Forward Biased (Less-than-current Events)

New science site

After checking out World Science, a new (to me) science and technology news site, I've added it to the blogroll.  Check it out—it features several exclusive stories not found on other such sites.

For example, they cover biology (dolphin's games may be more than just child's play, rats seem to sigh with relief), sociology (social inequity seems to date back to the Stone Age rather than being a product of civilization), new findings in aging research, psychology (some people have extreme déjà vu), and astronomy (surprise, surprise—"dark energy" might not exist after all).  Lotsa good stuff besides that, of course, such as a controversial (and, to me, somewhat implausible) theory that a family in Turkey has undergone "reverse evolution" in the span of a single generation.

It seems to be a great site.  Go check it out.

Here they come, folks

One thing you have to say about American politicians is that they are, by and large, predictable.  They will, with rare exceptions, come after the fruit of free enterprise, namely money, every chance they get, because it is with that that they buy power campaign for votes and swing voters their way.

They will also never tell you their root motivation for doing so, since they would tend to be somewhat less effectual in being re-elected should they not appear to have the best interests of their constituencies at heart.

Up to now, the internet has been mostly exempt from taxation.  But its plump, low-hanging fruit has been too much of a temptation to ignore for long.

Enter Alaska Sen. Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens (R-RINO).

Senators back new broadband taxes

At a Tuesday hearing convened by the Senate Commerce Committee, several senators from largely rural states called for expansion of the Universal Service Fund (USF), a multibillion-dollar pool of money that's currently used to subsidize telecommunications services in rural and other high-cost areas, schools and libraries.

Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who counts himself among the fund's staunch supporters, said Tuesday that "without Universal Service, just having a dial tone would average about $200 per month" for many residents in his home state.

Right now, long-distance, wireless, pay-phone and wireline telephone services are required to contribute a fixed percentage of their revenues to the fund, which they typically do by tacking an additional fee onto their customers' bills.

But supporters of the fund, which gives out on average more than $5 billion each year, say it has dwindled because traditional services, such as long-distance, are taking in less money, while unanticipated voice technologies, such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), are not expressly required to pay up. (A number of the larger voice over Internet protocol providers, including Vonage, have said they already pay into the fund, but there doesn't appear to be a formal regulation requiring them to do so.)

No formal regulation?  Can't have that, can we?  After all, someone somewhere might not choose to contribute "his fair share."

Let's just cut to the chase here, folks.

One constant feature of taxes in general (and the income tax in particular) is the tendency to concentrate as much revenue generation as possible into as few individuals as possible, thus making it impossible for the people who actually pay the lion's share of taxes to accomplish anything politically, particularly if it has to do with de-hiring the leeches who are bleeding them dry.  This is at the root of all the shrill cries of "TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH!!" whenever the subject comes up.  Face it, folks—since the "rich," however you choose to define them, pay the vast majority of taxes in this country, any tax relief at all will be of some benefit to them, and often is of more benefit to them since, after all, they're paying most of the taxes.  This little fact is conveniently ignored by opponents of tax rate cuts, and maddeningly ignored by proponents (who seem to have no political common sense at all).

In 1997, the top 5% of wage-earners paid the majority—51.9%—of all income taxes.  The bottom half of all taxpayers paid only 4.3 percent of income taxes.  There is nothing in the world fair about that, but it is spun as "fair" since, after all, the "rich" have "more than they need."  Who are you to tell me what I need, Jack?

It's pretty obvious that, in a battle between the people who benefit from taxes and the people who actually pay them, the beneficiaries win—as do the politicians who get to hand out the goodies.  And this fact is hardly lost on our good public servants.

While the income tax is the most obvious example of consolidation of the tax base, it's hardly the only one.  Otherwise taxes would be one of the simplest aspects of US law.  As it is, tax laws are the most complex and arcane in the land.

Of course, this fact is attributed to our good lawmakers' efforts to insure "fairness."

Though all the senators at Tuesday's hearing clearly agreed on the need for USF reform, their priorities differed. For instance, Jim DeMint, a South Carolina senator who has introduced a broadly deregulatory proposal advocated phasing out USF handouts entirely in certain areas where new broadband technology is actually less inexpensive to deploy than its telecommunications predecessors.

"As we look for fairer ways to spread the cost out," he said, "I think we need some ideas on how we can move areas away from subsidization and move into competition."

"Fairer ways to spread the cost out," Jim?  That's the exact opposite of what going on: the consolidation of the cost to a few, mostly politically impotent (due to their reduced numbers) individuals.  And see how he uses words designed to appeal to me, his constituent?  "Moving away from subsidation and moving into competition" is exactly what I support. 

Would that it were exactly what is going to happen.

Looky here, folks

Every now and then, in the course of human events (at least when surfing the net) I'll come across a site that's both new to me and that I think is a real gem.  I always delight in sharing these with you folks.

The EvC Forum is one of those gems.  It's not a blog, but a message board/web forum devoted to the issue of Evolution vs Creation.  After spending a couple of hours perusing several threads and topics on this board, I can say that it is truly a rare find in the midst of hundreds of message boards/blogs that are mostly echo chambers for the views of the founder.

This one, most certainly, is not an echo chamber.  Oh, no.

The founder is, from what I can tell, both a Christian and a Creationist, but this does NOT significantly bias the board in that direction.  And sure, you'll find a few cases of people who have no interest in really debating anything, only trying to press forth their own views.  But they are quite in the minority.

For starters, try taking a look at this thread.  I would personally be proud to have built and administered this forum, considering the quality of most of the posts there.  Sure, there's some "name-calling and feces-flinging," as one reader once said, but the quantity and quality of the good posts—on both sides of this issue—far, far outweigh anything like that.

By the way, the way I discovered this site was by checking my refer logs, particularly those refers that come from search engines.  One of these days I've got to write a post on the search terms that bring people here.  Most are predictable, but a few are really bizarre.  And mostly, if I do say so myself, it's gratifying to know that I actually show up high enough in these search engines that people actually can find me that way.

Strike three for me

(Sigh)  In my continual quest to lose as many readers as I possibly can, it now seems that I've reached the milestone of having been wrong at least twice, and possibly three times. 

What now, you ask?  Well...forgive me, readers, for I have sinned.  I not only liked Wikipedia—a lot—but have linked to it many times, disagreeing with wiser, more circumspect folk who denigrated its authority.

If it hadn't already jumped the shark before, it has now.  I've truly tried to stand by it, but I can't any more, lest I go down with it.  I've been dragged, against my will, to the camp of Wikipedia critics.

Via Bill Quick (who knew Wikipedia was a mistake 'way back at the beginning), we have this story (and another via Ralph Bristol):

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.

Yeah, I know:  what credibility?

A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world's biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws. His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.

In a confessional letter to Mr. Seigenthaler, Mr. Chase said he thought Wikipedia was a "gag" Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville.

Well, if Wikipedia wasn't already a "gag" site, it sure is now.

Just so you know, the reason I liked it so much was the consistent quality of the articles I read, which were almost totally limited to the sciences and mathematics.  What biographical entries I read were of scientists, almost never of political leaders.

Of those particular entries, I still hold that they are accurate, excellent, thorough, pithy, and generally very useful.

The trouble is that, unless you happen to be an expert in the field you're reading about, you have no way to know whether what you're reading is accurate.  This was always the case, now, but I had reason, I thought, to hope that Jimmy Wales and company had truly found a way to keep spurious entries to a bare minimum, and deal with them swiftly when they did happen (yeah, I know, sometimes I'm optimistic to the point of naivité).

But when a man's reputation can be attacked—by accident, no less—before a spurious entry can be removed, it's pretty clear that my optimism was misplaced.  Just imagine what can happen when someone intentionally sets out to smear someone with whom he disagrees.  (Actually, that has already happened a lot, but it was always pretty obvious when it did, and I know of no other cases where anyone was actually hurt this way.)

Now, Wikipedia is still a good place to try looking for "pop culture" stuff that you can't find in other encyclopedias (e.g. the "seven forms of Jedi light saber fighting styles"), although you still have to be careful.  And I'll continue to use it personally for the sort of articles that I've always found useful (until I find that even they are inaccurate).  I just don't know if I'll link to it ever again.  After all, it's hardly been the sole source for information on the net, regardless of subject.

Finally, Bill Quick put it well:

Within three years it will either be operating under an entirely different, and more trustworthy model, or it will be remembered only as another well-meaning failure.

I still have hope for the former, although considerably less than I had before.

Gone phishin'

I just received a very professional-looking, well written email, purporting to be from Bank of America, advising me that I have "a message from customer service available in [my] Online Banking Mailbox," and that I should follow the conveniently-provided link to see it.

There were no misspelled words or obvious errors to be seen.  It was certainly well-faked, but faked nonetheless, which is obvious for three reasons:

1. I don't have a BoA account.  Duh.
2. Mousing over the links I'm supposed to follow (since I don't use Internet Exploder), then reading the status bar, it's obvious they don't lead to BoA's domain or a subdomain thereof, although they do cleverly contain the words "Bank of America.com."
3. This is the biggie that everyone needs to know:  because of this very threat (called "phishing"), legitimate companies such as Bank of America never ask users to follow links contained in an email, just as they never ask users to open an email attachment.  They would, rather, have suggested you simply login to your BoA account and assume that you already know how to do that.  PayPal users are often targets of this sort of scam, too.  And it used to be that such emails were nearly always poorly-constructed and clearly faked, but obviously thats no longer always the case.

Of course I'm doubtless preaching to the choir here, since Forward Biased readers are way too savvy to fall for something so obvious.

Again, this is a case where simply knowing basic internet common sense would prevent these scammers from being able to con anyone, but they're so successful at it that they keep doing it, and people keep falling for it.

I took a screen capture of the email so you could see it.  Click on the image to see the full-size version.

UPDATE:  Rob adds, in a comment:

One important thing to know is the concept of subdomains. I can't go out and register bankone.com cause bankone ownes that. I can however, register something like techsupport.com or something like that and THEN register a subdomain bankone in it to make the URL bankone.techsupport.com. Most users would just see the bankone part and assume it's valid. I've gotten several Phish messages like that recently that _I_ was just barly able to prove they were bogus, and I'm in network security. Now, if it was techsupport.bankone.com then it's a bankone domain. Big difference the order can make.

But, the big detail to point out here is that no bank or financial company will EVER ask you to confirm account details like that. SSL is not unhackable but it's close enough. The effort to hack SSL wouln't be worth the time when you can call someone up and trick them into giving you their credit card number (called Social Engineering). Kevin Mitnik's book "The Art of Deception" should be required reading for all companies. (he was the guy that was jailed for the first big internet worm).

Just when you thought it was safe...

It's been a little while since we've had something like this going on, so I'm afraid some folks will let their guard down and be prone to opening an email attachment.

Just in case you've forgotten, DON'T.  Period.

Unless you are 100% certain that the attachment is safe—and since emails can be easily spoofed so that they appear to come from someone in your address book, especially if you're dumb uh, uninformed enough to still be using Outlook Express, don't open an attachment, even if it appears to come from someone you know, unless you are expecting it.  If in doubt, email the purported sender and ask them if they sent it.

There's an email going around that purports to be from the FBI, warning you that you may be in possession of pirated software.  If you open the attachment, and your anti-virus protection isn't fully updated, you will probably be infected with the "Sober" worm.

You are using anti-virus software, right?  And a good firewall?  They're both available for free, people.  Don't waste your money on a boxed product from Wal-Mart when you can get something just as good for free.  (Yes, I said just as good.)

(Here are links to Grisoft's free AVG anti-virus software and Zonelabs' free Zone Alarm firewall.  Both companies offer similar products for sale as well, so don't get confused.)

If we all simply exercised "common" internet sense with these things, worms, viruses, trojans and such would never get off the ground.