Earlier this year, my wife and two of my daughters attended CELEBR-8 U, a conference for middle school and high school girls organized by Moving Traditions, a wonderful organization for which our family has a great deal of fondness and respect. One of the co-sponsors of the conference was BBYO. Unbeknownst to us, Moving Traditions… Read More: BBYO management: incompetent or merely stupid? »
UPDATE: The Consumerist has posted a template you can use for your opt-out letter. Furthermore, the Consumerist article says that eBay just did the same thing as PayPal, and you need to send a letter to opt out of that one as well. There’s a link in the article to a template for the eBay… Read More: PayPal adding mandatory arbitration to user agreement, but you can… »
A recent security breach exposed the plaintext usernames and passwords of almost 100,000 members of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The usernames and passwords were discovered by a researcher in 100GB of log files inadvertently left open to the public on an IEEE FTP server. Leaving aside for the moment how incredible… Read More: How to misread statistics, ArsTechnica edition »
I have several domains on Go Daddy, including my blog and my primary email domain. As a result, both my blog and my email were nonfunctional for much of the day on September 10, due to the Go Daddy outage you’ve probably already heard about. For the record, I first started using Go Daddy simply… Read More: How not to apologize for a service outage »
In June, I wrote about a technique used by spammers to harvest names and email addresses of “live” targets for their spam. In a nutshell: you post an ad to Craigslist; the spammer sends you an automated email which makes you think that maybe the sender is interested in your ad; you send a response,… Read More: New technique from the Craigslist spammers »
UPDATE [2012-10-03]: RightScale has ongoing issues with the stability of their command-line tools. In particular: rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with a timeout error. You can’t just retry, because sometimes the script you were trying to queue was queued despite the error, and there’s no way to tell. rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with an error “Failed to process… Read More: Auto-negotiation of pool updates in RightScale VMs »
Ken at Popehat reports on Pittsfield judge Bethzaida Sanabria-Vega ordering a local blogger not only to stop writing about the daughter of a local public official who was the perpetrator of a hit-and-run accident which nearly killed someone and got off virtually scott-free after the courts “lost” some of the paperwork related to her case,… Read More: Pittsfield judge orders local blogger to stop writing about the… »
UPDATE [2013-02-13]: According to this article on Craigslist, as of February 10, 2013, they have implemented and are testing the idea I described below for fixing the problem described in this posting. I recently placed a for-sale ad on Craigslist. I anonymized my email address in the ad, which means that the published email address… Read More: Craigslist email-reply scam and what Craigslist could do to fix… »
UPDATE [2012-12-10]: I’ve updated the script with the new login URL shown in the comment below. UPDATE [2012-12-10]: I’ve added a new “–import” option to the script for importing a text file listing to-do items into a project. UPDATE [2012-12-10]: I’m not using Todoist anymore. I’ve switched to Toodledo, which I’m much happier with. You… Read More: Don’t lose your data if Todoist goes away »
Long-time readers of my blog may remember my multiple postings about Honda Village in Newton, Massachusetts. You can read the whole series of Honda Village postings here.