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For those you who have E-ZPass (EZPass or EZ-Pass, I can never spell it right) tags, you'd better take a look at your recent statement. No, this is not about phantom charges for some bridge you never crossed. It's about a $1 service charge that was quietly added in july.

Generally, when I receive my E-ZPass statements in the mail, I just glance over the balance amount and if it seems in line, I toss it. For some strange reason, I actually reviewed my last statement to see what kind of charges they have on it, and that is when I discovered the mysterious $1 account service fee.

The next day, I asked one of my coworkers if he knew anything about this. No, he said. But then he checked his account online and sure enough he was also being charged. So finally I decided to call E-ZPass and see what was up. It turns out that the E-ZPass tags are assigned by various authorities in new york, including Port Authority, New York State Thruway, and MTA. Mine was issued by the MTA. The Port Authority had been charging its E-ZPass customers the $1 service fee for a while, and the MTA, apparently feeling left-out, decided to silently add the fee.

What a perfect scam, bait and switch, swindle, robbery. First they sucker you into getting one of these tags so they can save money on toll collectors, then they charge you a service fee for the privilege of charging you at the toll plazas. And on top of it all, they sneak the charge in, hoping people wouldn't notice. When Kozlowski taps Tyco's money, that's fraud and embezzlement, and he must be punished. But when the government steals (and these outfits are quasi-government sorts), I guess it's called legitimate practice.

Hey Spitzer, are you awake?

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Comments on this Entry:

(jeans fetish on Jun 10, 2006 3:46 AM) Ill be back very soon to see any update!!!

(prefabrike on Mar 25, 2008 4:30 PM) What a perfect scam, bait and switch, swindle, robbery. First they sucker you into getting one of these tags so they can save money on toll collectors, then they charge you a service fee for the privilege of charging you at the toll plazas. this nice word.. thank you..

(kabin on Jul 16, 2008 8:42 AM) E-ZPass tags are assigned by various authorities in new york, including Port Authority, New York State Thruway, and MTA. Mine was issued by the MTA. The Port Authority had been charging its E-ZPass customers the $1 service fee for a while, and the MTA, apparently feeling left-out, decided to silently add the fee.

GWA is in effect a proxy client drawing from the vast Google cache content. This means that when you visit a site, in addition to your ISP, Google will also know about it, even if it doesn't supply the content from its cache. If you already have the Google toolbar installed, chances are Google is already collecting the information. The difference however is that with a decent network analyzer you could see what information is sent back to Google via the toolbar. With GWA, you can never be sure what is being collected since data is being supplied through Google itself.

Web operators are already having a hard time collecting data on their visitors. With paranoid users blocking cookies, disabling scripts and images, and cloaking browsers, now their IP addresses will also be masked by those of Google's. For some users, being IP-anonymized is a boon, but if you are a Web operator who depends on visitor's IP addresses for Web analytics, banned and private lists, site troubleshooting, or culture detection, life just became a whole lot more complicated.

To see what I mean, visit the Whoami page on my personal site with GWA turned on and then turned off and note the differences in the information presented.

Finally, will Google ever use GWA as a censorship or subjugation tool, displaying content based on its discretion? Google already wields so much power that many sites fear being banned from its index. Just imagine how much more anxiety they would have, if their site won't even load because GWA might decide to dump them and provide a 404 page instead. This is an unlikely and alarmist scenario of course, but it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.

If GWA is ever released as a finished product, it has the potential of becoming as popular as Google's toolbar. Only time will tell whether its benefits outweigh the risks.

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One of the newer products offered is Google Web Accelerator (GWA). It had been open for download for a while, but it was yanked offline citing too many users. the GWA home page is in some sort of a limbo now and sometimes it redirects to the Google toolbar's page, but GWA can still be downloaded from a number of other sites. Google it up if interested.

I recently downloaded it from one of these sites and gave it test run. It looks like a speedometer with a needle, sitting in the tray and the browser toolbar. The needle moves as the browser is used, indicating activity. A small text proclaims the amount of time saved using the tool. The idea behind GWA is simple, even though the implementation is a bit involved. Since Google has so many web pages cached in its distributed servers, it could rush content back to the browsers faster than the actual web sites can.

Making all of this work is a little proxy installed by GWA on the PC that attempts to pull content form the Google cache as the user browses to various sites. So far GWA claims to have saved me 15 minutes, but I don't have a sense of faster browsing yet.

I suppose GWA can be called a great innovation by a company that can leverage its massive cache content to facilitate browsing. But GWA also has some adverse effects. I'd discuss that in my next entry.

The GWA's home page is http://webaccelerator.Google.com/.

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 If you have ever scanned your web logs, you would undoubtedly noticed these agents. They come with different names like googlebot, msnbot, and yahoo slurp. Almost all legitimate robots ask for permission before crawling a site, and the way that's done is through a file named robots.txt. This capability has been around since the early days of the search engines, but it is perhaps one of those often forgotten details. The reason is that if a robot can't locate /robots.txt on a Web site's root, it takes that as a green light to crawl and index the whole site.

 robots.txt is flat ASCII file with a simple format. It is placed at the root directory of the Web site, so for example, it can be accessed this way: http://www.tmcnet.com/robots.txt. If you want search engines to crawl your whole site, you would specify this inside robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

If you want to block robots from a certain location of your 

site, you would specify this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

I won't bore you with the details. You can read about the stuff <a title="robots.txt" href=http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html>here</a>.

Now the question is: if a missing robots.txt file is an open permission to crawl, why bother creating one? The best reason is to save on bandwidth. Many sites are designed to deliver a standard page to help lost users with missing pages. A robot looking for a missing /robots.txt file would also receive this page, and while in most instances, the standard error page will not cause any harm, the robot would still have to parse it, wasting bandwidth and resources. A safe practice to avoid this waste is to place an empty robots.txt on your Web site.

Finally, understand that /robots.txt works based on the honor system. While most legitimate search engines follow its instructions, there is no way to enforce obedience via this file.

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The expanding menu has been part of MSNBC's navigational feature for many years. As the user hovered over the different item, a submenu would branch off displaying links to the top news for that section and other relevant sub-sections within. The sub-section items, once hovered over, would in turn open up their own menus displaying relevant links.

I always liked this functionality. It provided a one-click access to the stories I wanted to view. Dynamic menus do come with some inherent issues. One of the most problematic is layering. Most dynamic menus have the unfortunate side-effect of being eclipsed by active controls on a web browser. Those controls comprise items such as drop-down lists, applets, and flash.

To solve that problem, MSNBC would hide the active controls on the page whenever the user hovered on a menu item, thus the expanded menu would not clash with other controls on the page. It meant that many times interactive banners would suddenly vanish, and I suspect the advertisers weren't so pleased about their banners doing the disappearing act.

Now, with the expandable menu gone (at least for now), MSNBC is reaping several benefits, albeit at the expense of upsetting the dynamic menu fans. The banners would no longer need to be hidden, the users who would need to click on and visit the various section pages to see the relevant links are now greeted with a sponsored splash page (read more page impressions), and MSNBC.com would no longer need to maintain the dynamic menu.

According to one of our Web designers most people dislike dynamic menus because they interfere with the page and irritate the user. Perhaps that was part of MSNBC's reasoning to kill its dynamic menu. But given the other benefits, I hardly doubt MSNBC agonized much over this decision.

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Now I knew I had heard of this term before, but I just couldn't come up with a definitive answer. Was it a crater on the Moon? A rock formation on Mars? I was certain the term pertained to some off-earth object, but it's a big space with lots of objects.

So I promised her that we will look it up in the dictionary after dinner. Her response, "Let's look it up on Google first?" I was struck with how fast the Internet has endeared itself to even the elementary school kids today. The truth is that I do the same when I am looking for something, so why shouldn't she? But somehow I can't help feeling sad about how drastically the Web has mutated our culture.

Instead of opening a book or two, now we just Google it. In some ways we have been robbed from the fun and challenge of searching for something the old-fashioned way. But there is no defying progress.

As a compromise, I suggested for us to look the term up on wikipedia.com. At least that Web site has some semblance to a real encyclopedia. No dice, wikipedia was stumped, though it came up with some suggested links. But clicking on those would mean too much effort. And so Google became the clear the winner, and we didn't even have to click on any search results. In a flash of a page-load, the answer sat before us.

Olympus Mons, located on Mars, is the largest volcano in the solar system. A speedy answer, courtesy of the omniscient Google.

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This is good news indeed. Technology has already had a great impact on the health care industry and that is wonderful for patients. There is no doubt that this new initiative would further enhance how patients' vital data is handled. Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR) are nothing new. Plainly stated, they are patients' records on computer databases. But as new frontiers are explored, EMRs will become precariously closer to falling into wrong hands.

Consider the spate of news about stolen data from a number of prominent companies lately. LexisNexis, Polo Ralph Lauren, HSBC, NCR, and a number of renowned universities around the nation have had security breaches with customer data stolen. These are not fly-by-night companies with half-baked products. They are brands that most consumers trust and rely on.

If we are doomed to repeat past mistakes, then companies must be prepared to defend the EMR data with everything they have. But going a step further, they had better have plans in place for when security is breached and data is stolen. Because, let's face it, it is inevitable.

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Comments on this Entry:

(Muzaf on Apr 19, 2006 12:30 PM) EMR - Electronic Medical Records at Binary Spectrum, serves the necessary aspects of clinical care as well as healthcare information & practices.

(Muzaf on May 1, 2006 10:31 AM) EMR - Electronic Medical Records at Binary Spectrum, serves the necessary aspects of clinical care as well as healthcare information & practices.

(EMR on May 24, 2006 4:20 PM) EMR - Electronic Medical Records at Binary Spectrum, serves the necessary aspects of clinical care as well as healthcare information & practices.

(Avoiding the electronic Medical records pitfalls on Feb 21, 2007 4:19 PM) Points to consider when you purchase new EMR system Determine your Goals! Why are you looking at EMR? Has all the buzz made you think it is time? Do you want to improve patient care or efficiency of the office? Do you want to make more money? Do you want to go home earlier? Do you feel you have to? Have you even thought about it? Also you might want to ask the following preliminary questions to a vendor What is the cost per physician license? Do you have any existing clients in our specialty? Does your system come pre-loaded with templates for my specialty? Is your company the developers of the software or is it re-branded from another vendor? Is your system client/server based or ASP based? Does your system include practice management software? How many clients does your company have? Is your system HL7 compliant? How long has your company been in business? Is your development done overseas? Is support done overseas? Is your software CCHIT certified? If not, why? How often is the software updated?

 Interestingly enough, these companies have crossed paths of sorts before. Nearly a decade ago, Adobe had a chance and declined to acquire FutureWave, which later on merged with Macromedia and its flagship product, FutureWave, became what is know as Flash today.

 Besides Flash, Macromedia has a full spectrum of Web products to offer Adobe. There's ColdFusion, a mature server-side Web application product, DreamWeaver, a superb Web page design and layout product, and FireWorks, a versatile image creator and editor geared mostly for the Web. It remains to be seen how FireWorks will be positioned against Photoshop which is a competing product from Adobe. It is possible for the two products to merge into one.

 The acquisition, while an expensive venture, will bolster Adobe's presence on the Internet and Web arenas as it jostles for a bigger market share. Is all this activity getting Apple's attention? With the iPod market nearing saturation, Apple could be on the prowl for areas of expansion. Both Adobe and Macromedia have products with Mac roots and almost all of their current products and their Web sites have that special clean and polished look most associated with Apple. One wonders.

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 The move comes two days after an LA Times columnist criticized the auto-maker for pushing its gas-guzzling SUVs rather than investing in hybrid technologies. Perhaps the columnist went too far by calling for the impeachment of two GM executives, but GM's action is just plain childish.

 It's a free press. People express a lot of opinions about a lot of subjects. Some may get a bit scathing, others a bit risqué perhaps, but advertisers should take criticism in stride and understand that the separation between the editorial and advertising departments is what keeps a publication vibrant. An uncontaminated editorial process can only help the credibility of its publication which leads to more interested readers which in turn translates to more eyeballs seeing the ads.

 If GM hadn't jumped the gun, they could have used their advertising space to subtly challenge the columnist's position. Instead they decided on this immature action, possibly handing the columnist even more credibility.

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I'm not sure what to attribute to this strange behavior. Google already had its April fool's fun with Google Gulp. But I just saw this story and  it appears that Gmail is indeed marching towards the 2 GB storage limit. It was only a few days ago that Yahoo! announced plans to augment their email storage to 1 GB.

So it seems that the storage wars are once again heating up between the email titans. Personally I can't see how anyone would exceed the 1 GB capacity, but I suppose there is some value in bragging rights here. Having the highest capacity in the industry is great PR after all.

Meanwhile Hotmail has been quiet during all this. I wonder if they're planning a 1 TB storage offer after the smoke has cleared. That should settle the race, or does it?

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Such is the case heard before the supreme court regarding the file sharing and file swapping products known as P2P or peer to peer software. No one in their right mind is going to admit that the products they create are intended to encourage people to break the law, but actions speak louder than words.

Napster, the original digital piracy tool wasn't heralded as a bootlegging product either, but once its true usage in swapping pirated music became obvious, the law had no choice but to shut it down.

Proponents of P2P products such as Kazaa, Grokster, and eMule claim that their creators have the right to innovate and can't be held liable for people's misuse of their creations. There is some merit to that argument, but when these wares become tools in the hands of millions to break the law and bilk others of their rightful living, the law has no choice but to intercede. If the purveyors of the P2P products are looking the other way and getting rich on the backs of others' hard work, even if it is inadvertent, they must bear some responsibility.

They would holler just the same if someone found a dubious method to unwittingly hijack their creations and dent their pocketbooks.

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Wonder what would have happened if I was at the deadline date (I wasn't) and I owed money (I didn't). I guess on top of the wasted time and postage money, I would have been slapped with late IRS penalties too.

Moral of the story? I'm not sure. I mean how much more certain can you be than taking your tax return envelope to the post office to send to the IRS? Maybe get a second opinion on the postage from a different post office?

For some, e-file may be an option. I tried it a couple of years ago and it worked out great, but last year I had some hassles with it and ended up mailing in the return. It's back to e-file for me this year. And, what are my chances of recovering my postage fee from the USPS? Yeah, right.

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Ebbers' star rose at a dizzying speed during the heyday of the telecom era. From a small-time phone company operator, he became the mighty chief of MCI WorldCom and would have nabbed the number one spot had his merger initiatives with Sprint had come to fruition.

We have been a long-time MCI customer and I suppose we should have foreseen such a bleak day for its chief. From our vantage point their accounting department was nothing short of a complete disarray. I can't tell you how many uncounted times we contacted their accounting people to fix a billing problem, only to call again and again after receiving subsequent erroneous invoices. And the bills themselves were impossible to decipher. It's almost as if they were deliberately designed that way to confuse and thus fleece the customers.

Ebbers' anguished face might engender feelings of pity for many, but in the final analysis, the man was in charge of the company and deeply involved in its operation. He could not shirk responsibility of the massive fraud that had overtaken the company, and the jury was observant enough to conclude his guilt.

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Spurred by an enticing link in my Hotmail account, I recently paid a visit to MSN Spaces. All I can say is that this service has a long way to go before it can catch up with the other blogosphere titans such as Blogger and Movable Type (and by extension the TypePad service).

MSN Spaces is designed nicely, but it is cluttered and cumbersome to navigate. There are no options to save the blogs to an external site, and the space provided (10 MB) is inadequate for an active blogger who uses lots of images. I use Movable Type at work and Blogger at home, and both of these products provide a superior blogging experience. They have simpler interfaces, provide better functionality, and have more useful options.

I am certain that with time Spaces will improve. Whether or not it can catch up with the old reliables, we'll have to wait and see. For now, this is the only blog I'm going to place in my Spaces account. I must try everything at least once.

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And while investors seem to be cheering alongside Walter by sending the HP shares up on the news, one can not help wonder whether things just got better or worse at the company. It's not just Fiorina that was the trouble for HP. For the true culprit, HP should look East to Texas, where Michael Dell is commanding his empire and has continued to fortify his position while HP has been grappling with its problems.

Unfortunately HP's computer business is not a cohesive unit as Dell's is. HP carries a number of other entities such a Compaq and Digital Equipment (from a previous Compaq take-over) which have come with some heavy baggages of their own as they were sewn into the HP culture. The Dell culture, on the other hand, is one of growth, focus, and steady vision. And with its present momentum, it's a Herculean task to match, let alone beat.

So as investors rejoice Fiorina's departure news today, they'd better be sure to keep their Aspirin bottles nearby. It's gonna be a long hang-over.

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I had blogged about all this previously, and as compelling as the move to Gmail was, once Hotmail came through with their 250-Meg storage, I decided to stay with it, although I utilize my Gmail account occasionally.

But now I am finding that competition between providers has created a real boon for the end-user and so far Gmail is ahead of the pact. One of the greatest features offered by Gmail is the ability to forward incoming emails to another account. This is truly a test of confidence on the part of Gmail, as users could simply forward their emails to Hotmail or Yahoo! if they so choose. The other feature is pop-3 email download. This allows those of us with email clients, such as Outlook, to download incoming emails to our local boxes. It would also allow Hotmail and Yahoo users to pull in the Gmail messages as well, if they choose to do so.

The forwarding and pop-3 features would have never been offered by the other guys as they'd fear users skipping their email sites and read their messages elsewhere. Gmail should be applauded for offering these services so fearlessly, allowing their users to interact with their services on their own terms.

Two other Gmail features that are also useful are Gmail Notifier (the tray icon that notifies user of new messages) and the RSS/XML feed of newly arrived messages. Many people utilize RSS readers today, so the RSS/XML feed comes in real handy.

Gmail has sure made it tough to go with any other provider, not necessarily because of technical advantages, but more due to a better understanding of their user base.

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Comments on this Entry:

(Rich Tehrani on Feb 8, 2005 10:59 PM) I had no idea you could use an RSS reader wih Gmail. Great idea. Makes agood sense. Thanks for the tip.

(rob on Nov 12, 2005 1:36 PM) i feel you. gmail is rockin - i even use it as a base account, but all my emails look like they are being sent from whateve account i choose, so as to not confuse people with return gmail emails.... lighting fast too, im mean sooooo fast

(isaac on Mar 7, 2006 6:53 AM) Please help me to creat g mail account. Send me an invitation please. I desparetely the g mail account, please help.

(peter on Mar 16, 2006 7:08 AM) i wanna someone send me an invitation for creat a g-mail account my e-mail es peternow20@yahoo.com thanks alot

Microsoft's latest push in the search field is clearly an imitation of what Google has been able to achieve. But in this case, the product is just too similar to Google's offering. Take the new and improved MSN search. The pages are clean, the ads are text-based, and the results are presented in almost the same format as Google does. Then there is the IE toolbar plug-in. It's a copy of google's toolbar with the highlight tool, form auto-fill, and Blog posting. And the MSN Deskbar, again the same striking similarity to Google's Deskbar down to the logo watermark in the search field.

I downloaded the products (the toolbar and deskbar are lumped in one install) and used them for a while. They work fine, but I just can't see a compelling reason to leave Google at this time. Perhaps, given some time, Microsoft will be able to improve these products drastically and surpass Google, but for now I just hope the hard competition continues to deliver better products to the consumer. The race is just heating up.

Microsoft's search-related products can be downloaded here.

Google's offerings are here and here.

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Okay, I realize that jury duty is supposed to be an honor and a civic duty and what not. But really, how many of us really look forward to being called for it? I don't. Yet I wonder how after so many years, my name finally made it in the pool. It had to be the registration to vote. The truth is that until the last presidential election, I had never voted, and therefore never bothered to register. Once I did however, my name went into the list, and jury duty found me.

This is not unlike companies selling their customer lists to others for the purpose of marketing, but at least in this case the government is not secretive about it. I should have done my homework to understand the process better. I'm not sure if knowing this information would have stopped me from voting, but since my chosen candidate didn't make it, it makes this jury duty call even harder to bear.

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As blogging gathered critical mass, companies started to show interest. Now many news and information sites have a heavy blog presence as well, manned by their editors and other contributors. Our own company saw a slow start to blogging, but now we have a number of power bloggers who contribute to the wealth of our online existence.

Many people now get their daily news from blogs, but one of the areas that blogs have begun to encroach on Web pages is what's known as trackback. This is a means by which a blog site can be notified when another blogger makes a mention of them in the form of a url link. Generally, the notification involves a summary of data to be passed back to the mentioned blog site and most sites choose to display this information, in effect providing a link back to the blogger's post. It's a courtesy move in response to the mention. By the way, trackback was devised and promoted by the renowned blog software maker, Movable Type.

Now many sites have decided to incorporate trackback in their own pages, and we now provide this service to our readers. When you read our pages on tmcnet.com, feel free to reference them in your blogs and if your blogging software is equipped with auto-discovery, we will receive your message (known as Ping). To view the trackbacks or get the Ping url (to trackback manually) just click on on the our pages.

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Along with the .NET hoopla, the Passport service was being showcased as the de-facto authentication scheme. It would allow third party Web sites to login users through Passport and leave the authentication and access job to Microsoft. The idea wasn't new by any means. Single sign-on has been the aspiration of the authentication industry for decades, but alas, Passport wasn't meant to be the proverbial silver bullet.

eBay was one of the more prominent companies who initially signed up for Passport services in addition to their own authentication method. But I always wondered, why would a vendor entrust its valuable customer information to Microsoft. I guess eBay must have been having the same doubts. As of January 24th, they are dropping the Passport service from their login screen. If not the death knell, this is a giant blow to an already waning product.

Meanwhile .NET has mostly been forgotten by the public, save one area. It is still much alive in the development community and with the next version of .NET development Framework 2.0, and Visual Studio 2005 on the horizon, it has the development community, myself included, abuzz. The .NET vision has never been clearer.

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For years the only choice for Windows users to search their local files has been the standard Microsoft Search program which comes bundled with Windows. It does the job,
But it's minimalist, clunky, and painfully slow. Microsoft tried to address the speed issue by marrying the search program with the Index Server (a service that indexes the local files), but while this has boosted the performance of search it is still woefully lacking in utility, features, and robustness.

There has been a need for a better search software for quite a while. Enter the big three search outfits, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN with their own search programs, known as Desktop Search.

Not too long ago I installed Google's Desktop Search and I was initially happy with its performance and flexibility. But Google's program is limited in the file types it could index and the interface is, well, Googlish, as in plain and simple and no frills. Perhaps Google's strength in its Web search simplicity was just too bland for me when it came to searching locally. I soon lost interest and forgot about desktop search, until today when I downloaded the Yahoo's incarnation of the desktop search program, and my reaction so far is, wow!

Available in beta version, this program does an impressive job of indexing the local files as well as Outlook messages. It has the intelligence to recognize over 200 different file formats and it can index everything in its path. The interface looks fresh, functional, and fast. In little time I had it configured to index my entire hard drive and after it was done with its initial scan, I tested it with a number of keywords. Who knew searching could be so much fun? It's blazing fast and the results are presented in a nice format. I am sold. Yahoo's Desktop Search has now replaced Google's program in my program tray and I feel absolutely empowered having such a tool at my beck and call.

You can download Yahoo! Desktop Search for Windows from here.
Read the press release.

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Windows Users have a number of choices to battle spyware today. They come in free and paid flavors from a number of companies and I bet these companies are not so sanguine about this new release from Microsoft.

Installing and configuring the program was a breeze and then I had it run a quick scan. It identified one low-risk program (with a nice summary) and gave me a few options to deal with it. For the time being I configured it to run a deep scan every mid-night and check for new updates. Exiting the program, it silently went into an icon state, nestling itself with the rest of the resident programs in the Tray area.

For me, the Microsoft AntiSpyware program is too new to have a definitive opinion about, but my first impression was a positive one. One more thing, the program also contains a tool to wipe clean many hidden areas that record user's activity and whereabouts, including Internet Explorer history, visited links, and recently opened documents by other program. It's a great tool for a paranoid like me.

You can download Microsoft AntiSpyware from here.

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As a matter of personal choice I rarely pick up the phone. Having three females in the house for a number of years, the Pavlovian in me has learned that chances of me receiving calls is rather insignificant. Nevertheless proper telephone etiquette is a necessity of life. I still answer most calls I receive in the office.

So here's the conundrum. How can we teach the kids proper telephone manners when most callers are telemarketers? My wife and I have different approaches in dealing with them. Depending on her mood she could go from rude to nasty. In some cases it even makes me shudder, which is why I sometimes plead with her to allow me to handle the calls. My methods are more gentle. They go from abruptly declining to fooling with them.

I have to admit neither of us employs much etiquette in dealing with telemarketers. But I'm afraid that now my children have acquired some of this crude behavior and that worries me.

As adults we can differentiate between a genuine call and a sales cold call. The distinction is murky for kids however. The learned response is to be rude, no matter how amiable the caller is. In fact it seems that the more polite the agent, the more harassment the kids will unleash.

I'm not sure what the solution is. How do you teach grade-schoolers that some polite callers are really script-regurgitating sales-people interested in selling something they may not even know about and collecting a commission? And they might be calling from the next town, India, or even a federal prison.

For now we've taught them to never identify themselves or disclose any information no matter how trivial. I suppose adding my number to the federal Do-Not-Call list would also be a good move. I just hope my kids don't find out about it. They almost look forward to tormenting the hapless agents.

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Comments on this Entry:

(HTML Sherpa on Dec 28, 2004 1:50 PM) Have your wife read this article: http://www.wnbc.com/news/3977271/detail.html

(N on Jan 14, 2005 7:43 PM) I really liked that blog entry! And it is true: nowadays it IS very difficult to teach children how important telephone manners are, and still make them understand not to give any information over the phone! :)

While Geico claims that this practice infringes on its trademarked company name, I can't see how this holds any water. I suppose if the ads are defamatory or baselessly attack Geico, the company's lawsuit may have some merit, but even then, Geico should pursue such litigations against the original advertisers, not the publisher itself.

The point is that if everyone wanted to use cheap litigation to stop their competitors or detractors, then that could amount to censorship and that would drastically change the advertising landscape. Even Geico may not like that.

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Frankly I am surprised that it took this long for scammers to employ this trick. But abolishing the hosts file, as some experts might suggest, is not a solution to curb the crackers using this trick. First of all hosts files are still legitimate means of translating names into ip addresses. I bet many organizations still use them internally as a quick and simple DNS alternative. Secondly, hosts files are invaluable for debugging. I can't tell you how many times I have used the hosts file to troubleshoot DNS problems, access issues, or other host name related quirks. Without the hosts file, I would have had to tinker with a name server which is a lot more complex and may itself be the root of the problem.

Finally, who's to say the bad actors won't change the computer's DNS entries to point to their own evil name servers. If they can change the hosts files, modifying DNS entries takes just a little more work.

Let's not eliminate a helpful tool out of fear and desperation. Practicing good security is the only way to fight these types of attacks.

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Comments on this Entry:

(Jerry on Mar 3, 2005 8:28 AM) First of all hosts files are still legitimate means of translating names into ip addresses. I bet many organizations still use them internally as a quick and simple DNS alternative. Robert i am trying to do just this....i can redirect the page to another page but i want to redirect it to a file.htm on the local computer (so that the file will say this page has been blocked if you feel you need this page to do your job..blah blah...) but i can seem to figure it out...or to point it to a url www.whatever.com/error.htm any help here would be great.thnks

(vhashemian on Mar 3, 2005 9:19 AM) hosts file and dns are only used to translate domain names and nodes into ip addresses. if you want to redirect from another host, you can modify the hosts file to point the domain to the local computer (generally 127.0.0.1) and then consult your local web server docs for page redirection.

(DC on Oct 17, 2005 3:24 AM) It would be nice if one of you experts could provide a succinct and easily understood description of how someone would recognize a fradulent entry in a host file. Because I am using an anti-spyware package that uses the host file to block spyware sites, my host file is full of entries. Would I look for something other than 127.0.0.1 in the "value"?

It's hard to imagine that a company of such humble beginnings could surpass Yahoo! in such a short time. But then again that statement alone is astonishing in its own right. It wasn't long ago that Yahoo itself was considered a speculative company with a sky-high stock price. Now it's almost looked at as an established and viable denizen of the corporate world.

And yet we wonder if Google's lofty valuation is justified. Who knows? If you consider that its market cap is almost triple that of Amazon.com, that question may have some merit. But then again Amazon.com's market cap rivals that of Raytheon, a large defense contractor with 78,000 employees.

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Late August on a trip from Connecticut to Virginia my car broke down in the center lane of the Jersey turnpike. The alternator had died and the battery had little juice left to keep the car going. So on this hottest hour of the hottest day of August, I stepped out of the car, pushed it to the shoulder in the middle of the angry traffic, and not having a cell phone walked a mile to the nearest rest stop to call for help.

At the end of the day I found myself in a motel in Burlington, NJ. My car had been towed to a Goodyear service station that was closing for the day and there were no open car rentals offices at that hour.

The next day, I made a call to the service station and made sure they had started to work on the car. Anxious to continue with my trip, I rented a car (I definitely recommend Enterprise, they pick you up!), and finally made it to Virginia to visit my Grandmother.

The next day I called the service station and found out the car was ready and the day after that I set out to Burlington, NJ again to pick up the car and return to Connecticut. I returned the rental car (again, I recommend Enterprise, they drop you off too!), paid the repair bill and got back home. The car drove just fine.

About 3 weeks later, the alternator started to make screeching noises and then a couple of days after that the noise stopped and the charge indicator lighted up on the dashboard. I knew I was running on my new battery alone and I had little time. I had a warranty on the repairs but how could I possibly go to New Jersey again? It is an old car and I thought it was time to junk it. What bothered me was that the repairs had lasted less than a month and I had no recourse.

But before junking it, I decided to call the Burlington service station and at least give them a piece of my mind about their repairs. But much to my surprise the manager apologized and told that my local Goodyear service station would honor the warranty -- A ray of hope. Calling the local Goodyear station went better than I could possibly imagine. The manager patiently listened to my case, took my information and promised to call me back. Yeah right, I thought.

Right he was, he did call back, made arrangements for me to bring the car over immediately, and showed concern by encouraging me to buy a new battery (which he would reimburse) to install in the car, in case the current battery died on the way there. The repairs took about an hour, didn't cost me an extra dime, and the car is back on the road. On top of that, a few days later I received a call from him just to make sure everything was well and I was satisfied with the service.

Thank you Bill O'Russo and thank you Goodyear. You've got yourselves one very satisfied customer.

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I was beginning to think that Hotmail might renege on their promise. Glad my suspicion was disproved. Bring on the spam.

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