The Substantially Similar Weblog

I haven’t been blogging lately. I do have a running list of ideas and topics, but my blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. When I was a law student, it was easy for this to be a ‘law student blog,’ but now that I’m practicing I haven’t figured out how to find a balance between the personal and professional (and, perhaps on a third axis, the technical). Also, since I had a daughter, my time has been pretty scarce and I’m not sure that blogging is the best use of it.

I’ll probably pick up in frequency before too long, but in case anyone is wondering, I’m still here.

In the meantime, my Webloyalty is a Scam entry continues to get more traffic than anything else on this blog—close to 31,000 hits at the time of this writing, and nearly 1,000 writebacks (plus nearly as many personal emails to me on the topic). See also this follow-up post. One guy has even started a blog dedicated solely to criticizing Reservation Rewards—but now the link seems to broken.

When I write these consumer protection entries, I inevitably get comments from low-level company insiders defending their practices (see, e.g., U-Haul Responds). These writebacks are often a much better condemnation than I could ever come with. For example, the following was apparently written by a “WLI Call Center Rep.” The POST request came from the same area of Connecticut as where Webloyalty is located, and it seems pretty genuine:

I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram.

Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty.

So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

1. IDE ribbon cables
2. IDE jumpers
3. Slave/master issues
4. BIOSes that can’t boot to large partitions (I would be happy not to see this in the afterlife, either)
5. Long, uninterruptible POST
6. dma_timer_expiry
7. Cilantro

Actually, I don’t really dislike cilantro, I just wouldn’t miss it if I never saw it for the rest of my life. The other stuff, though, is definitely getting in the way of me dying happily.

This is not a list that would resonate with most people, but I expect most of my readers are not representative of the general population.

Malcolm Gladwell· (probably best known as the pop-sociologist author of The Tipping Point·) has an excellent piece in this week’s New Yorker· on what pit bulls can teach us about profiling·. The argument boils down to one about common tendencies in misinterpreting data and drawing the wrong (or “unstable”) generalizations from apparently recurrent phenomena.

Everyone’s favorite security guru Bruce Schneier· has made similar arguments in the past·, but Gladwell’s style in this case is more compelling. I particularly liked this passage about The Godfather:

In July of last year, following the transit bombings in London, the New York City Police Department announced that it would send officers into the subways to conduct random searches of passengers’ bags. On the face of it, doing random searches in the hunt for terrorists — as opposed to being guided by generalizations — seems like a silly idea. As a columnist in New York wrote at the time, “Not just ‘most’ but nearly every jihadi who has attacked a Western European or American target is a young Arab or Pakistani man. In other words, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty what an Al Qaeda terrorist looks like. Just as we have always known what Mafiosi look like — even as we understand that only an infinitesimal fraction of Italian-Americans are members of the mob.”

But wait: do we really know what mafiosi look like? In “The Godfather,” where most of us get our knowledge of the Mafia, the male members of the Corleone family were played by Marlon Brando, who was of Irish and French ancestry, James Caan, who is Jewish, and two Italian-Americans, Al Pacino and John Cazale. To go by “The Godfather,” mafiosi look like white men of European descent, which, as generalizations go, isn’t terribly helpful. Figuring out what an Islamic terrorist looks like isn’t any easier. Muslims are not like the Amish: they don’t come dressed in identifiable costumes. And they don’t look like basketball players; they don’t come in predictable shapes and sizes. Islam is a religion that spans the globe.

I wonder how often things like this (“Dear Sir, calling StarForce ‘Anti-copying malware’ is a good enough cause to press charges and that is what our corporate lawyer is busy doing right now”) actually have their desired effect. I suppose it might work in cases where the recipient is actually dumber than the writer.

On the plus side, that sort of letter could certainly create declaratory judgment jurisdiction; the recipient could turn around and sue the sender for a declaration that they have done nothing unlawful.

I also wonder whether companies like StarForce actually have a “corporate lawyer,” and if that person is aware of these emails. I sure hope not.

Update: Apparently this story has been slashdotted. I try not to post about things that also appear on slashdot, on the theory that most people will have seen the story somewhere else at that point, but this entry went up before the slashdot article. A commenter makes a good point, though, that Cory Doctorow (the recipient of the abovementioned threat) is Canadian and lives in London—something the writer of the threat seems to have no clue about.

Yesterday, it got up to 53° F (11° C), after a very cold and blustery week. There was still quite a bit of snow on the ground, so we went on our first ski trip of the year. It’s great to be able to ski with no jacket or gloves. (The hat came off later as well).

I recently blogged about humans failing my blog’s comment “Turing Test.” My blog had a box below the real comments box, prefaced with a statement to the effect that you shouldn’t enter anything in that box if you were a human (yet some humans did enter comments in that box, thus shunting their comments to a spam file). In response, several commenters noted that my layout was confusing and offered suggestions for improvements.

I’ve taken their advice and wrapped the “spam” comment box in a style tag that will make the box invisible if your browser renders CSS. I had this perhaps irrational fear that the spammers were smart enough to read the CSS, but as it turns out, they aren’t. The box is now invisible to most users, but I continue to get as many as several dozen spammers filling in the invisible box.

The main shortcoming I can see with the current system is that people who use text-only browsers like w3m or cell phones, or people with visual disabilities who use an audio screen reader may still be confused. Still, I think this is much less intrusive, annoying, and non-accessible than, say, a hard-to-read captcha that won’t work at all for those people.

I’ve been reading the news about the world’s tiniest fish, but I really didn’t appreciate how small this fish is until I saw this image on boingboing (from Science News, I believe).

All I can say is: that is a small fish.

Those of you outside of Massachusetts (or the United States) may not have heard about our recent healthcare insurance debates. Left Center Left has some interesting entries on the lack of local political analysis and confusion about why the business community opposes the various legislative solutions where those solutions appear to be basically in their self interest.

The proposed solutions are converging on a tax on employers who do not pay for their employees’ healthcare. That tax would help pay for statewide coverage of all or most citizens, and hopefully encourage employers to provide insurance for their employees to avoid the tax. (There is strong dissent, for example from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, as to whether the tax would actually raise any money).

Critics argue that the tax will discourage employers from coming to Massachusetts. The two large employers singled out most frequently in the State for not providing healthcare benefits to their large work force are Wal-Mart and Dunkin Donuts. Is it even remotely possible that Wal-Mart and Dunkin Donuts would actually shut down (or stop opening up) stores if they have to insure their employees or pay an additional tax? Obviously increased labor costs (whether through tax or insurance) could cut into profitability—but is there any evidence at all that it would represent a “tipping point” that would cause these employers to shut down? (Note that despite Massachusetts’ reputation as “Taxachusetts,” a study last year that I can’t locate right now pointed out that the overall tax burden on Massachusetts citizens was about in the middle, compared to other states).

Even if the health insurance mandate depresses wages, it’s worth noting that it is cheaper for the employer to buy group health insurance for its employees than it is for each of those employees to buy it individually—both because of the bulk buying power and for tax reasons. It is thus not a “zero sum game” where employees wages should be depressed by the exact amount of the increased health care costs.

Finally, wouldn’t this measure actually encourage employers to come to Massachusetts who already insure their employees, since presumably the statewide insurance mandate should decrease costs to those already providing insurance as they will no longer be effectively subsidizing the uninsured who work for competitors and other employers? And aren’t those the kinds of employers we would like to attract, rather than more Dunkin Donuts and Wal-Marts? (In fact, wouldn’t fewer Dunkin Donuts lead to less heart disease, thus also cutting down our health care costs overall…?)

Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker makes an excellent observation while discussing Google’s video service digital rights management scheme: “Privacy is for Google what security is for Microsoft.”

Interesting commentary by Chinese documentary filmmaker Hao Wu on Marketplace. Wu explains that it is not possible to obtain most films in China except as pirated versions, and when there are official legal releases they are edited and censored by the government. If the United States is successful in getting China to devote substantial police resources to enforcement of international copyright law, a perhaps unintentional side effect is that access to information and openness will be squelched.

This raises the question of whether it is really in Hollywood’s long term interest to crack down on piracy in otherwise repressive regimes. It’s at least an interesting perspective to bring to the issue that I hadn’t really considered.