I happened to be traveling through Scottsdale, Arizona today and came across a sign I had never seen before. It makes one wonder… Do they really put cars worth stealing (or breaking in to) in their parking lot or is it a security theater? With times being tough like they are, is it *really* in the budget to park cars that tempt would-be thieves to break into them? I highly doubt it.
A couple of weeks ago I was sent a package in the mail that kind of took me by surprise. It was addressed to me, but wasn’t something I would order, expect, or even consider ordering. However, I was sent several Scantron-style sheets, some brand new plastic bags labeled “biohazard”, and other information including an account number for supplies for a medical office. Trying to do the right thing, I did a lookup on the company that sent the package and they swore up and down that they had the correct address and told me I was a specific Doctor. After a quick lookup of previous owners of the address this package was sent to (I have more than a few addresses), there was no record of any Doctors living at this specific home.
So I called the company back. This time, I was greeted by someone that appeared to be a bit grumpy. Apparently, the company was looking for a specific Doctor. After asking a few questions, I found out the doctor lived at an address in Minneapolis, Minnesota that was…well…not really very close to the one on the package. Numbers were switched around, the street name was a bit scrambled, and our names were not close at all. However, the address on the package was definitely one of mine. The last place this Doctor practised was in Saginaw, Michigan, but this company had discovered that the Doctor moved to Midland, Michigan. Since they couldn’t find him, they asked if I knew him. Not knowing what everything was all about, nor what they wanted with the Doctor, I told them I did not know him. Then the ignorance started – they told me that I “need” to find the Doctor and give him the package. Apparently I’m a delivery service and didn’t know it. Needless to say, I let them know I wasn’t about to do their detective work. They then had told me that I need to return the package, but I would need to pay for postage. Again, I refused. They then had threatened to call the police and I reminded them that the mail was addressed to me and is legally mine (I did this out of spite at this point) and hung up the phone.
Two days later, they called my phone asking for the Doctor they were looking for. I told them that there was no Doctor at this number. They had then told me that I need to give the Doctor a message to call them. I reminded them again that there is no Doctor at this number and they hung up. I haven’t heard back since then, but decided that this encounter was worthy of a write-up.
Now I can assure you, I’m not a Doctor (especially a Medical Doctor) by any stretch of the word. Imagine what the possibilities are having the supplier’s name, address, number, and the account number of this Doctor as well as his name thanks to the company disclosing his name and information. I’m still shocked that something this sensitive landed in my lap out of the blue like this. I can only imagine how often something like this happens, or the consequences of when something like this happens. Do HIPAA laws come into play here? Any other privacy laws? This is similar to if a bank statement ended up being sent to me that was really someone else’s account. And yes, that happened to me too about two years ago.
After checking with the post office, since this was sent to me at one of my addresses, this piece of mail is mine and they don’t have the right to ask for it back.
Materials used: Nothing – this just ended up being sent to me via snail mail.
For a good time, type :% into the Chrome address bar. Down she goes! I guess some Google beta products are more beta than others. It usually crashes before you hit enter too. So much for each tab on a different process as well. That and the memory usage is through the roof – worse than IE 8 beta!
Thanks, but I’ll stick with Firefox for the stability and extensions. 
Here’s a funny older trick for those of you on windows:
- Create a new text document
- Open it with Notepad
- Enter the text “Bush hid the facts” (without the quotes)
- Save it as whatever you want
- Close it then re-open it
Depending on what fonts you have installed, either you will see squares or you might see some Chinese characters. Certain characters are mistaken as UTF-16 characters intead of ASCII and that’s what you get. Actually, it’s any 4-3-3-5 combination of words (“chad did mrs gates” works too), just remember your spaces.
A couple of weeks ago or so I filled the trunk with bottles that needed to be taken back for bottle return. Not my favorite job in the world, but it eventually has to be done. While filling the machine full of empty 0.5 liter bottles, I happened to notice something that was kind of silly – the front door to the machine was unlocked and could be opened. I looked around and it turned out that all of the bottle return machines were like that. I was kind of hoping that this was just a fluke and that maintenance was being performed on the machines.
No such luck.
I went back a couple of days later to do some grocery shopping and found the same thing. This time I decided to open the door and take a look inside. There was another key (that could be removed) and a numeric keypad asking for an admin password – numeric password of course. Well, at least there was multi-factor authentication in place (outside key, inside key, password), but they already removed one of those factors by leaving the front door open. Not only that, but the receipts the bottle return prints out with the Meijer’s logo on it are easily accessible. If a somewhat smart theif grabbed a roll, they could be used for fraudulent purposes – print bar codes on receipt paper for bottle return money. Not good.
As coincidence would have it, a fellow student worked at Meijer’s and gave me a brief explanation as to why they left the doors open rather than locked – they kept losing the keys. So rather than make extra keys or make it mandatory to return keys to a certain location, they just forget the keys altogether and leave the front door unlocked. Apparently they already had the fake receipt problem described above with their Coinstar machine.
Don’t even get me started on the UScan self-service checkout machines…that’s for another post another time 
Solution: Simple – lock the doors. I went there again a few nights ago and locked all of them by pushing in the locking handles.
Materials: Voyager cell phone (camera).
As I was making some purchases in Menard’s yesterday, I happened to visit a kiosk that had about 4 PCs sitting there with a screensaver on. I couldn’t really tell if they were for employees only or not, so I walked up to one and moved the mouse. Unfortunately, it asked for a password and I wasn’t about to try to start guessing. Instead, I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and saw the option to reboot. So I rebooted the machine and walked away. I came back about a minute later to find the machine updating. Not just patches, updates, and the like, but rather new pricing, new products, and other store-related updates. I took a couple of screenshots with my camera phone (by the way, Motorola Razr phone cameras suck) of the updates taking place and a list of completed and upcoming updates. Sorry about the poor picture quality – Razr phone cameras have absolutely terrible quality.
Materials: Motorola Razr camera phone.
As most people I know are aware, I am a Linux fan. It runs on older hardware better, the open source software and operating system just run better, it has several solid server software applications, and well…it’s free. Linux is very widely used in a server environment, but it’s starting to make waves on the desktop. People seem to be going crazy over Vista’s “eye candy” – transparent menus, window minimization animation, etc. Linux has had transparent menus available as long as I have been using Linux – around 1998 or so, so I’m not so sure what all the fuss is about. However, MacOS came up with some pretty cool eye candy itself when MacOSX came out. A while later, Compiz was released and is now standard with the Ubuntu Linux distribution installation. There are a lot of other videos available, but the point of this video is to show that you don’t even need high-end hardware and video cards to play with the eye candy that is available for Linux (unlike Vista for example).
Below is a video I took playing with Compiz and 3ddesktop with a lower-than-average-performance Compaq laptop. Enjoy!
Materials: Compaq Laptop (2135US) with an upgrade from 256mb of RAM to 1gb of RAM, Kodak Digital Camera (C743).
