Beware of spewing garbage

As always happens with current events and especially with relief and aid efforts, scammers come out of their holes to steal money meant for the unfortunate. E-mails and social networking messages will start pouring in and fake relief websites have popped up already. Avoid scams that only make scammers richer and donate only directly to major organizations (such as the Red Cross) or at least do your research first.

The Better Business Bureau has a listing of charities that are in good standing at http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/

For more information about the scams, see the Ars Technica article on the subject.

Swine Flu!

The CDC says swine flu is everywhere. A CBS investigation says it's not. How do you know who's telling the truth? Well, try looking at the evidence.

According to Dr. Mercola of mercola.com:

• The CDC has stopped testing for Swine Flu so how would they know how wide-spread it is?
• The CDC has a long history of conflicts of interest between makers of vaccines and regulators of vaccines.
• "the U.S. government has granted vaccine makers total legal immunity from any lawsuits that result from the new swine flu vaccine"

And a little more detail on that last one:

The most problematic aspect of the PREP Act is that it removes all financial incentive to make a safe product.

In fact, vaccine makers now have a negative incentive to test it for safety, because if they are aware of problems, then they could potentially be held liable for willful misconduct!

As long as they can prove they "didn't know" of any problem, they will not be liable for damages. Hence it's in their best interest to know as little as possible about the adverse reactions it might cause.

Before you get hyped up about this "pandemic" and rush out to get the vaccine, maybe you should do a little more research. I'm not suggesting there's some conspiracy theory here, just that if what the article says is true, we already know that poor regulation leads to tragedies and abuse and the Swine Flu issue may be just one more example.

This is a great idea!

(Image source is unknown)

With tweetMyMoney, you can monitor your account balance, deposits, withdrawals, holds and cleared checks with simple commands. And, you can even transfer funds within your account. It’s all available on Twitter, 24/7! And, the best part is, our tweetMyMoney service is free!

(Emphasis mine)

Hello Twitter banking, goodbye money.

Why anyone thought this was a good idea, I don't know. Granted, you can't transfer money to OTHER accounts, only "within you account", but someone who breaks into your twitter account can still get a lot of information about you and move your money around causing you serious overdraft fees.

The issue at heart here is that getting information about your account and moving money around only requires the security of your Twitter account (which isn't to say much). How many people put strong passwords on their Twitter like they do the bank? How much effort does Twitter put into their security?

I think the idea of alerts to your phone is kind of cool, but maybe the bank should have set up its own Twitter-like messaging service instead of using a public one that's a big fat target of bad guys already.

Beware of traps

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Sadly, traditional phone call scams still work particularly against those of the previous generation that never had to distrust any callers. This one is targeting military veterans:

"America’s Veterans have become targets in an inexcusable scam that dishonors their service and misrepresents the Department built for them," said Dr. Gerald Cross, VA’s Under Secretary for Health. "VA simply does not call Veterans and ask them to disclose personal financial information over the phone."

Remember that people who call you could be bad guys. Before giving away any sensitive data, find out how to reach them through ONLY public phone numbers available on the official website or in a phone book NOT using any numbers they give you.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Here's another example of how someone's Facebook profile was used against them (First example here).

"If you are alleging that, as a result of an accident, you have not been able to enjoy life the same way and there is a photo taken after the accident showing you skiing or exercising … that could be relevant," the civil litigation and intellectual property lawyer said in an interview yesterday.

Well duh. If there are cases where people's personal diaries have been subpoenaed, I guarantee you an online record like Facebook is fair game.

Predatory lending

(Image is in the Public Domain)

All I can say is "good". There needs to be consequences for companies that manipulate people for greed.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Simply put, media should be media, programs should be programs. Putting code or commands into media like movies, music, e-mail etc allows for viruses or worse and no one should have to worry about that. Well, worry.

If you put the new Blu-ray Iron Man movie into your computer it will try to connect to the Internet and download something (some horrible DRM program probably?).

(Image is in the Public Domain)

It seems that online predators are getting tired of savvy kids that know better than to be lured (or they're just getting lazy/impatient). Either way, one police group is warning that predators are shifting to a strategy of blackmail instead.

As always, be aware of what your kids are doing online and know who their friends are. Make sure they know what to do when threatened by someone online.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

This isn't going to be an exhaustive write-up about Paypal and the various trouble you can get into with it. Instead, I'm going to talk about one very important part of the system that most people should know how to deal with.

Specifically, the direct bank access.

When you sign up for Paypal, they ask for your bank account information so they can make some test deposits. Once you see the deposits, you return to the system to tell them how much was sent to verify your account.

Here's the problem: if you do it, Paypal will then have full access to your bank account to pull funds if you were to say, go negative on your Paypal account or some Paypal employee decides they need a little of what you have or a hacker breaks through their world class security.

Instead, don't ever confirm the deposits. What this does is allow Paypal to continue making deposits (for when you get cash in Paypal), but they can't debit your account (so there!). Granted, doing this will limit the amount of money you can filter through paypal (like $500 a month or so), but so what? Most people never do transactions that large and worst-case, if you manage to get a single transaction over $500, just withdraw it over the course of a few months.

If that's not realistic for you, confirm the numbers, just make sure the account you're using is disposable.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Though they originally blamed it on anti-virus software on the machines, Diebold has admitted that it was coding error that leads its machines to drop votes. Hopefully that will help in the lawsuit against Diebold and encourage others states to recoup their losses as well.