A story on the 10th anniversary of the O.J. Simpson verdict notes his recent plans:

Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10, "it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen," he said. It never happened.

I haven't seen much reality TV since Married by America perfected the form, but I'd watch an alleged double murderer being sprung on unsuspecting prank victims. O.J. would be the new Allen Funt, who had to go off-camera towards the end of his Candid Camera days because he was scaring the hell out of people.

If Juic'd became a hit, think of the copycats it would spawn: Kobe Bryant runs a rape crisis hotline! Roman Polanski teaches junior high girl's soccer! John Bolton serves as U.N. ambassador!

Television · 2005/10/03 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Don't Fall for Scamazon.Com

Considering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks.

A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing:

Dear Amazon member,

Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.

Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.

Please follow the link below:

[link removed]

and update your account information.

We apreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place to trade.

Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.

Regards,
Amazon Safety Department

NOTE: This message was sent to you by an automated e-mail system. Please don't reply to it. Amazon treats your personal information with the utmost care, and our Privacy Policy is designed to protect you and your information.

The link had the Chinese hostname www.amazon.com.encrypted-inquiry.cn, which resolves to an IP address in Germany. Yesterday, a net abuse monitor reported on Usenet that it had a different IP address in Thailand. The site looks exactly like Amazon.Com and asks for your username, password and credit card information.

Never respond to an e-mail asking for your account or credit card information, no matter how official it looks. These are always scams, run professionally by criminals who will rapidly hit your accounts for everything they can get and are unlikely to ever be caught. Most operate outside the U.S., as this globe-trotting Chinese/German/Thai effort demonstrates.

Considering the importance of ecommerce, browser users need more help detecting these scams. I could tell that the host encrypted-inquiry.cn was suspicious because I am a domain name geek, and Amazon.Com would never use a host in China for American customers. A Microsoft program manager was not so lucky, falling for a similar e-mail because he had just ordered from Amazon.

The server monitoring company Netcraft offers a free Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox toolbar that warns users of known phishing sites, providing hosting information about each site you visit. When I installed it this morning, it already had the Amazon scam attempt in its database, alerting me not to visit before I loaded the page.

The toolbar displays detailed information about each site, revealing where it's hosted, what company controls the IP address, and how long it has been online. Toolbar links open detailed reports on each site.

Security · Publishing · 2005/10/02 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

This is Anna Badkhen

The most compelling stories from a newspaper reporter in Iraq are being penned by Anna Badkhen, a 29-year-old foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. She frequently writes stories that bring first-hand accounts from frontline soldiers home, such as her article this morning of a Marine platoon outside Sada, a town near the Syrian border that's one of five controlled by insurgents:

The mortar rounds hit in the early morning. The first one, a harbinger of the assault to come, whooshed up from the sleepy border town of Sada at around 5:30 a.m. Friday, landing in a burst of sparks several hundred yards short of the sandstone cliffs where U.S. Marines were camped out.

The shell's trajectory left a momentary orange trace in the predawn sky, but the impact was almost inaudible, and most of the Marines slept right through it, wrapped in their sleeping bags in the foxholes they had dug in the hard-packed desert dust.

The second round landed closer ...

Badkhen has a novelist's ear for dialogue, relating Thursday how desert-encamped Marines make their beds:

"It's like digging a grave," he says. "I'll lay in my little grave, I'll put my sleeping bag on top of me, and I'll be warm. I've found out that the deeper you dig, the warmer it gets."

"Last time we were out," he continued, "the first day, I dug like a champion. The second day, I didn't dig deep enough, and I was cold."

The Chronicle thinks so much of Badkhen's work that it sent her from one warzone to another, assigning her to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Badkhen, who publishes an online journal for the paper, described herself as anti-war in a 2003 interview. Before bias monitors make too much of that, it appears to be an apolitical expression of sympathy for civilians caught in a warzone:

I don't like wars. I think wars are bad. I see a lot of people suffer ... If one government doesn't like the other government and they go to war, or if one regime doesn't like the separatists, and they go to war, then the people who suffer are not just the government and the separatists. The people who suffer are the people in between, just people who are living their lives. I'm on their side.

Another blogger has discovered Badkhen, complimenting her ability to note things that "snottier, glitzier reporters don't."

The more I read of her work, the more it feels like the next Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Politics · Journalism · 2005/10/01 · 16 COMMENTS · Link

Throw the Book at Google

Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is a clear violation of copyright.

I'm not so sure.

If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call it Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright?

Selective quotation of a book is fair use. Is repeated selective quotation of a book still fair?

There are full-text books on the web under copyright, such as Live Simple by John December. Google did to this book what it wants to do to library books in the real world -- it grabbed copies of all the pages and will search the text in response to a query, presenting the relevant excerpts.

As an armchair copyright lawyer, I can't figure out how it matters that Google grabbed one book with a bot and grabbed the other with a scanner. Google grabs the full text of copyrighted works all the time -- 56,000 on this server alone. If Google Print is illegal, wouldn't Google be illegal as well?

Thank God we have wealthy corporations with high-powered intellectual property lawyers who can answer this question for us.

Publishing · Politics · Movable Type · Google · 2005/10/01 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

The Joy of MySQL

While deleting some comment spam in the Drudge Retort database, I just had to use the following MySQL query:

  delete from feedback where author like '%sperm%';

Mysql · Webpublishing · Sex · 2005/09/30 · Comment · Link

Grover Cleveland Will Have His Revenge

Blogs for Bush contributor Mark Noonan:

I really do urge our Democrats to step back from the edge -- you are sitting in a lake of gasoline and you are playing with fire. We on our side will only put up with so much before we start to pay back with usury what we have received.

DailyKos diarist Hunter:

This is the world you forged and, unfortunately for you, I'm beginning to take a fancy for it. Welcome to the politics of your own party, finally sprouting from the ground on which you planted the seeds and ---- upon them.

When two political blowhards engage each other in back-and-forth argument on the Internet, it always reads like foreplay to me. I would not be surprised to learn that James Carville deflowered Mary Matalin on the set of Hardball after a particular divisive joint appearance. Or that Chris Matthews stuck around to take pictures.

We're mass producing stupid in American politics these days, but the absolute nadir has to be the following argument, whether offered by a Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, Kossack, or Little Green Football:

Things didn't get ugly until your side began the politics of personal destruction. We were perfectly happy to fight by Marquess of Queensberry rules, but after what you just did, you will have no one but yourself to blame when I vigorously knee you in the nuts.

Gutter politics is as American as insider trading and jazz music.

If you must cling to the belief that the other guy started it, show some historical perspective and reach back further than Robert Bork, Vince Foster, or Richard Nixon to rationalize your behavior.

Any underhanded actions I undertake in support of the Democratic Party will be motivated by the ill treatment Grover "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa?" Cleveland received from Republicans in 1884.

Just because a man sleeps out of wedlock with a troubled woman who had multiple sex partners, accepts paternal responsibility even though the child might not be his, sends the toddler to an orphanage instead of taking him in, then persuades her to give the boy up for adoption, that's no excuse to make the subject a character issue during a presidential campaign.

Politics · 2005/09/30 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Bill Bennett Races to Judgment

The crime rate would go down in the U.S. if blacks were aborted, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said during his nationally syndicated radio show yesterday:

... it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

The belief that a particular race is more prone to criminality is often based on rates of incarceration, such as a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that blacks have an 18.6 percent lifetime chance of being incarcerated, compared to 10 percent for Hispanics and 3.4 percent for whites.

Judging this solely on the basis of current incarceration is both extremely ugly and misleading. Other contributory factors are ignored, such as a 2004 poverty rate for blacks that's 24.7 percent, three times as high as that for whites, and the fact that minorities are significantly more likely to be arrested and convicted than whites who commit the same offenses.

There's also the tragic generational consequences of a parent's incarceration, which increase the chance a child will end up in prison later in life.

Bennett could have made the same point using gender instead of race -- males are 10 times as likely to be incarcerated as women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

By choosing to make this about race and single out blacks, Bennett engaged in one of the uglier examples of race baiting I've heard from a national radio host, even though he tried to qualify his thoughts by admitting they were "morally reprehensible." I hope he has the decency to offer a full apology.

Update: Matthew Yglesias, perhaps fishing for another Yglesias Award, defends Bennett on TPM Cafe, while Rep. John Conyers calls for his suspension.

Radio · Politics · 2005/09/29 · 54 COMMENTS · Link

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