Matt Richtel in the NY Times reports on a Russian online market for stolen credit card numbers.

Among his data points is a finding from a market research firm that fraud rates are three times higher for online MasterCard and Visa transactions than in the real world. We’re still talking about a quarter of one percent, but that means one out of every 400 online transactions is fradulent, and that feels like  rather a lot.

 

Global Village Idiocy. Tom Friedman continues his work for yet another well-deserved Pulitzer. The nut grafs:

… [T]hanks to the Internet and satellite TV, the world is being wired together technologically, but not socially, politically or culturally. We are now seeing and hearing one another faster and better, but with no corresponding improvement in our ability to learn from, or understand, one another. So integration, at this stage, is producing more anger than anything else….

At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we’ve ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool we’ve ever had.

This is nothing that net-wise pundits and journo haven’t been saying for years. But Friedman adds an important data point, and adds it in his typically elegant and clear manner.

When I was in high school, I saw Tom Stoppard’s play “Jumpers” on Broadway. Twice. It was amazing, opening up all kinds of vistas of language and showmanship and Oxbridgian hoopdeedoo. That’s why I liked this story:

So God’s Really in the Details?. Last month, Richard Swinburne, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, invoked probability theory to defend the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

I particularly loved this graf:

In plain English, this means that, by Mr. Swinburne’s calculations, the probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent.

I kind of thought that the whole point was to have faith in the face of what was surely impossible. But what the hey — if you can prove it anyway, how bad could it be?

From The New York Times:

Old Personal Computers Never Die; They Just Fade Into Deep Storage. It is estimated that three-quarters of all retired consumer PC’s sit gathering dust in closets, garages and attics across the nation. By Andres Martinez.

Let’s see. I’ve got a Mac SE and a Toshiba 1100 Plus sitting in the closet. I’ve given away an old Thinkpad and a Dell in the last couple of months and I sold a Gateway Handbook a few months ago. So those are three previously idle PCs that are (I believe) in current use, and I’ve got four more CPUs currently active around the house. That’s not counting the many PDAs of various vintages hanging around. (Yo! Steven! Do you still have that Sony Magic Link? And where’d my Newton go?)

Then again, I never did get involved with Commodores or Timex Sinclairs. I had serious lust for an Osborne 1 and a Kaypro, but they were beyond a UPI reporter’s salary. If I had come up with the scratch, though, I bet I’d still have them.

So — how many computers do you have around *your* place, just sitting idle?

Hey Kids: Did you know that some mail order companies inflate those packing material air cushions with helium? Turns out that the helium has so much buoyancy that the savings in shipping costs outweighs the price of the helium itself.

You read it here first.

The AP reports on University of Minnesota professor Jim Kakalios, who uses comic books to illustrate points of physics.

Very nice, innovative technique. The problems seem a little simple for college physics, but what do I know…

I wonder how the good professor would explain Wonder Woman?

A nice piece about PC voice recognition at Mitch Wagner’s drive-thru.org: YOU’LL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO SWEAR AT YOUR PC WHEN IT CRASHES. 

My friend Nat Polish was involved a few years ago in the launch of a company called Soliloquy. The basic idea was to create a voice interface to a database; you should be able to walk up to a computer or a kiosk and say, “I’m interested in a song by the Beatles,” and have the database respond and carry on a (highly structured) conversation. They got it working well enough to sell some real-life demos before the company collapsed.

As the company was launching, I overheard Nat giving an interview to CNBC, I think it was. I couldn’t catch the whole thing, but at one point Nat looked squarely into the camera and said from his considerably lofty technoperspective:

“You understand, of course, that the keyboard is a transitional device….”

Jamie Kellner, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting, apparently needs a better PR keeper. He gave an interview to Cableworld magazine in which he made some toweringly stupid comments. The original piece is behind Inside.com’s tollbooth, but this link to the Yale Law School’s excellent Lawmeme weblog copies much of the salient idiocy — then lampoons it.

My two favorite quotes — and these aren’t the jokes:

[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming.

… and …

I guess there’s a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom.

Gee, thanks, Jamie.

I remember that after Ronald Reagan was elected president how surprised people were when they discovered that he actually was going to do all the things he said he was going to do. I’m just afraid that not enough people will take Kellner and the movies’s Jack Valenti seriously

From CNN:

An environmental group has sued to get warning labels slapped on chocolate products that caution sweet tooths about potentially hazardous levels of lead and cadmium.

As my wife says, “Well, we’re screwed.”

This explains so much….

Thanks to Amee Abel for alerting me to this, and Theresa Carey for finding the original.