The News – 07/26/02

In this Issue:	Recommended Reading
If It Seems Too Good To Be True . . . Shameless Self-Promotion Dept. Threats to Powered-Down Computers Jargon Alert Microsoft Gets In the Groove O2 Releases xda® New Security Standards Efforts Gartner On Wireless Readiness The Wayback Machine Just the Right Stuff™	I realize this is the only newsletter you’ll ever need, but if you want more in-depth detail, check out: Stan Hustad’s The Coaching Connection Management Signature's The Express Read

If It Seems Too Good To Be True . . .

The second part of the Why You Need to Get Hip to HIPAA series will appear in a future SNS

I recently ran into several accounts of an apparently popular pastime among net geeks: Con Artist Baiting. Wired magazine ran an article on the adventures of Wendy Willcox, who responded to one of those bogus appeals from African royalty for help in laundering money. Often bearing a subject such as “Urgent Business Proposal!” these scam emails purport to from a bureaucrat, banker or royal family member who needs help in moving a pile of money or valuable gold or jewels out of his country. All you need to do is to advance the miscreant a few thousand dollars for bribes or other expenses. In return, you get a cut of the swag.

The most popular form of this appeal, which has been on the Net since its infancy, purports to come from a Nigerian prince, and thus this type of fraud is commonly known as Nigerian 419 fraud (for a section of the Nigerian penal code) and also known as Advance Fee Fraud. Often the fraudster asks the unwitting mark to meet him in Africa or some other country.

Unfortunately, many, many greedy people fall for this rather transparent con. Despite its preposterous nature, the 419 scam still claims many victims after roughly 20 years in play. According to a StarTribune article, a Medford, Ore., couple got bilked out of $40,000 last month. A Vancouver man lost $10,000. In 1995, according to the Secret Service, an American lost his life in Lagos, Nigeria, while searching for his 419 connection. (I don’t know about you, but to me, these claims sound eerily like the contents of a chain letter: “A Medford, Ore. couple broke the chain . . .”).

As you can imagine, due to the rampant nature of the Nigerian emails, law enforcement personnel are overwhelmed. Nigerian letters accounted for 15.5 percent of complaints last year to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center. The US Secret Service gets 100 calls and 300 to 500 emails a day concerning the con.

There are a whole lot of upright citizens, however, who are not waiting for the Secret Service or other government good guys to catch the scammers. Instead, they play along with the scam and coax some rather remarkable behavior out of the miscreants.

An anti-scammer known as Buddy Weiserman got his scammer-turned-mark to run around a park in Ivory Coast, Africa hopping and flapping his arms like a chicken. The recently famous Wendy Wilcox maneuvered two scammers in front of a Webcam in Amsterdam where he captured their picture and posted it on the Web. The Web site Scamorama tracks many of the reverse scams people have run on 419ers.

Scam email has been around as long as there’s been email. A descendant of chain letters, this type of con preys upon people who want to get something for nothing (and, hey, that’s most of us!). When evaluating unsolicited email that ends up in your email box, remember the advice I constantly give my sons: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Briefly Noted

• Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: Finally I’ve put up the Nanotechnology Resources directory I promised last November.
  
  Also, check out the article I wrote for the Taylor Harkins newsletter entitled, Do you hate your customers? It continues the theme from my earlier article, analyzing the media industry’s response to file sharing.
  
  Finally, and at long last, the CTOMentor wireless white paper, You Can Take It with You: Business Applications of Personal Wireless Devices, is available at ITPapers.
  
  
• Threats to Powered-Down Computers: Concerned about CyberThreats, you’ve turned off your computer when you’re not using it. Smart idea, but this practice may not be quite as safe as you think. Many of today’s computer models have a feature known as “Wake on LAN.” This feature is included for the convenience of network administrators who don’t want to get up in the middle of the night to resuscitate a powered-down computer. The way it works is the administrator sends the computer a special signal over the network. Despite being off, the computer’s network card is still monitoring the LAN, looking for this signal. When it sees it, the computer powers up. AMD calls their version of this capability Magic Packet™. The capability is built in to computers made by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Gateway 2000 and other leading manufacturers. So if you want your PC to go off and stay off, pull the plug!
  AMD
  

• Jargon Alert: There’s apparently nothing in life that can’t be improved by assigning it a TLA (Three Letter Acronym). Witness Autonomous Malicious Logic (AML), AKA software worms such as Code Red. BFD.
  
  
• Microsoft Gets In the Groove: Microsoft recently announced it was integrating the Groove Workspace into its SharePoint Teams Services solution. Groove is the peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration software designed by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie. Long the darling of the P2P world, Groove takes a giant step towards respectability with this agreement. One of the cool things Groove can do is collate a workgroups edits to a shared document both synchronously (while all are online) and asynchronously. When an absent member checks back in to the Workspace, all the changes he or she missed are applied to the local copy of the document.
  Groove
  
  
• O2 Releases xda®: British cell phone network provider O2 recently announced the release of its PDA/cell phone converged device. The PocketPC-based device features up to 3.5 hours of talk time and up to 15 hours of PDA use. It’s based on an Intel Strong ARM 32-bit processor with 32MB of RAM. The screen is a reflective 240x320 pixel TFT display featuring 4096 colors. It was pretty easy to find out all that stuff. However, in an all-to-typical marketing blunder, the link to the pricing page was broken earlier this week. The device starts at £499.99.
  O2
  

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