Family turns to Facebook when son disappears
Posted: Thursday, July 9 2009 at 07:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Now, he's missing.
Hillman managed to escape while being transferred from one mental health facility to another last week near North Adams, Mass., just days before he turned 21. He ran off into the woods and has not been seen since. Before the escape, he sent a suicide note to his sister and brother, saying he planned to drown himself in the Atlantic Ocean – leaving his family to fear they are in a race against time to find him.
In their frantic search to find Gregory, the family has turned to Facebook for help. The “Help Find Gregory Hillman,” group quickly grew to more than 1,400 members. Hillman is still missing, but there are indications that he's still alive, his sister, Amanda Hillman, said Wednesday.
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Researchers say they can guess your SSN
Posted: Monday, July 6 2009 at 04:59 pm CT by Bob Sullivan
There’s a new reason to worry about the security of your Social Security number. Turns out, they can be guessed with relative ease.
A group of researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University say they’ve discovered patterns in the issuance of numbers that make it relatively easy to deduce the personal information using publicly available information and some basic statistical analysis.
The research could have far-ranging implications for financial institutions and other firms that rely on Social Security numbers to ward off identity theft. It could also unleash a wave of criminal imitators who will try to duplicate the research.
Details of the research were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal and will be explained at the annual Black Hat computer hacker convention in Las Vegas later this month.
The report means companies and other agencies should once and for all stop using Social Security numbers as passwords or unique identifiers, said Professor Alessandro Acquisti, who authored the report.
"We keep living as if they are secure, a secret," he said. "They're not a secret."
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Helpful finance tips, or sneaky payday loan ad?
Posted: Wednesday, July 1 2009 at 04:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
The Econ4u Web site includes a blog with helpful tips and other personal finance tools.
Econ4u.org seems like a happy place to learn simple lessons about money. The Web site is full of smiling faces and quick, fun questions like: How long will it take to double your money if you are earning 5 percent interest? (14 years, by the way).
So what’s a fun Web site like that doing in the middle of a bitter battle over the payday loan industry, or for that matter, the smoking industry?
Research commissioned by the Econ4u.org’s operator, The Center for Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy, has made its way into newspapers around the country – fewer than 1 in 5 members of Congress have any formal economics training, the organization said after a recent study. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters and dozens of papers have all cited the center's research.
Econ4u's owners say the site has a straightforward, noble mission: to "teach important economic concepts." But while the site offers plenty of useful money basics, there is one oddity: information on controversial payday loans is unusually positive.
And more curious: The man behind the site is Rick Berman, a notorious Washington, D.C., publicist famous for taking up the cause for unpopular industries like alcohol and tobacco. In fact, many believe Berman –- who’s known by opponents as Dr. Evil -- was the model for the lobbyist viewers loved to hate in the 2005 movie “Thank You for Smoking.”
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Debt cut in half? Don't count on it
Posted: Friday, June 26 2009 at 05:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Like anyone with a radio or TV, Lorena Altamirano heard the ads promising quick and painless debt relief. If there was a way to settle her debt for 50 cents on the dollar, she sure needed it. A recent divorce had led to a nasty financial surprise: Her ex-husband's unpaid bills had pushed her almost overnight from having virtually no debt to being $17,000 in the hole.
"I was paying everything perfectly, no problem, until the divorce,” she said. “Then the skies fell on me. These were bills he never told me about. We were married and I was responsible, but that put me totally out of balance."
Altamirano still had a decent job as a benefits claims processor, but she was now living paycheck to paycheck. With a son in college, and $1,600 a month rent for her San Mateo, Calif., apartment, she had nothing left at the end of the month to pay down the debt. The interest rates on her credit cards climbed, and the late fees started to pile up.
A friend had enjoyed great success with a debt consolidation loan, so Altamirano started researching debt workout plans on the Internet. She quickly found Debt Remedy Solutions in Boca Raton, Fla., and sent an inquiry. The response seemed like an answer to her prayers.
"We are generally able to settle debts for about 40 cents on the dollar and have our clients debt free in a very short period of time on a low monthly payment plan," said the letter, which Altamirano provided to msnbc.com. "We charge the lowest fees in the industry."
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Twitter 1, Censors 0: Why it's still working
Posted: Thursday, June 18 2009 at 05:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Why does Twitter work inside Iran even after other Internet services have been disrupted? The key feature enabling it to evade government censorship, some observers say, is something that might otherwise be considered Twitter's Achilles’ heel.
Unlike Facebook, and most other social networking sites, Twitter users don't need to visit Twitter.com to use the service. In the business world, that's a terrible idea. Twitter has no way to promise potential advertisers that its enormous audience will ever see ads placed on the site.
Instead, Twitter has a completely open architecture that allows users to both send and receive messages on a variety of platforms -- cell phones, Blackberries and, of course, other Web sites. This openness is proving to be particularly effective at avoiding government interference.
"You can connect to Twitter without going through Twitter's front door," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law school professor who runs Herdict.org, which tracks censorship efforts worldwide. “These services run interference between you and Twitter.”
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Iran's Web outage shows the Net's still fragile
Posted: Tuesday, June 16 2009 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
When you live in a place where every Starbucks offers wireless access and every salesman seems to have a Web-anywhere laptop gadget for wireless broadband, it's hard to imagine that Internet access could disappear overnight. But the election unrest in Iran is a stark reminder that Web access is indeed fragile -- and it's not hard for a determined government to curtail or cut off connection to the outside world.
Several reports indicate Internet access in Iran has been disrupted since the election this weekend. And while there is some disagreement over the source of that disruption, there is no doubt that Iranians’ connection to the outside world is precarious. The nation's state-run Internet provider, Data Communications Iran (DCI,) gets its bandwidth from six regional providers. On Saturday, only one of those six pipes was operating normally, according to an analysis by that New Hampshire-based Renesys Corp., a firm that observes Internet traffic flow. That means almost all traffic in and out of Iran flowed through one set of fiber-optic cables passing through Turkey. The pipe would be easy to cut, and relatively easy to filter according to content.
But something even more subtle is probably hampering Iran’s Web connectivity, says Julien Pain, a veteran of the free press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. During Friday’s election and immediately afterward, Internet traffic slowed to a crawl. Such ratcheting down of bandwidth is often used as a sneaky censorship tool, he said.
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A kinder, gentler overdraft policy? It's true
Posted: Friday, June 12 2009 at 04:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Could it be true?: A major bank has actually instituted an overdraft fee policy that is more consumer friendly?
Hard as it may be to believe, Bank of America this week ended one its most notorious gotcha policies -- charging $35 overdraft fees when account holders’ balances dip a few pennies into the red. Now, customers who make small accounting errors will get a break. As of June 5, the bank now charges only $10 when a consumer ends the day with a negative balance $5 or less. Let's call it an "overdraft mercy rule."
"Recognizing that some accounts are overdrawn by relatively small amounts, we have reduced the overdraft fee," said bank spokesman James Pierpoint. "This directly addresses one of the larger customer complaints about overdrafts, and allows us to help customers when they make small mistakes."
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Bank says its e-mail too important to be spam
Posted: Tuesday, June 9 2009 at 08:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Kevin, a 40-year-old from Sacramento, Calif., likes to keep a tidy inbox. He's very deliberate about removing himself from mailing lists and anything else that might clog up his e-mail. So recently, when he received a marketing pitch from his credit card company, Capital One, he quickly asked to be removed from its list. The response he got surprised him.
"We bring these offers to customers as part of our customer agreement and therefore do not provide a means to prevent this valuable information from reaching them," the firm responded.
In other words: "No."
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Lawsuit a glimpse into 'worst' of the Web
Posted: Friday, June 5 2009 at 08:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
It was allegedly the darkest of the Internet's dark corners. On the Internet provider’s servers, authorities say, were Web sites with names like young-girl-sex.net, little-incest.com, and littles-raped.com. It allegedly helped criminals serve up spyware, spam, Trojan horse programs and mount phishing attacks, and also helped them sell illegal drugs and pirated music. But now, federal authorities say, the ISP at the core of a "witches brew" of illegal activity has been shut down.
The FTC's complaint offers a rare glimpse into the seediest parts of the Web.
The Internet provider called itself Triple Fiber Network – or 3FN.net -- and claimed to be based in Oregon while operating servers “in the heart of Silicon Valley.” But the Federal Trade Commission alleges that 3FN -- also known as Pricewert LLC and APS Telecom -- was really controlled by criminals in the Ukraine and Estonia, and was the "worst ISP located in the United States in terms of hosting malicious content.”
The FTC obtained a temporary restraining order on Wednesday from a federal judge in the Northern District of California that shut down the service and possibly thousands of Web sites. FTC staff attorney Ethan Arenson said it was the first time the agency had ever shut down an ISP.
"There were unique circumstances in this case which called for that," Arenson said.
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Why phishers love Facebook
Posted: Tuesday, June 2 2009 at 04:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Behind every successful criminal computer hack a simple two-step process: gain trust, then exploit that trust with an attack. Computer criminals will tell you that gaining trust is the hard part. Consider a real-world parallel: Breaking into a bank is difficult. But if you befriend a guard, he’ll eventually let you walk right in through the front door.
That's why Facebook attacks are so easy, says Mary Landesman, senior researcher at computer security firm ScanSafe.
"Facebook users assume a level of trust they just should not assume when using the site," she said.
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