Special Interest Group on CRAP

Today I got a piece of spam sent to the email address that was only used for communication with allofmp3.com. In case you have forgotten, that was a shady music seller who sold MP3 music files by the megabyte, but was eventually shut down through pressure by the US trade representative. The spam had a PDF file attachment, which means that either they use PDF to evade filters or else the PDF is a potential virus.

Anyone out there interested in dissecting a potentially rogue PDF file?

Today I got another spam from ACM, plus a spam from “World Scientific Publishing” that tries to look like they are acting on behalf of Purdue University. I have appended the one from World Scientific Publishers in the hopes that it will shame them into avoiding spam in the future. Why would Purdue University consent to such behavior?

Dear friend,

Thank you and regards,
Jason Lim
Marketing Executive
World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd
5 Toh Tuck Link
Singapore 596224
Tel. +65 6466 5775 ext. 247
Fax. +65 6467 7667
Email: cjlim@wspc.com

Has anyone else noticed how the airlines have steadily devalued frequent flyer miles over the years? I just cashed in some miles to fly to Boston on United, and after much hassle with an arcane web site, managed to secure some economy seats. United has something called “Economy Plus”, but in reality, they created a new class called “Economy Minus” which used to be called Economy. When you go to check in, you are asked if you want to upgrade to “Economy Plus” from “Economy Minus”, at which point they wanted $148 for one way. I think…nah. I’m average sized and I have a wife to lean against, so there was no real value in this. Turns out that the “Economy Minus” section is full, so they wouldn’t give me a seat assignment, instead giving me a “Boarding Management Card”, which is more like a “Boarding Torture Identification Card”. Now I get to wait in the boarding area until they have verified that there is nobody traveling on this flight who is stupid enough to pay $74 for a seat that they are going to get anyway if they hold out like I am. I’ve played this game before (and ranted about it), but now it’s an established procedure so it’s merely an amusement for me.

Apparently United Airlines has forgotten that the frequent flyer programs were started in order to reward loyal customers, and have instead turned them into programs to torture customers they regard as unworthy. Warren Buffet once said that someone should have shot down the Wright Brothers and saved investors 100 years of agony. Airlines have repeatedly demonstrated a level of management incompetence that is truly amazing, and part of this is the unique ways in which they turn loyalty programs into disincentive programs. If you want to chuckle at their incompetence, read this.

There were a lot of things happening 40 years ago this week. You all know about the moon landing – a great achievement for all of mankind, and a lot has been said about it. I find it irritating that people push to go to Mars next, considering that we haven’t even explored the bottom of the ocean or figured out how to do without oil.

The other big thing that happened 40 years ago this week is that I met my wife while playing volleyball. Sometimes it takes a while to recognize how important something is in your life.

I got another spam from Cambridge University Press today. Apparently this is their new strategy for success as a tree-murdering paper publisher.

They provide an opt-out link at the bottom: http://listserv.cup.org/t/49324/239073/2681/0/ which obviously contains campaign information in it, but apparently they were too incompetent to encode my email address in there because the form asks for my email address again. That’s another sign of disregard for their diminishing set of customers.

I had previously complained about ACM spamming me – are they now enabling third party spammers as well? More SIGCRAP.

Today I received spam from Cambridge University Press, using an email address that I used to register for the ACM Electronic Commerce Conference in 2006. It appears that even supposedly reputable organizations cannot resist the temptation to send spam.

Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an airmail letter from Africa with one of these scams, trying to get me to send them information for them. For the last four years I have also been getting phone calls to my office from these clowns, trying to get me to yield to temptation and help them steal from me. This last week I got three of these calls, all from country code 233 indicating Ghana. It’s getting more and more annoying (though perhaps the solution is simply to disconnect my phone).

If you try to shop on craigslist, you regularly come across semi-obvious scams, and there are even more scams that are fairly well concealed. I am now getting several spammers a day following me on twitter, and my spam folder on my personal email account typically has 5,000 spam messages in it (I never look at them).

All of this is a reminder that a lot of people on this planet try to make their living from fraud and other criminal activities. Technology has become an enabler for these scams, and the most chilling offender in my mind is voice over IP, which makes phone calls from countries like Ghana essentially free. People who are naive or lonely or otherwise vulnerable (particularly senior citizens) are going to fall victims to this criminality. It used to be that if you wanted to avoid crime, you could mostly do this by sequestering yourself in a civil part of the world. The Internet is making that more difficult.

When I first signed up for facebook, it was obvious to me that it was a walled garden taken from the same mold as AOL or Prodigy. Facebook allows you to import things to facebook, but they never allow data to escape except to humans. As an example, I’m writing this on my blog, but it will soon be copied to Facebook with relatively little trace of how to find my complete blog site of sigcrap.org. The reason for this is obvious – they want the advertising dollars that can come from human attention.

So long as people knowingly turn over data to facebook, I see no problem with it. We should be clear however that Facebook is not an open platform, and Facebook is not likely to encompass every activity you might want to have.

Today I got spammed from ACM. There were several annoying things about it:

1. The fact that they use direct mail marketing in the first place. The email address they used is the one I used to register for SIGIR 2006, so at least they are using the “existing business relationship” loophole.
2. They are still a dead tree society, mailing the CACM to all members. No matter what you think of this periodical, it’s silly for ACM to cling to the old publishing model like grim death.
3. The message is cleverly worded to avoid discussion about the ACM digital library. In fact, ACM membership does not include access to the ACM digital library, so apparently they think membership is orthogonal to science. ACM members still have to pay $5 per article to download from there (nonmembers pay $10). If ACM membership included this instead of the CACM, then I would consider joining.
4. The organization is now using preferential pricing. To quote:
   

   Join ACM today and receive a 15% discount plus an ACM Free World Clock Calculator!

   They included a link “just for me”. What justification is there for me to be offered a lower price than a new PhD in CS? And WTF is ACM doing giving away World Clock Calculators? Did they buy too many of those in the 80s? Do they offer toasters next month?

Can you imagine a world with an ACM that organized as a professional society? As a start, I want them to do the following:

1. put science first by supporting open access to publications (like Usenix)
2. treat their members on an equal footing without preferential pricing
3. didn’t waste resources on useless trinkets
4. didn’t use email to spam potential “customers” (I can’t really call them “members”).

They invited me to “… consider how valuable an ACM membership and Communications of the ACM magazine can be to your career”. I have. They are CRAP.

I find myself fascinated by the California budget process. Much of the stuff I have read about blame for the crisis makes no sense at all to me, and has made me even more cynical about the state legislature. The shortfall in revenue this year amounts to about 10% of revenue. That doesn’t seem so complicated – simply apply a fairly regular cut across all departments. Some departments are experiencing increased true demand for services (notably unemployment insurance), so you’ll have to cut some departments more than 10% – say 15%. Some departments are legally protected against cuts, such as proposition 98. The legislature can repeal it with a 2/3 vote, but they are of course completely incapable of compromise so that won’t happen. Cutting 10% will hurt like hell for all departments, but private industry goes through such cycles regularly, and they almost always result in a stronger organization.

Who can tell me that there is a state department that would not benefit from cutting lose the bottom 10% of performers among their employees?

Also, one thing that companies do in tight times is to offer incentives to reduce expenses in the short term, trading them for long term obligations. An obvious way to do that is to offer retirement incentives to people, offering them a larger pension paid in outyears based on their agreement to retire NOW.

I’m sure the process is complicated, but it has become a lot easier for me lately. I’m voting out any incumbents in the state legislature when the next election rolls around. Their inability to compromise leaves no choice.

Correction: today the governor gave a speech in which he says the revenue shortfall amounts to 27% decrease from last year. That makes the severity of the cuts much more severe, but doesn’t change anything else about the strategy to solve it.