Scientific American forgot to tell me how to activate my digital subscription. Here's how.

When I renewed Scientific American last September I had a “deal” that included 1 or 2 freebies and digital service for $40. (Today I’d use Amazon — $35, much easier to manage, great subscription manager, etc).

The magazine eventually showed up but not the free extra book/special edition and not the digital service. Maybe there was an email that went into my spam filter, but I have gotten other email from them.

Turns out I had a digital service all along. I went to their customer service site and followed a link to manage my subscription account. From there I saw a link to activate digital service. That worked.

Now I have to figure out what happened to the freebies.

Massive phone spam -- from Weatherby Healthcare

Weatherby healthcare hires physicians for “locum tennis” roles. That’s filling in for someone on holiday and the like.

They’ve contracted with the phone spam company from hell. My Google Voice number is deluged with calls like this (email of transcription):

Good morning. This is Kevin with weatherby Health care. I saw you recently inquired online about some outpatient work. I wanted to touch base with you. I'm currently working with several urgent care and outpatient facilities not only in your area, but throughout the country as well that are looking for a position like yourself to provide temporary full time or sporadic shift coverage they offer a high flexibility in the schedule and competitive pay rates. Give me a call back today would love to give you some additional information and details about these opportunities and see how I can be a resource for you my direct line here is 954 300 77 1821 again. This is Kevin with weatherby Healthcare 954 370-7828 have a great day.

and like this:

is Mike Ruskin weatherby Health Care's primary Care team. Hope you're doing well. I was reaching out to you because I came across your information, and I have some new open a family medicine positions available in Minnesota wanted to see if you or any colleagues should have I might be available. Give me a call back when you get this message. Let me know 954-343-2142 again Mike ross again with weatherby 954-343-2142. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Bye.

I blocked several of the numbers, but their phone spam operation is rotating through a large set. Number blocking doesn’t work.

I’ve turned off text messaging notifications of calls on my GV number and notifications from the GV app and notifications of missed calls. So the only notification I get is now email. In gmail I set a filter for any email with the text “weatherby health” to send it to the trash.

We desperately need a robocall/phone spam solution.

Oh, and if you’re a physician — please don’t answer calls from Weatherby. If you’re Weatherby, you’ve made a disastrous choice of marketing services.

PS. If you’re Google — your Google Voice phone spam filtering needs work.

What a solution for phone spam will look like

The FCC wants a vast and unmanageable array of voice communications carriers to fix the robocall plague.

I’m here to tell you what will happen. It will work much the way email spam was managed in the 1990s. It will also be the end of our legacy voice communication system and, somewhere along the way, the Feds will mandate that Google and Apple support VOIP interoperability.

Yeah, email spam is managed. It’s true that 95% of my email volume is spam, but I don’t see it. Differential filtering based on the managed reputation of an authenticated sending service works. Push the spam management problem down the sending service, then vary filtering algorithms based on the reputation of the authenticated (PKI) sending service. If you still see large spam volumes or losing valuable email it’s because you’re using Apple as an email service provider. Don’t do that.

Here’s what I think will happen to enable differential filtering based on the managed reputation of the authenticated calling service. I’m sure insiders know this, but they aren’t talking. 

• VOIP interoperability will be mandated. No more Apple-only FaceTime audio.
• Services (AT&T, Verizon) that don’t authenticate or manage their customers are assigned poor baseline scores. Service that authenticate/manage customers (Apple) get high baseline scores.
• Low score calls get sent to spam VOIP, we never see them. Medium score never ring through, they go automatically to transcription and we get transcription summary.
• High score calls are eligible for ring through based on user device settings.

The carriers will fight like hell to preserve their domain, Apple will fight interoperability, Google will be fine.

 

PS. For now we have a home phone number that is purely message, the phone doesn’t ring. Google Voice would be even better. If I could set my iPhone to “Do Not Disturb” status strictly for voice calls I’d be fine. I rarely answer unrecognized and unscheduled calls.

See also

• Economist.com | The fight against spam - buying a managed reputation 2/2004
• Fighting Spam - a proposal I first wrote up @1997.

Quicken spending spam - alert "feature"

In my mail this morning…

During a machine transition I reinstalled Quicken 2015, so I at first thought we’d unwittingly enabled Quicken Mobile and put our finances into Intuit’s Cloud. We hadn’t, but there’s an alerting “feature” I didn’t know about that can be changed in preferences. I’ve now disabled all alerts. 

I’d prefer Intuit (current owner, but Quicken has been abandoned) not know anything about me at all. I suspect knowing about me is, unfortunately, a significant part of their failing business model.

If you don’t want this, then stay away from Intuit and Quicken.

Don't lose the birthdate for your Fakebook account

Yahoo! has been an excellent spam-mail service. I use my Yahoo email whenever I want to avoid spam — such as when I have to deal with Ticketmaster.

I have a “spam” Facebook account too — I use it for sites that trade services for the right to access my Facebook timeline, friends, etc. My Fakebook account has no friends and no information, nothing except a birthdate that turns off the most obnoxious Facebook ads (70+). I’m happy to give it out.

Alas, I forgot the birthdate I made up. So when I tried to use my Fakebook account from a new machine I couldn’t answer Facebook’s authentication test — even though I knew the password. My account was locked out.

Fortunately it worked from home, and I’ve since added my Fakebook birthdate to my password database.

Now you know — when you create a Fakebook account, don’t forget the birthdate.

What you sign up for when you pay Virgin Mobile Canada for phone services

I've once again gone through the tricky process of setting up a Virgin Mobile Canada prepaid account on an unlocked AT&T iPhone. This time I paid more attention to the contract I signed. It was remarkable what rights I've given Virgin Mobile:

... Unless you decline or withdraw your consent at a later date, you agree that Virgin Mobile, Bell Mobility, Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Bell Aliant, The Source and their affiliates may .... send you communications by any means, including electronically ... products and services of our third party marketing partners; 

virginmobile.ca/marketingpreferences

(b) Telemarketing and Automatic Dialers: Unless you decline or withdraw your consent at a later date, you agree that Virgin Mobile may contact you by phone at your mobile number (and/or at any other contact numbers which you provide from time to time), and using automated dialing and/or announcing devices, to inform you of new offers and promotions, including but not limited to telemarketing messages. If you do not wish to receive such communications or allow the use of your information for these purposes, please call 1-866-580-3625 to change your preferences. 

... virginmobile.ca/textalerts for further information or to block premium short code messages.

So in addition to paying for these services, we also agree to be spammed, texted, and telemarketed to. If you provide your landline number when asked for contact information [1] needed to verify the account, then that's fair game for telemarketing as well.

And the carriers wonder why we hate them ... (ok, so they don't wonder.)

[1] I didn't, and I gave them my Yahoo pure-spam(r) account. But I still need to turn off the texting spam and the telemarketing on the mobile number. Some of this may not be legal in the US, Canada is not famed for consumer protection.

Apple reactivates anonymous charitable donation via iTunes - please Cook, make this permanent.

Apple has quietly reintroduced something I've wanted even before CARE.ORG broke our deal and sold us out to the donation industry. They are again offering a way for non-wealthy people to donate anonymously to the Red Cross via iTunes.

They did this previously for Superstorm Sandy ...

iTunes now accepting Red Cross donations for Superstorm Sandy aid

iTunes will transfer 100 percent of all donations directly to the American Red Cross without sending users' names or contact information.

Unfortunately it's not a permanent service ...

The iTunes and Red Cross giving system was most recently activated following the devastating earthquake and resulting tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011. Before that, Apple offered the service in 2010, following a series of deadly earthquakes in Haiti.

We need Apple to make this a permanent service. Please join me in adding this request to Apple's iTunes Feedback Page. Apple can deduct the cost as a charitable donation.

We need this. Emily and I gave up our annual donations because of the deluge of mail, spam, phone calls and the like. These weren't huge donations, but they were non-trivial. If we were wealthier we'd give through a legal shield, but we don't have that kind of money. We can't be the only family hiding from the crazed donation industry.

So now we can donate to at least this cause. The only acknowledgement is an email receipt for tax deduction. The American Red Cross doesn't get any more information -- which is very Apple like. Here's how it looked on my iPhone today:

Come on Tom Cook -- make this permanent!

We do not understand the world in which we live

It is always this way, on the micro and the macro. I didn't understand high school until college. I didn't understand medical school until I was halfway through. I was deep into the corporation before I recognized my surroundings.

Did hunter-gatherers understand their context? 

Three links that tell us we don't understand ours (all via DeLong):

• The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone 11/2010. " ... An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? ... the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating ..."
• Twentieth Century Economic History - DeLong: "... What do modern people do? Increasingly, they push forward the corpus of technological and scientific knowledge. They educate each other. They doctor each other. ... They provide other services for each other to take advantage of the benefits of specialization. And they engage in complicated symbolic interactions that have the emergent effect of distributing status and power and coordinating the seven-billion person division of labor of today’s economy...
• Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel | Quiet Babylon: " ... The Kindle store is awash in books confusingly similar to bestsellers... Icon’s books are created by a patented system... products that generate unique text with simple thesaurus rewriting tools called content spinners... Amazon ‘stocks’ more than 500,000 items from Solid Gold Bomb. These things only barely exist. They are print on demand designs... Talk about crapjects and strange shaper subcultures still gives the whole threat a kind of artisanal feel. The true scale of object spam will be much greater..."

In our work, our hive like human world, we seek those who know and do. Some hide themselves, some advertise. Some are specialists, some are generalists, a few are omni-talented. A very few are powerful, a few are powerless, most are in-betweeners. All are enmeshed in systems of symbiosis and parasitism, all embedded in the "novel assemblage".

This world seems strange to me.

It will seem quaint to whatever thinks in 2113.

Minnesota DFL phone spam - might not be what it seems

Since the election we've received a nightly phone call with a Caller ID of MN DFL party and a return number of 651-251-6300. As others have noted, that is indeed the phone number for the Minnesota DFL Party.

I assumed it was simply a fund-raising robocall. We are good Commies and donate to the Party, so it's not surprising that they'd harass us. It has been, however, oddly persistent. So tonight I actually answered the phone -- but I heard only a few meaningless sounds. Nobody was there.

I wonder if this were really a DFL call, or if someone is spoofing their number. That would be a nasty trick; a small donation to the right offshore resources could paralyze a fund-raising program.

If so, it might be that the villains don't know the election is over. Or the nighty calls could simply be a malfunctioning robocall system. I'll try to contact the DFL and ask what's up (I'll need to disable some of my DFL email spam filters to get a response). Even if it's not a dirty trick in this election cycle, it's a sure-fire strategy for the next one. Just another way that the era of switched network voice telephony is over. We will need caller-authentication with reputation-based call triage.

I'll update this with what I hear from the Minnesota DFL.

Update 12/8/2012: It seems to be incompetency, not malevolence. It seems the DFL really is spamming our home nightly.

Information archeology: a challenge for Google Reader (or its successor)

There's an immense amount of knowledge, insight and entertainment in the feeds I follow. Using Reeder.app on my iPhone, and Google Reader web or Reeder.app on my desktops, I learn something new every half-hour or so. I share some of the stream via Pinboard (archival), app.net, twitter and wordpress (archive and indexed into my custom search).

Works pretty well -- but it could be better.

I'm skimming the surface of the knowsphere. There's great material below, sometimes in once beloved blogs that have gone silent. We need a way to dig it up.

That's someting old-Google might have added to Reader. Using signals like links, non-spam comments and authorship Google Reader could define an "archeology" stream -- the best of the past, where 18 months might be the start of old.

Google's probably not going to do this, but a third party service could do this and create a feed. Yahoo!'s wonderful but forgotten Pipes! product could be modified along these lines.

Dear Dems: Maybe you shouldn't have spammed me so much.

The GOP may have a loose relationship with the falsifiable world, but they're tight where it matters. They have money by the truckload, mostly delivered by the deluded wealthy [1] to anonymous GOP funding streams.

So you'd think that Emily and I be inundated with pleas for donations.

Instead, crickets.

Seemed odd to me, then I remember the dense wall of filters and blocks I had to put up after our last set of donations. I had to block over thirty domains to beat back a deluge of Dem spam.

I guess our defenses are working. All those pleas and invitations are probably lost in my spam filters.

Maybe my team needs to rethink their fund raising strategy, and to implement rigorous email list control. Work on it guys.

In the meantime, I guess we'll have to send money somewhere. Google will probably come up with an address.

[1] Besides America, how many other post-industrial nations associate wealth with virtue and intellect?

CAPTCHA has failed, and so anonymous comments may go too.

My most loyal commenter (that's you Martin) tells me he can't solve Google's CAPTCHAs any more.

Neither can I. I responded ...

I can't do the CAPTCHAs either. Blog authors don't usually see them, but occasionally I'm connecting with a non-owner account.

I think they've evolved to a point that only human experts and AIs can solve them, and they all work for spammers.

Problem is I allow anonymous comments and only moderate if > 4 days, so there's only CAPTCHA and Google spam detection between me and endless hordes of mosquitoes.

As an experiment I've disabled CAPTCHAs on notes.kateva.org. I'll see how good Google's spam detection is. If the volume is too high I'll turn off anonymous comments. I agree, CAPTCHA has reached the end of the road.

Even in tiny market blogs like mine, comment and discussion is problematic.

Update 8/9/12: No problems! I should have dumped CAPTCHA years ago. Turns out I did on tech.kateva.org and then forgot I had. Google's comment spam filters are pretty amazing.

Usenet: it's time to put a stake in it

Google has rebooted Google Groups for Business. I'd was surprised by the reboot, so the announcement brought me back to my old Groups account.

I found Google had me listed as a member of rec.sport.skating.inline. Yes, a usenet group. Google inherited them when it rescued the DejaNews usenet archive from oblivion [1].

There are still posts to the group that pass Google's spam filters -- one every few weeks. Alas, even they look like spam. I saw some older posts from a year before.

Wikipedia tells us that most of the usenet traffic now is spam and "binaries" newsgroups. The article gives the impression that those binaries range from illegal software to child porn. Most ISPs don't carry usenet any more; I'm sure Google doesn't index the binaries and I suspect it filters most of the spam.

It's time to put a stake in usenet. At the funeral, we should consider the lessons it taught us.

[1] I was a keen DejaNews user. I used to 'tag' my usenet posts with a unique string to enable retrieval and review (for example). I'm tempted to add this search string to my Google Custom Search engine, but I'm a bit leary of breaking the engine.

Bicycle light donation - a selfish way to give

Today's commute was as good as it gets. Warm, sunny, not too hot yet. Bit of a breeze. Streets quiet. Cars considerate and happy. A good ride for daydreams of doing good stuff.

Until one of my daydreams runs into something practical. Something like a program to donate towards $10 easy to install semi-sealed high reliability blinking red bike lights.

I could bring $200 to an interested bike shop, put up a small poster, and see how it goes.

It's the kind of low energy donation I might actually do, and, best of all, it's anonymous. So no spam!

Even better, it's selfish. I worry a bit about getting run over, but I worry a lot more about running someone else over. More blinkies, fewer nightmares. A program like this ought to appeal to people who never bike, particularly elderly drivers with good reason to fear low visibility bicycles. Unlike helmets, which some cyclists dislike (not me), just about everyone likes blinkies [1].

My next thought was that someone has to have set something up like this. Of course they have, including in Minneapolis four days ago ...

• I’m raising money so more people on bikes can Get Lit and Get Lit: This Chicago program focuses on front white lights.
• Be Bright at Night: A Cleveland campaign that gives lights to people who bike without at night. It's supported by the Sylvia Bingham fund, in memory a young woman killed by a bad right turn. (Lights wouldn't have helped her, to prevent those turns we need smart-car tech [2]).
• Portland (OR) police distribute bicycle lights
• Minneapolis police install bike lights (four friggin' days ago) - part of the Bike Cops for Kids program, "Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota and other generous persons have donated 1,500 helmets, 150 bikes and 6,00 bike lights."

These are great programs, but I didn't see one that involved distribution at local bicycle shops like Cycles for Change, Express Bike Shop, or my local favorites. So there's room for growth.

Anyone know of other programs like this?

[1] Except for the Apocalypse flavor of libertarian. In my searches I found someone complaining about the corrupting influence of bicycle light donations.
[2] It's in the lab. Machine vision/radar to identify pedestrians, animals, and bicycles and alert drivers.

The evolution of spam: Nordstrom and mandatory spam acceptance

We've come a long way baby.

A year ago Nordstrom's began offering optional email receipts as "a convenient, environmentally friendly alternative to paper receipts."

Of course there are alway a few skeptics who doubted Nordstrom's integrity, but USA Today was reassuring

Retailers ditch paper and pen, use email for receipts - USATODAY.com

... no retailer serious about building a relationship with its customers would consider taking advantage of email access, said John Talbott, assistant director of Indiana University's Center for Education and Research in Retailing.

That's because for the retailer, the most significant benefit is being able to offer a service customers appreciate, he said. It isn't about cutting costs, he said, as less than 1% of a retailer's total revenue goes toward paper and ink for receipts.

Instead, the driving force is providing an option that makes the store a more appealing place to shop...

Yesterday Emily bought a shirt at Nordstrom's. The email receipt, she was told, was mandatory. No, of course there'd be no spam. She doesn't have a spam account, so she gave them her gmail account.

She got her first Nordstrom spam a few hours later. I'll show her how to use filters later today.

Not to worry though, paper receipts are not long for this world. Soon we'll be buying things with our phones. No spam there, since of course there's no tie between our phone's unique identifier and our email and phone number.

IPO lessons from MySpace

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Shelley

Cleaning spam out of my Yahoo email (it's spam-only), I saw mention of MySpace.

It jogged an old memory. I'd set up an account there in 2006 - mostly to secure a username in case it went anywhere. I still had the old password in my Filemaker web database (it goes back to 1995 or so).

Here's the first entry in my MySpace messages ...

Welcome to MySpace, the best place to connect with friends on the Net! 

I'm Tom, and I'm here to help you with MySpace. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to say Hi, feel free to send me a message! You can also check the FAQ for the most frequently asked questions. 

How do you get started? 

On MySpace you share your profile, photos, blogs, and messages with a fast-growing network of people connected to you by your friends. 

The first thing to do is to invite your friends -- then when they invite their friends you'll all be connected!

There are several hundred subsequent emails, all spam and terms of service announcements as best I can tell. Most of the site UI is advertisements.

Facebook is supposed to go public soon -- in the midst of Bubble 2.0. Investors should remember MySpace.

Spam-Cram epidemic means SMS dies sooner

The ailing hippo of SMS texting is under attack. iOS/OS X Message is at its throat, Google Voice SMS is on its back, and now the hyenas of spam-cram are on every limb.

Last November I thought SMS had only 2-3 years left, but since then text spam has taken off. Lately text spam seems to be used to trigger inadvertent cram-contracts, like the BuneUS Mblox cram that hit our family plan.

The attack rate may be higher than we think. Since I posted on this yesterday I've had 1 friend and 1 colleague tell me they discovered SMS-triggered spam-cram on their phone bill.  Incidentally, AT&T isn't always as quick to reverse charges as they were with me. [1]

From what I have learned about SIM-boxes and the history of spam-cram in China post unlimited texting, there's no fix coming. The only fix for cramming is for Verizon and AT&T to give up on selling ring tones and weather forecasts -- and to forego their 30-50% cut of cramming revenue. The only fix for SMS spam is to turn off SMS, or to turn off unlimited SMS then block traffic from networks that offer unlimited SMS.

Actually, I should say there's no carrier-fix coming. There is a simple fix:

1. Phone immediately and put a block on "third party charges". (See details.)
2. Stop using SMS. Start using iMessage or Google Voice -- and, no, they don't interoperate.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: AT&T's SMS spam - blocking the email route: doesn't really address the big problem. There's no fix for SMS spam except SMS blocks.
• Gordon's Notes: The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies: operators figure they have only 1-2 years left
• Gordon's Notes: iPhone micro: How SMS pricing is accelerating the smartphone transition: AT&T's crazy fee increases push users off SMS
• How to stop text spam: Why cellphone spam is on the rise and what you can do about it. - Slate Magazine
• Cellphone Cramming Gets a Second Look - NYTimes.com

[1] I told the poor rep repeatedly that I wasn't angry with him and thought he was doing a fine job. I did tell him what I thought of AT&T and asked if he could pass that message on. I think the grinding of my teeth might have shortened the discussion time -- he skipped to the refund step immediately.

Crammed: Mblox $9.99 a month

I've been expecting this; I'm just surprised it took this long. There was a wee note on my online statement "AT&T monthly subscriptions" "billed usage" - $9.99 for Mblox $9.99 subscription:IQ31CALL8668611606 (BuneUS). (BuneUS is a popular scam, I wonder if my 15 yo unwittingly replied to the scam text.)

I've been crammed. As if AT&T's text spam weren't enough.

I called and, of course, AT&T will reverse the charge. It's the same way they manage text spam -- if you call in the charges will be reversed. Takes a bit of time, but AT&T will happily do it. If you don't call, AT&T will happily keep their profit.

That's not why I'm posting about this though. We don't need another reason to hate AT&T, we hates 'em well enough already.

I'm writing because, unlike texting, there's a fix for cramming. I've not seen it before, but I'm not sure it's new.

AT&T has a free "parental controls purchase blocker". It requires a phone call -- they don't want to make this too easy. I phoned and had all of our family plan numbers blocked -- this blocks ring tones, AT&T product purchases, cramming purchases -- everything. AT&T did insist on sending me a PIN I could use to buy ring tones -- even though I didn't want it.

It's something we should all do. On your mobile dial 611, wade through some voice mail, and ask the rep to block it all on all lines.

See also:

• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly
• Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams
• Head still exploding: The AT&T mobile phone rebate card scam
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show
• Gordon's Tech: AT&T's SMS spam - blocking the email route

Update: Since posting this I've gotten several reports of cramming associated with text spam. The NYT article from 4/8/12 matches my experience ...

Cellphone Cramming Gets a Second Look - NYTimes.com

.. Both AT&T and Verizon deflected any talk of financial upsides of this whole SMS arrangement, but it’s generally understood that roughly one-third to half of the revenue generated by third-party providers goes to carriers. Which leads the Haggler to believe that if the SMS system were set up by a disinterested party, rather than one that is sharing the profit, it would look much more consumer-friendly.

AND now some odds and ends as we wrap up our two-part episode on cramming: The Haggler asked the Federal Communications Commission to explain what’s so hard about cracking down on this con — but received a response so anodyne and unilluminating that, as an act of mercy to both readers and the F.C.C. it won’t be excerpted here. AT&T and Verizon both said that they would block all third-party charges for any customer who calls and requests such a block, at no charge. If you’ve been crammed by Wise Media and want to complain, you can do so through the Georgia governor’s Office of Consumer Protection, at consumer.ga.gov. Tell ‘em the Haggler sent you.

AT&T, meantime, said it would not allow Wise Media to sell any “new content” to consumers, which means that if you signed up for HoroscopeGenie, rest assured that you’ll continue to get it. And if you didn’t sign up for HoroscopeGenie, but are currently getting it anyway, fret not — it’ll keep coming.

Apple's Potemkin Parental Controls (iOS edition)

When the NYT's NYT's Tedeschi admitted to me that he'd missed the boat on iOS Parental Controls I was hoping for a correction to his NYT mobile porn article. He'd written "For parents who are uncomfortable letting children browse such content on an Apple device, the first step is to tap the Settings icon... Enable Restrictions and ... switch Safari to Off..".

Of course this doesn't really work. Last week someone I know discovered the joy of porn videos as viewed through Flight Update - with Safari and YouTube restricted. He finished off his 200MB data allowance in two half hour car drives.

How did he do it? It's not hard. In Gate Guru, for example, the 'legal' page has a link at the bottom. Tap on the link, and you get an embedded WebKit browser. Tap again to get to USA Today, from there it's a couple of taps to Google search.

This isn't a new problem. The WebKit back door has been in iOS since Apps came on board. Most non-Apple Apps have these back doors, including many educational apps. Almost any app that accepts advertising will link to an external site. The safest approach is to only allow Apple's software, but in practice many non-free games are fine.

I suspect most kids are very familiar with using this backdoor; I've seen children with 3rd percentile IQs find and exploit these loopholes in a few minutes. Adults have more trouble, it took Bob Tedeschi a few tries to find the loopholes. I suspect we're more bound by preconceptions of what's possible. (Who'd think to hide explicit emails in the Spam folder, for example?)

Apple's Potemkin parental controls are really only effective at placating parents. It seems to work though, I've been the only one complaining.

See also:

• Apple's iPhone parental controls are completely broken 9/10
• NYT's Tedeschi misses the iOS Porn story 1/12
• Parental Controls on iOS and OS X: what we do now 2/2012. Lately we have better results on OS X. The key was to block Google completely.

Update 3/5/12: Just demonstrated this with liveATC.app, which my son would love to use. There's a twitter share icon. From that it took me a couple of taps to the twitter blog. That's  rich source of links, so from there I hopped to Amazon and from Amazon I had the web. All with Safari disabled of course.

Rule 34 by Charlie Stross - my review

I read Charlie Stross's Rule 34. Here's my 5 star Amazon review (slightly modified as I thought of a few more things):

Rule 34 is brilliant work.

If Stross had written a novel placed in 2010, it would have been a top notch crime and suspense novel. Charlie's portrayal of the criminal mind, from silence-of-the-lambs psychopath (sociopath in UK speak, though that US/UK distinction is blurring) to every day petty crook, is top notch.

Stross puts us into the minds of his villains, heroes, and fools, using a curious 2nd person pronoun style that has a surprising significance. I loved how so many of his villains felt they were players, while others knew they were pawns. Only the most insightful know they're a cog in the machine.

A cog in a corporate machine that is. Whether cop or criminal or other, whether gay or straight, everyone is a component of a corporation. Not the megacorp of Gibson and Blade Runner, but the ubiquitous corporate meme that we also live in. The corporate meme has metastasized. It is invisible, it is everywhere, and it makes use of all material. Minds of all kinds, from Aspergerish to sociopath, for better and for worse, find a home in this ecosystem. The language of today's sycophantic guides to business is mainstream here.

Stross manages the suspense and twists of the thriller, and explores emerging sociology as he goes. The man has clearly done his homework on the entangled worlds of spam and netporn -- and I'm looking forward to the interviewers who ask him what that research was like. In other works Stross has written about the spamularity, and in Rule 34 he lays it out. He should give some credit to the spambots that constantly attack his personal blog.

Rule 34 stands on its own as a thriller/crime/character novel, but it doesn't take place in 2010. It takes place sometime in the 2020-2030s (at one point in the novel Stross gives us a date but I can't remember it exactly). A lot of the best science fiction features fully imagined worlds, and this world is complete. He's hit every current day extrapolation I've ever thought of, and many more besides. From the macroeconomics of middle Asia, to honey pots with honey pots, to amplified 00s style investment scams to home foundries to spamfested networked worlds to a carbon-priced economy to mass disability to cyberfraud of the vulnerable to ubiquitous surveillance to the bursting of the higher education bubble, to exploding jurisprudence creating universal crime … Phew. There's a lot more besides. I should have been making a list as I read.

Yes, Rule 34 is definitely a "hard" science fiction novel -- though it's easy to skip over the mind-bending parts if you're not a genre fan. You can't, however, completely avoid Stross's explorations of the nature of consciousness, and his take on the "Singularity" (aka rapture of the nerds). It's not giving away too much to say there's no rapture here. As to whether this is a Rainbow's End pre-Singular world … well, you'll have to read the novel and make your own decision. I'm not sure I'd take Stross's opinion on where this world of his is going - at least not at face value.

Oh, and if you squint a certain way, you can see a sort-of Batman in there too. I think that was deliberate; someone needs to ask Charlie about that.

Great stuff, and a Hugo contender for sure.

If you've read my blog you know I'm fond of extrapolating to the near future. Walking down my blog's tag list I see I'm keen on the nature and evolution of the Corporation, mind and consciousness, economics, today's history, emergence, carbon taxes, fraud and "the weak", the Great Recession (Lesser Depression), alternative minds (I live with 2 non-neurotypicals), corruption, politics, governance, the higher eduction and the education  bubble, natural selection, identity, libertarianism (as a bad thing), memes, memory management, poverty (and mass disability), reputation management, schizophrenia and mental illness, security, technology, and the whitewater world. Not to mention the Singularity/Fermi Paradox (for me they're entangled -- I'm not a Happy Singularity sort of guy).

Well, Stross has, I dare to say, some of the same interests. Ok, so I'm not in much doubt of that. I read the guy religiously, and I'm sure I've reprocessed everything he's written. In Rule 34 he's hit all of these bases and more. Most impressively, if you're not looking for it, you could miss almost all of it. Stross weaves it in, just as he does a slow reveal of the nature of his characters, including the nature of the character you don't know about until the end.

Update: In one of those weird synchronicity things, Stross has his 2032 and 2092 predictions out this morning. Read 'em.