Bigger Picture: When To Trust The Bank

The hilarious story of a lawyer suing Citibank for not stopping him from losing money in Nigerian Scam is making rounds on Internet. There are many articles covering the topic, but I'm going to link to the article at TechDirt, for it makes a point that has farther reaching consequences than others (that I've read, that is).

While it's easy to mock the lawyer for getting tricked, the basic version of the scam and this more sophisticated version both rely on a very unclear part concerning check processing. Most people assume that once a check "clears" it's confirmed as valid. That's not true.

There's much wider audience that is suffering from this vulnerability in the banking process. I am talking about eBay buyers and sellers.

Side thought - unless eBay is profiting from the uncertainty, they might want to lobby the remedy to this problem, because it is costing them zillions of potential users that are not currently using eBay for the fear of being scammed.

Another side thought is how much time will pass before there will be uproar about the conflict of interest between eBay and PayPal, for eBay does collect the fees regardless of whether the buyer or the seller thinks the whole transaction is fraudulent. You can see glimpses of it in Australia, where eBay tried to make PayPal the only available payment method.

Not to single eBay out, any payment mediator is in the same situation, not necessarily for this reason. Existing Internet retail practices allow for many unfavorable race conditions to exist that allow exploits.

Back to the original point - all these things happen because of absence of a strictly defined protocol that allows the end user, the consumer, to track what is happening, when and why. Such protocols are in place for every step of the way (it wouldn't be possible to conduct business otherwise), except the "last mile" to the actual consumer.

There's an interesting problem here - similar to the famous Zen koan: those who care, see the inadequacy. Those who don't see the inadequacy, don't care. As witnessed by another recent discussion on TechDirt, there are idiots out there, and no matter what safety guards will be installed, they will keep being scammed. They will either be unable to comprehend, or simply unaware, or careless.

But I want the protocol nevertheless.

Google as Janus, Janus as Google

Google taketh away, Google gives back with abundance.

Whether the right hand knoweth what doth the left, is irrelevant. The result is more than slightly amusing to watch.

I can just imagine the magnitude of quirks of power plays that we, regular mortals, do not see.

UPDATE: The demand turned out so high, the Measurement Lab had to redesign their web site and get rid of images - I guess the bandwidth consumption went through the roof. Nice to know there's many of us who care.

Open Letter To BMW Dealerships

To whom it may concern:

I just called the <witheld to protect the guilty> dealership to verify what part numbers I need for a specific repair, and was told "We do not give out part numbers, only prices".

I was understandably shaken, because, you know, BMW is a pretty complicated car, and it is kind of difficult to make sure that you are not spending hundreds, and even more often, thousands of dollars just to piss off the seller even more when it turns out that the part you've bought doesn't fit, because it is not the part you actually needed, or the car the part is for is not the car you have (and I don't have to explain to you how many different sub-revisions BMW has).

When I got over the shock, I said, "Why?" and got the answer "Because people call us just to find out part numbers, waste our time and then go buy the same parts on Internet".

Well...

Tough shit.

You were not shy to leverage your unique position of the seller of "The Ultimate Driving Machine" when you were selling the car to us.

You were not shy to gouge us by upselling expensive options that you knew would be wrong or deadly (rear side airbags in a sedan to the family with two kids about five years of age - you knew they will come disabled, with a big red sticker, right?)

You were not shy to repeatedly screw us over by providing substandard service (any BMW owner knows the difference between "BMW quality" and "BMW service quality").

While doing that, you were not shy to charge exorbitant prices for parts and service.

And now you are complaining?

Well, tell you what - you keep doing that, and I will sell my BMW to anyone stupid enough to buy it, given all the above, never buy a BMW again, and switch to a brand that is customer friendly. I've had just about enough of your attitude.

Oh, and I have a suggestion for you - you are in a best position to compete with independent parts retailers because you have direct access to *the* original equipment manufacturer, and you already have distribution channels set up. Why don't you actually start leveraging your competitive advantage instead of screwing us over?

And then, maybe, just maybe, the artificially inflated price becomes appealing enough that somebody will part with their hard earned money and buys the product you're selling, and you, yes, you don't lose your job.

Conspiracy Theory: Google Bending Over For Corporations

Well, not much of a theory - the facts line up pretty straight.

Take a look at earlier ones covered here.

Now, GMail goes offline. And Gears installer runs smack dab into... inability to cope with a proxy that requires authentication.

What?

Almighty Google can't make its programmers create a dialog box that asks for proxy username and password? 407 Proxy Authentication Required is too complicated?

Apparently so.

There were others before - Google Pack, Chrome. The feature's been requested, most probably more than once. It is trivial to implement (and please clue me in on certain security changes in Microsoft Windows that make it so difficult).


The stench is becoming tangible.