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Wednesday, May 30, 2001 |
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I had a Mobil speedpass for a while. It's about the diameter of a pencil
and an inch long, with a hole through the end so it can go on your keychain.
You wave it at the pump, a light on the pump goes on to tell you it knows
who you are and you pump your gas. Mobil links theirs to a credit card.
It worked fine until one day my bank called me up to say that I had been
buying an awful lot of gas in towns east of here, had I lost my card?
No, but it turned out that I'd lost my speedpass. It fell off my keychain
the last time I used it, but it was so small that I didn't notice it was
gone, what with all the frequent shopper barcode tags et al with my keys.
I finally got it straightened out and Mobil ate the bogus charges, a
relief since the card company said their usual anti-fraud rules don't
apply when you don't use your physical card for a transaction.
I decided I'll spend the extra two seconds per visit and swipe my card.
I do have an E-ZPass toll transponder in my truck, but that's different
for two reasons: it's large enough to miss and is firmly glued to the
inside of the windshield, and they give me the incentive of significant
toll discounts (in NYC at least) if I use it.
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner ["John R Levine" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 46]
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> Word was set to allow "Fast Saves", which is a non-default setting
> that performs incremental rather than complete saves.
It's worth pointing out that for a long time the default was to have
fast save _on_. The first thing I would do with any version of Word is
check for and disable it, having discovered its lack of reliability.
(Many patches to earlier versions of Word were solely to address,
er, issues with fast save.)
The risk lies in changing the defaults when user experience has led to
certain expectations. In this case, if you were hoping that fast save
would let you recover mistakenly deleted text based on experience of
older versions of Word, you'd be out of luck.
PGP [Lloyd Wood via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 45]
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The California Assembly passed a bill today which would make it illegal for
Californians to play games online that are otherwise illegal in California.
The bill would fine first-time transgressors $25 per transaction (not
conviction) and $100 per transaction thereafter. Companies (anywhere)
convicted of catering to Californians could be liable for $1000 per
transaction and 90 days in jail. The bill supposedly specifically allows
prosecutors to go after offshore corporations.
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/breaking/docs/064216.htm
We're barely finished cursing France for their stupidity in attacking
Yahoo!, and we go and do something equally stupid. Hopefully, our Senate or
Governor is a little smarter than our Assembly.
Anyone want to bet that this bill doesn't work as intended? No, wait a
minute, I could get arrested for that. [griffith@olagrande.net via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 45]
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Maximillian Dornseif, 2002.
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