of Chinese Web surfers by sending messages through several layers of hosts to obscure their path. In addition to the Department of Defense, Mr. Dingledine had also received funding from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports free speech online.
The article says that the promising of these may be Freegate, a software program that connects computers inside China to servers in the U.S.
As the product of ethnically Chinese programmers, [Freegate] uses the language and fits the culture. It is a simple and small program, whose file size of just 137 kilobytes helps make it easy to store in an email program and pass along on a portable memory drive.
The software’s creator, Bill Xia, estimates that about 100,000 people a day use Freegate or one of the other censorship workarounds he helped develop.
I like that, a lot :-)
