Identity Thieves Mastered My Card

I just completed a 10-day ordeal dealing with fraudulent charges on two credit cards. On Friday Nov. 18, my card donated $1.89 to the Hong Kong chapter of the relief organization Médecins Sans Frontières. The following Monday, my wife's card spent around $190 with the Ito-Yokado retailer in Japan.

These charges were discovered within 72 hours as I reviewed my MasterCard account online. I had just paid for wireless Internet access at a Disney World conference center on Nov. 20, and a day later I became retroactively paranoid about providing my credit card details to the strongest wireless access point in range of my laptop.

That decision didn't have a chance to come back and haunt me, because I was already being robbed across Asia. I cancelled the cards.

I'd like to figure out how this happened. The two cards have different numbers, have never been lost and aren't used at the same merchants.

MasterCard announced in March that 40 million credit card numbers were exposed by a security breach at a Tucson processing center, so my best guess is that thieves hit numbers stolen from a database (rather than my pants).

But how could both of our cards get hit on different numbers, and what kind of self-respecting identity thief makes a $1.89 test charge and doesn't follow up with a weekend spending spree?

My bank didn't provide any more details on the charges, which takes all the fun out of being victimized by international criminals. I wanted to find out what they bought from Ito-Yokado, a huge Japanese retail chain that owns a majority interest in 7-Eleven, and where my $1.89 donation will be used.

Security · 2005/11/29 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

New Book: Programming with Java in 24 Hours

I just launched the web site for Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, my 21st computer book since I began writing them in 1996. I'm not sure how this happened. I went to college to learn interpretive dance.

This is the fourth edition of the book, updated to cover Java 2 version 5. I wrote the first in a 17-day haze in 1997, covering Java 1.1 and its class library, which is less than one-tenth the size of the Java 2 class library today.

Over the years, the book has grown to 558 pages and been heavily reworked several times to reflect changing priorities among Java's several million programmers. Back in 1987, Java was touted as the ideal language for designing interactive web content like games and animation, so the book covered applets extensively. Today, Macromedia Flash has all but killed applets in the browser -- the last major web site using Java applets, ESPN, switched to Flash within the last year for its fantasy sports and live game stats. Java coders use the language primarily on Internet servers, database programs, web applications and middleware.

The fourth edition devotes new chapters to two subjects that weren't even around eight years ago: XML and XML-RPC. I wanted to get XML-RPC into the book so badly that I suspended the laws of time and space. Each of Sams' 24 Hours books contains 24 one-hour tutorials, which add up to a day under a timekeeping system established by the Babylonians more than 1,000 years ago. I broke that system to make room for Hour 25, "Creating Web Services with XML-RPC."

I cover XML-RPC programming using Apache XML-RPC, an open source Java class library that makes it easy to move data around from program to program over the Internet. I rely on it all the time -- this week, I transferred thousands of database records from a Frontier server to an XML-RPC server on my desktop machine to a PHP/MySQL database on Workbench.

Each chapter ends with two programming exercises solved on the site. The Hour 25 exercises are an XML-RPC client, server and request handler for the XML-RPC interface of Advogato.

Even if you don't buy the book -- a possibility I hate to even contemplate -- those two applications demonstrate how to make and receive XML-RPC requests in Java using Apache XML-RPC.

Publishing · Programming · Java · 2005/11/29 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Terrorists Reap What They Sew

Congressman John Carter, R-Texas, has found a new area of concern for the nation's homeland -- uniforms worn by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are made in Mexico:

If we're manufacturing uniforms in Mexico, what's to stop someone from walking across the border in a Border Patrol uniform? How do you know who are our guys and who are their guys?

Don't tell Rep. Carter, but Al Qaeda probably has the operational capabilities to sew a shirt and pants. If our border security can be fooled by the standard action-movie trick of taking someone's uniform, making the clothing in Dubuque isn't going to solve the problem.

Politics · 2005/11/28 · 20 COMMENTS · Link

Black Friday: More Than I Bargained For

Once the doors opened just before 5 a.m., hundreds of people poured through, breaking down the police tape. Dozens of others cut the line and ran through the exit door before Wal-Mart employees were able to stop them.

Inside, Wal-Mart workers were throwing boxes with laptops and portable DVD players to the people who were pushing and shoving to get the merchandise. A lone sneaker lay on the floor, lost by an anxious shopper in the scrum.

My name is Rogers and I am a recovering doorbuster.

A few years ago during a Thanksgiving holiday in Dallas, my wife and her sisters got up before dawn Friday morning to go doorbusting, hitting the sales at Target and other retailers on the biggest shopping day of the year.

I thought this sounded nurse-a-shotgun dreadful, but when I saw some of the prices at computer stores, I became one of these sad, bargain-crazed freaks.

The aptly named Black Friday gets larger, longer and more dangerous each year. I heard a radio report from a Wal-Mart where 5,000 people lined up outside before it opened. Some stores have even begun opening on Thanksgiving Day, spoiling one of the last commerce-free holidays.

Another former doorbuster:

Black Friday is the most terrible day of the year. I can't believe what kind of human beings go out on this day and start fights and are that greedy and materialistic to get up this early and do these things. ... I'm sickened by what I was exposed to today. I don't even want to go into detail about the things I saw and the things that were uttered out of people's mouths.

I don't know what possessed me to get up at 4 a.m. for a knockoff MP3 player, six-format digital photo card reader and other computer peripherals, most of which remained unopened the next time Black Friday rolled around. The only thing I can recall needing -- from any of these sales -- was a 100-pack case of blank CDs ($0.01 after a $9.99 mail-in rebate).

Two years later, I still have 70 CDs left.

When I was doorbusting last year at CompUSA in Jacksonville, I decided that no amount of savings is worth standing in line for an hour within the armpit fallout cloud of computer aficionados, many of whom skipped a shower so they'd have the best possible chance to buy one of five $49 laser printers.

Update: Bill Lazar survived a Black Friday riot at a Mountain View, California, Wal-Mart: "People raced to the consumer electronics department as the store opened at 5 a.m., jumping over counters and pushing over a display case. Store managers, downplaying the scrum afterwards, needed help from Mountain View PD to restore order."

Jacksonville · 2005/11/26 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

CNN Dicks Cheney with Subliminal Messages

The Drudge Retort has obtained video footage that proves the superimposition of an X mark over Vice President Cheney during a televised speech Tuesday wasn't just an innocent technical glitch by CNN, as claimed by anchor Daryn Kagan-Limbaugh.

In a story impacting hard across the conservative blogosphere, Matt Drudge reported Tuesday on a "large black 'X' repeatedly flashed over the vice president's face!"

The X, which appeared for two frames displayed over one-fifteenth of a second, turns out to be a small part of a series of extremely hard-to-detect subliminal messages lasting more than 10 minutes during the speech.

If you watch the 11-minute, 8-second video closely, you'll see that Michelle Malkin and other seasoned observers of politics were right to suspect that someone at the Communist News Network was attempting to subconsciously sway the public against the vice president.

If this kind of thing is standard practice at the network founded by patchouli-smelling medicinal hemp advocate Ted Turner, it may explain the 19 percent approval rating that Cheney currently enjoys in the polls.

Television · Politics · Journalism · 2005/11/23 · 289 COMMENTS · Link

Fun with Comment Spam

A spammer pimping Tadalafil left the following comment on Workbench this morning:

I am delighted that you have chosen to respond at last to one of the people posting comments on your blog. While the subject of the sex/slave trade is indeed horrendous, I am sure I am not alone in wishing that you would engage and debate with those of us posing hard and difficult questions about the impending EU Constitutioncrisis that is likely to result from a rejection by French and Dutch voters. Surely this is a paramount subject for you - Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication - to be addressing. It wont go away, you know.tadalafil

After a reader of Margot Wallstrom's blog shared his concerns with the European Union commissioner in April, his comment was grabbed by a spammer's software and is being spread around the world to help men achieve 36-hour erections.

2005/11/23 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Murthquake Continues to Shake Washington

On Friday, Republicans in the House of Representatives pushed to the floor a bill they wrote but did not favor:

It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

To no surprise, the bill failed 403-3. The yes votes came from the Democrats Cynthia McKinney, Jose Serrano and Robert Wexler.

This bill was must-see C-Span, but I've been struggling to figure out what Republicans hoped to gain with such a transparent stunt. It may please Sean Hannity and other tail-wagging right-wing housepets, but the GOP doesn't need to engineer fake victories to throw a bone to their supporters. They have the majority in Congress and can mop the floor with real Democrats every day of the week.

Liberal Democrats regularly serve up new bills that have absolutely no prayer of being enacted. If Hannity enjoys the taste of fictitious Democrat, wouldn't he love to gnaw a nice tasty leg of Dennis Kucinich?

There's a real withdrawal bill they could have opposed: Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha's call to redeploy U.S. troops outside of Iraq within a reasonable time as a "quick reaction force" with an "over-the-horizon presence of Marines."

The GOP took a huge risk with their fake bill, because they pushed the subject of withdrawal higher in the news. This became clear yesterday when 100 Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders responded Monday by demanding the withdrawal of foreign troops "on a specified timetable."

I couldn't figure out the Republicans' logic until I read Salon Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg this morning.

Republicans hope that this 400-vote victory squelches debate of Murtha's proposal, reducing the war in the eyes of the public to their heroic defeat of nobody's call for immediate withdrawal. Americans are as heartsick as Rep. Murtha about 160,000 U.S. soldiers serving as target practice for suicide bombs and IEDs while we're given no exit strategy more concrete than "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

They're clearly afraid of Murtha, a conservative hawk and decorated Vietnam veteran who visits weekly with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital and has strong ties inside the Pentagon. He legitimizes a perception that's growing among disenchanted supporters of the war -- the belief that our presence in Iraq hurts more than it helps:

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45 percent of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.

If only cowards cut and run, as we recently learned from newly elected Rep. Jean Schmidt, why are war supporters running as fast as they can away from this debate?

Politics · 2005/11/22 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries