pattern recognition, context and social engineering


oh those clever worm writers. i’m assuming this email is sobig or a variant which claims to come from security@microsoft.com and comes complete with patch.exe. if the grammer were a little better, i’m sure they’d get a few takers. it’s a perfect example of the new breed of social viruses that exploit your sense of authority:

“These are big, powerful email addresses like support@ebay.com, sales@amazon.com or (oof) blogdex[at]media.mit.edu. Even though people know not to open attachments, the authority of that email address throws an exception in their brains and thus the virus is propagated. It’s a new breed of virus, and it’s spreading like crazy.

Of course after another few months of IT castigation, the email world will return to normal. But this is an arms race between email virus authors and the pattern recognition in all of our brains. For every patch that a network administrator makes by slapping our wrists, someone is engineering more and more sophisticated techniques for bypassing our preconceptions.”

gator, media hat tricks and promotional stink

it’s hard to believe that is has been around 13
years since i was sitting on curb rolling gently back and forth on
a skateboard talking with friends about how odd it was that mark
“gator” rogowski had confessed to killing his girlfriend. even
stranger is the fact that that the event is now the basis for a
documentary which has nearly scored a media hat-trick by being
featured on the

terri gross show

and two, count ’em two, articles in the new york times [ see,
“A
Skateboard King Who Fell to Earth”

and
“The
Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of a Skateboard Star”

]. the terri gross interview was fairly compelling, but i’ve been
suckered once into paying hard earned money to take a walk down
memory lane with the barely mediocre
“dog town and the z
boys”

and newsday pretty much confirms my worst fears with

its skewering of “stoked”

:

“On a strictly mechanical level, even skateboard
fanatics likely will find it embarrassingly self-congratulatory,
particularly about the alleged glory days of ’80s skating; the
skateboard illiterate will wonder why so much time and effort are
being spent on such an insignificant, uncharming subject. And
anyone even the least bit cynical will smell the promotional stink
behind the social criticism, as “Stoked” promotes the very outlaw
life.style it pretends to stand against.”

not sobig

i’m quiet sure i’ll regret taunting the networking gods, but i’m going to do it anyway. for some reason, i haven’t received that many sobig related spams over the last few days, despite it being declared the
biggest virus so far:

“E-mail filtering company MessageLabs, for instance, said it intercepted more than a million messages that carry the virus on Tuesday, while rival Postini trapped 2.6 million in 24 hours.”

don’t get me wrong, i’m still getting my fair share of spam and whatnot, which is the inevitable casualty of having a public personality on the internet but, for me at least, sobig was notso. i wonder why.

countergoogling customers

i’ll admit it. i’ve

countergoogled

in the past:

“Pay attention, marketers: remember Roger &
Peppers, evangelizing 1:1 customer relationships back in 1997?
Well, just when you finally have your company’s customer databases
and filtering tools all worked out, and you actually identified
that Lego-loving dentist in Taipei and emailed him a personalized
offer for a family holiday in Denmark, Google changes the name of
the game with a vengeance.”

although i agree with matt that it,

“…could actually be something that gets built into new business
processes…”

, i usually find that i need to go to unusual lengths to prevent
the recipient from feeling like i’m a wierd blogstalking corporate
tool. up to this point, i’ve reserved my countergoogling powers for
rather benign purposes; i specifically restrict the activity to
people who have mentioned
facefive

in a blog. i, of course, see this as simply starting a friendly
conversation and happily it has all worked out for the better so
far, but i think it definately needs to be used with caution. [ via ev ]

jabber java logger


Instant logging: Harness the power of log4j with Jabber
:

“Not only is logging an important element in
development and testing cycles — providing crucial debugging
information — it is also useful for detecting bugs once a system
has been deployed in a production environment, providing precise
context information to fix them. In this article, Ruth Zamorano and
Rafael Luque, cofounders of Orange Soft, a Spain-based software
company specializing in object-oriented technologies, server-side
Java platform, and Web content accessibility, explain how to use
the extension ability of log4j to enable your distributed Java
applications to be monitored by instant messaging
(IM).”

{ intertwingled since 2000 }