| Tuesday, December
18, 2001
This is from http://www.arstechnica.com/
About a SCAM USING PAYPALS. NOTE it
only uses PayPals, it is not something they have done, and there is no
reason not to USE PayPals. Read this and BEWARE:
PayPal Scam Posted 12/18/2001 - 11:22AM, by hanser
Thanks to fuzz in the Lounge for this heads up.
Apparently someone has created an exact replica of PayPal's site and
modified it slightly. Here is a copy of the email being sent to people:
From: service@paypal.com To: you@yourisp.com
Subject: Get $5 from PayPal! X-Mailer: X-Mailer Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001
21:09:19 -0500
Season's Greetings Valued PayPal Customer;
As the New Year approaches and as we all get
ready to move a year ahead, PayPal would like to give you a $5 credit to
your account!
All you have to do to claim your $5 gift from
us is update your information on our secure Pay Pal site by January 1st,
2002. A year brings a lot of changes, by updating your information with us
you will allow for us to continue providing you and our valued customer
service with excellent service and in the meantime, keep our records
straight!
To update your information now and to receive
$5 in your PayPal account instantly, click this link:
http://www.paypal-secure.com/cgi-bin/webscr.pl?em=you@yourisp.com
Thank you for using PayPal.com and helping us
grow to be the largest of our kind! Sincerely wishing you a very
"Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,"
PayPal Team
paypal-secure.com is not affiliated in any with
PayPal. All links, including the errors, go back to the real PayPal site.
Interestingly enough, going to www.paypal-secure.com displays a directory
listing. I thought I'd give you all a heads-up, as I myself might have
fallen for it had I not seen the thread. It should also be noted that all
PayPal URLs start with https://
Since I have recommended PayPal here
and use it -- with very good results -- I thought I had better post this
warning. THANKS TO ROBERT BROWN for bringing it to my attention.
Jerry,
Just saw this on Ars Technica and thought you might
be interested, since you use Pay Pal. There's a new scam floating around
(I'm not sure how widespread it is, but it seems clever enough to get at
least some people to fall for it).
http://www.arstechnica.com/
As of right now the PayPal Scam story is at the top
of the page, but it may have drifted down a bit by the time you look; they
sometimes post news throughout the day.
---- Robert Brown http://www.godofwar.com
"Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin
Franklin
Thank you.
Now this:
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Subject: Republic or Empire?
Dear Jerry:
You aren't the only one worried. See http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1992/dunlap.htm,
"Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012." It was, by the
way, which won National Defense University's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Strategy Essay Competition last year.
Very interesting.
Best, Stephen
I will have to have a look when I
get past some deadlines. Thanks. And
Tracy Walters thought he had seen everything:
http://eshop.msn.com/eshopframe.aspx?merchId=2620&catId
=0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fshopping%2Ediscovery%2Ecom%2Fstores
%2Fservlet%2FJumpzone%3Fdi%3D40587710%26ti%3D9000000
%26ps%3D632257
Heh. On which subject, this one gets
a 'heh' from Roland Dobbins:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5675&mode=thread&order=0 And
JoAnne Dow points out that bureaucrats will be bureaucrats...
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TRAVEL/NEWS/12/18/airport.shutdown/index.html
This is about Charlotte airport's being shut down
for awhile when one of the magnetometers was discovered to be unplugged.
All passengers still on the ground were rescreened. But then:
>From within the story: "Passengers aboard
flights that had already taken off were rechecked at their destinations,
said FAA spokesman Chris White."
Now this seems to be in the finest anal retentive
bureaucratic tradition. Supposedly the object is to prevent
"weapons" (like fingernail clippers) from getting on to
airplanes, right? How does screening the passengers AFTER the flight
change what got onto the airplane? To the bureaucratic mind the important
thing is that everybody be hassled^H^H^H^H^H^H^H er "checked"
not that nasty objects be kept off the flights.
The only mitigating circumstance might be all too
typical CNN mucked up wording. Perhaps only passengers planning to board
connecting flights at the unchecked flight's destination were rechecked.
If so then CNN should have so stated, methinks. But given the mindsets I
have noticed in the security community, long on "procedure" and
short on "thought process", the stated recheck of all passengers
as they landed is probably more to the point. I have too many years living
with a security clearance while working on DoD projects to think
otherwise. These people work on "tick sheets", real or mental.
They do not work on "intended results" at all.
{^_^}
And indeed the notion of taking over
an airplane with a nail file is so silly that only a bureaucrat could
persuade himself that it is possible. And these creatures get PAID to do
this.
The author of this very famous article thought the
military would have to make an empire. I don't think he could have written
a believable story about the republic being handed over voluntarily.
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1992/dunlap.htm
and a follow-up http://www.usafa.af.mil/inss/ocp11.htm
<<PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Winter
1992.url>>
Jerry,
This article takes a strong stance in the Republic-vs-Empire
debate:
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/01winter/peters.htm
Also, about a month ago, at the age of 38, I started
learning Latin for the "fun" of it. Your writing played a
significant role in making it seem worthwhile. I can tell you that it's
been worth every minute.
Larry Elmore
One might also look up "The
Conquest of the United States by Spain" by William Graham Sumner
which makes much the same point as Peters: the Spanish American War was
decisive but not in the way we thought. Richard
Stahlman on the latest in the Adobe case. It comes in three parts written
at different times:
Dmitry Sklyarov is safe from the DMCA, but Americans
are not. We must not lose the impetus that his case provided.
The dropping of charges against Sklyarov is a good
thing, but we must not think of it as our victory, because we did not win
it. Rather, it is largesse from powers that feel completely triumphant.
They believe that their successes in court, together with the example
presented by Sklyarov's treatment so far, make their dominion so strong
that nothing can challenge it.
It is up to us to change this state of affairs. In
general, we should focus on Adobe and the other corporations that paid for
and use the DMCA, not on the FBI and DOJ which are merely their servants.
The DMCA is a weapon; those who choose to use it against the public should
be held morally responsible for their decision to do so.
Sklyarov must have large legal expenses, and
expenses for his unintended stay in the US. These represent an injury that
was done to him by Adobe. We should demand that Adobe compensate him for
this injury, and promise they will never do to anyone else what they did
to him. Until they do, we should picket their offices and urge the public
to refuse to do business with them.
In cities where there is an active group of
protestors but no important Adobe presence, we can picket publishing
companies that issue Adobe ebooks. Or other companies that in some way
menace us with the DMCA, such as movie companies or record companies. Or
legislators such as Barney Frank who supported the DMCA.
It might be useful for someone to find a schedule of
Pat Schroeder's public appearances--or ask the public to be on the lookout
for them. She gave a speech in the Boston area in October, a campaign
appearance for a candidate, and I was mailed a letter about it;
unfortunately I was traveling and did not see the letter until too late.
If her friends find that her support brings a protest, she may find
herself a less valued acquaintance.
-----
I did not know that this was a plea bargain--I heard
that charges had been dropped. That puts it in a very different light: he
has done harm to others that far exceeds the harm he has avoided for
himself. I won't claim I would have done better, since I have never been
in that situation--but the question of how strong I am is beside the
point. Sklyarov had a duty to resist, and he failed in his duty.
It appears that another consequence is that he will
be unable to help our movement by speaking. In effect, he has defected.
At this point, the only thing left for us to do is
to push hard to punish Adobe--so hard that anyone will think twice before
daring to do this again. Sklyarov is no longer a cause celebre, but we can
make Adobe a cause celebre if we work at it.
So who is for a loud boycott and picketing of Adobe?
Will the EFF spearhead it? The EFF has concentrated on action in court,
and that approach was worth trying--but it has been almost exhausted, and
has failed. I hope they will not shrink from joining a different kind of
action now.
----
When I read Seth Finkelstein's message saying that
Sklyarov had agreed to "cooperate with the United States in its
ongoing prosecution", and showing damaging-looking statements he had
agreed to make, it appeared that he was giving the US government exactly
what it wants in order to nail ELCOM and put a nail in the coffin of our
freedom. I commented based on that understanding of the nature of the
deal.
Since then, people have told me that the situation
is more complicated; that his testimony won't necessarily help the
prosecution much, and that the deal will make it easier for ELCOM to argue
its case. I'm glad to hear that things are not as bad as they looked. So I
withdraw my criticism of Sklyarov for making the deal, and I apologize if
I misjudged its nature.
The truly important issue is not one programmer, one
company, or one case; it is the DMCA and our freedom. On this issue, I
stand by what I have said. We must put the strongest pressure on Adobe, on
movie companies that make encrypted DVDs, and on any other companies that
now or in the future use the DMCA weapon against our freedom. We must
teach them to regret their arrogance.
RMS
What is important here is a
principle: the United States, having done something stupid, is not about
to apologize or admit error. It seeks a "win" by getting a
meaningless plea bargain. Face saving and all that. Adobe
started this, and Adobe is responsible. Adobe persuaded the DOJ that there
was something real here. DOJ was uninformed at best, and misanalysed at
best, and now wants off the hook. "It wasn't our fault." the
heck it wasn't. They managed to persuade DOJ that a silly case was a good
case. But DOJ should have just
up and said "OK. We were wrong. We should not have done this. Let
right be done." But we no longer have it in us to do that,
whether the AG is Janet Reno or John Ashcroft. After 911 there was
probably little attention given to this idiocy in high places, so things
skidded along on autopilot, and the autopilot action in our legal system
now is a "win". Justice and right are irrelevant. Such is the
course of Empire. Sklyarov was
caught in the midst of it all, besieged by a superpower and a
multi-billion corporation at the same time; one can hardly blame him for
not wanting to be the test case. Some time ago EFF urged Adobe to make amends
by paying Sklyarov's expenses. They of course declined although it would
have been the best return on a PR investment they ever made. And now it
all ends with a whimper, and DMCA continues... 
Joel
Rosenberg on Spider Robinson's article:
"As to the content, underestimating your enemies is not usually
the best strategy"
Well, yeah. And while Spider's a sweet guy, he seems
not terribly unusual in his relentless need to underestimate the enemy, in
both capabilities and numbers.
I can understand that. If the problem is just one
guy in a turban -- well, probably a burka, at the moment -- and who looks
more than vaguely like Ctein, come to think of it, no big deal. If it's
just this one guy and a few disaffected Saudi bourgeois kids who have done
the Muslim equivalent of joining the Manson family, it's not a much bigger
deal.
If on the other hand, what we're seeing is the
rebirth of the Abbasids -- and that's precisely the model that the
revolutionary Islamists are using, aided and abetted by support that it
wouldn't have occurred to the Umayyads to give their erstwhile supplanters
-- we've barely begun to take the first step, and haven't begun to
acknowledge that we can't count on the modern-day Umayyads to do our dirty
work for us, in part since they are, in a remarkable repetition of
history, trying to coopt their replacements.
-- ------------------------------------- There's a
widow in sleepy Chester Who weeps for her only son; There's a grave on the
Pabeng River, A grave that the Burmans shun, And there's Subadar Prag
Tewarri Who tells how the work was done.
-------------------------------------
When I mentioned Spider's thesis to
my wife she said "So how did he take over a whole country from the
inside if he's so stupid?" Which is the right question. The
world struggle between East and West is old and continues. C Northcote
Parkinson wrote one analysis in a book called, oddly enough, East and
West; but the best book I know on this, and in fact one of the best
one-volume summary histories of Western Civilization, is Fletcher Pratt's
BATTLES THAT CHANGED HISTORY, written at a time when Midway was just past
and it wasn't entirely clear if Midway actually belonged in the series (it
probably didn't: the US could have lost at Midway and would still have won
the war. Newt Gingrich's novel 1945 to the contrary, it wasn't really a
near run thing. Of course in those days we had Detroit, which we don't
have any more... But it is
well to put the current wars in context, as Joel does, and Fletcher Pratt
did. Real Islam, what is in the Koran (which in theory can never be
changed) can only have truce with the War World, which is everything that
isn't part of Islam. It is true enough that western ways have tamed some
Islamic sects to where they are indistinguishable from unitarianism, but
then that is the case for much of Christianity -- the difference being
that Christians were commanded to preach to all nations, not to make
forcible converts and levy tribute on unbelievers. The Christians got most
of that out of their system in the Crusades. After Lepanto the West
couldn't even bring itself to recapture Rhodes or liberate Greece : Venice
needed the Turkish markets too badly, and the notion of
"Christendom" was gone, crumbling even as the Empire held the
Turks under Suleiman at the gates of Vienna. Don John of Austria could
barely hold the coalition together long enough to win at Lepanto, and even
there it looks as if Andrea Doria was more concerned with keeping his Genoese
fleet intact to counter Venice than in defeating the Turks. (Coalitions
tend to do that: break apart along lines of national interest as soon as
those interests conflict at all. Look for Bush II's coalition to crumble
soon enough. Which isn't to say it's not worth while holding on to one
while one can, but the fact is we don't need NATO and what NATO could
contribute isn't in general much worth having. I leave Britain as a
special case.) Next year in
Baghdad.
I haven't seen this but it doesn't
really surprise me... Dear
Jerry,
The Washington Times reports yesterday that
government "scientists" falsified research on the territory of a
rare lynx species as a way to close two Washington forests to multiple
use.
Please take a look!
Bruce Kebbekus http://washingtontimes.com/national/20011217-7117603.htm
Ah well.
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