By this point it seems clear that everyone in America - and probably most of the rest of the civilized world, or at least those parts that are tired of hearing us whine about it - is in favor of a playoff system in college football. Naturally, there are those who do not watch college sports or sports in general (a friend out in Los Angeles claims to have difficulty remembering which sport uses the oblong ball with the pointy ends on it), but even the majority of those people would probably agree that a system which allows the two teams which are actually the best to meet head-to-head to determine the national championship is more in keeping with our stated national preference for truth, justice and fair play. Unfortunately, there is a very simple and incredibly powerful force that is preventing such a system from being implemented, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future; I refer, of course, to money. As long as it remains more profitable to maintain out current plethora of bowl games and opaque system of selecting the two teams for the "championship" game, nothing is likely to change. The question we need to consider is whether or not this is actually a bad thing...
First off, all of the arguments about bowl games, television revenues and profits made by the sports programs of NCAA schools improving the quality of education at those schools are completely specious - the money generated by the athletic programs is almost universally retained by the athletic department for its own use. The rest of this point is a bit murkier, however. Participation in any nationally televised event usually comes with the opportunity for the school to broadcast its promotional video during the event, and will always create mentions of the school's name in publications and newscasts where it would not normally appear. It seems clear that this will increase the school's exposure and prestige; the degree to which this improves matters for the institution remains in dispute. Still, a national playoff system would concentrate media and public attention on the seven games involved (assuming a field of eight seeds; a field of 16 would involve 15 games, and so on) and draw it away from the 28 other bowl games being televised each year. This would be even better for the eight teams selected, but would undoubtedly harm the other 56 to some degree...
Second, there's the business picture to consider. Bowl games, as is often alleged, generally do benefit the television networks and venue owners more than anyone else, but as a business blogger I feel it is my duty to point out that these are public-owned companies (in the case of the networks) and public municipalities (in the case of many of the actual stadia) all of which benefit the economy and the public in general by earning money, employing people and paying taxes. The residual benefit realized by the communities in which bowl games take place (especially hotel and restaurant receipts from visiting fans) may be smaller, but is certainly not a bad thing, especially because these businesses also contribute to the economy as a whole. And even if the secondary benefits realized by related businesses (transportation companies, tour companies, apparel and souvenir manufacturers, publishers and the like) are small, they're certainly better than nothing, which is what we're likely to see from a bowl that is eliminated as no longer relevant or simply driven into complete obscurity...
Finally, there's the effect such a system would have on the game itself. As frustrating as it is to have the same record as another team in your conference (and actually beat that team head-to-head during the regular season!) and still end up below them in the standings and bowl precedence for the post-season, as is the case with Michigan State this year, it would be even worse if no one ended up watching your bowl appearance because it wasn't one of the 7 National Playoff games, and worse still if your team was denied a post-season game after finishing their best season in a generation just because there wasn't enough of a television audience to bother staging the game...
In the long run, I can't (as a fan) say that the current bowl system is really a good thing. But by the same token (as a business teacher) I can't really say it's entirely without its up side, either. As long as there is money to be made, there will probable always be dozens of obscure but colorful football games played in the last weeks of December, and the first weeks of the new year...
GO GREEN! GO WHITE!
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The Grad School Diaries: A Long December
Regular visitors of this space will recall the set of 30 short essays chronicling the first year of my time at Michigan State, which I called the Graduate School Diaries; astute readers may have noticed that the collection ended abruptly just before the start of my second year in the program and has been on hiatus since last May. It’s not that I’ve gone off of the project – obviously, since I’ve continued writing these slice-of-life moments during the period that hasn’t made it onto the blog yet. It’s that the sixteen months just concluded have been so difficult that I can’t even come up with a bad metaphor for how difficult they have been, or figure out how to write about them in some way that isn’t just a meaningless recitation of doom and woe – which is kind of the point of this entry, in fact. The truth is that everyone – and every family – will experience what are, by their lights, difficult times; to the truly fortunate this may be limited problems that you or I would consider trivial inconveniences, while some people in this world are experiencing torments that anyone who actually has a computer and an Internet connection probably can’t even imagine…
One of the reasons I started writing this autobiographic sub-series was to try to gain some perspective on the very strange landscape I find myself navigating. Because the fact is, things that are considered deadly serious in Academia might be considered trivia anywhere else (and vice versa, if we’re honest with ourselves) and writing everything down and sharing it with the world makes it more concrete, not just for me but for most people. Some of what has happened to me in the past sixteen months is good and some is bad; some is life-changing serious, and some of it is jumped-up trivia; some of it is beautiful and life-affirming, and some of it is simply absurd. I don’t claim to know much about anything, and the more I learn, it seems, the more I realize that I don’t understand, but the one thing I know for sure is that I was meant to tell stories; to bring the world to life in words and phrases, to make sense out of the chaos with my (extremely modest) art. There’s even Management theory (well, Organizational Theory, anyway) to support the idea. So here we go again…
In the words of the song, it has been a long December, but there is reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last. The last sixteen months have taken me and every other member of my household to our limits (and occasionally beyond), but this bright and beautiful New Year’s Day finds all of us alive and well, and living together in Michigan. I don’t know what this year will bring; not what I will be doing for a living, or who my fellow voyagers will be, or even where the next cycle of months with take me, but I feel curiously at peace. It might just be true that the point of life is the journey, and not the destination; and if that is true, then it has been an interesting trip recently – and I get the feeling it’s about to get even weirder…
Want to come along? It might be fun…
One of the reasons I started writing this autobiographic sub-series was to try to gain some perspective on the very strange landscape I find myself navigating. Because the fact is, things that are considered deadly serious in Academia might be considered trivia anywhere else (and vice versa, if we’re honest with ourselves) and writing everything down and sharing it with the world makes it more concrete, not just for me but for most people. Some of what has happened to me in the past sixteen months is good and some is bad; some is life-changing serious, and some of it is jumped-up trivia; some of it is beautiful and life-affirming, and some of it is simply absurd. I don’t claim to know much about anything, and the more I learn, it seems, the more I realize that I don’t understand, but the one thing I know for sure is that I was meant to tell stories; to bring the world to life in words and phrases, to make sense out of the chaos with my (extremely modest) art. There’s even Management theory (well, Organizational Theory, anyway) to support the idea. So here we go again…
In the words of the song, it has been a long December, but there is reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last. The last sixteen months have taken me and every other member of my household to our limits (and occasionally beyond), but this bright and beautiful New Year’s Day finds all of us alive and well, and living together in Michigan. I don’t know what this year will bring; not what I will be doing for a living, or who my fellow voyagers will be, or even where the next cycle of months with take me, but I feel curiously at peace. It might just be true that the point of life is the journey, and not the destination; and if that is true, then it has been an interesting trip recently – and I get the feeling it’s about to get even weirder…
Want to come along? It might be fun…
Friday, December 31, 2010
The Numbers Are In...
Three weeks ago I activated the "Stats" function on this blog, which includes the counter you can find at the bottom of the page, to see if my picture of who comes to this site - and how often - was correct. As I noted at the time, the stats system had only been available for a few months, and was indicating that I get between 500 and 600 visitors a month - which seemed a bit high. Well, actually, it seemed like somewhere between 490 and 590 more than I would have expected, and I decided to keep an eye on the hits and see what happened. It's been an interesting few weeks, to say the least...
As you can see from the counter, we've had over 630 hits in the 21 days since I turned on the counter; we seem to average about 20 visits a day, although I can't tell you for sure if that's 20 visitors or just 2 people who come by a whole lot. By contrast, my rather snaky opinion blog, called "Racing to the Bottom" is only drawing a few hits each month, and in fact weeks go by without a single visitor. I don't update it as often, and perhaps the topics aren't as accessible, since they're mostly be railing about something or other that has gotten under my skin that week, but I'll keep an eye on that one, too...
So, as we go into 2011, what will happen to my little business blog? Will it retain its modest core of readers, or will it drop off into one of those dark corners of the Internet people never visit? Will people start reading the opinion columns on "Racing to the Bottom" because I've linked to it here, or will that dry up too? If I go through with that whim to start a third blog featuring light-hearted fiction and comedy, will anyone come to that party? Is anyone even reading this one? I still don't have any answers, but I can tell you this much: One of the reasons I gave for starting this blog was "It might be fun" - and it has been. I think I'll stick with it for another year...
Happy New Year, everyone!
As you can see from the counter, we've had over 630 hits in the 21 days since I turned on the counter; we seem to average about 20 visits a day, although I can't tell you for sure if that's 20 visitors or just 2 people who come by a whole lot. By contrast, my rather snaky opinion blog, called "Racing to the Bottom" is only drawing a few hits each month, and in fact weeks go by without a single visitor. I don't update it as often, and perhaps the topics aren't as accessible, since they're mostly be railing about something or other that has gotten under my skin that week, but I'll keep an eye on that one, too...
So, as we go into 2011, what will happen to my little business blog? Will it retain its modest core of readers, or will it drop off into one of those dark corners of the Internet people never visit? Will people start reading the opinion columns on "Racing to the Bottom" because I've linked to it here, or will that dry up too? If I go through with that whim to start a third blog featuring light-hearted fiction and comedy, will anyone come to that party? Is anyone even reading this one? I still don't have any answers, but I can tell you this much: One of the reasons I gave for starting this blog was "It might be fun" - and it has been. I think I'll stick with it for another year...
Happy New Year, everyone!
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Airline Follies Part 67
Earlier this year I wrote about the curious case of a Delta passenger who was trying to bring a dog home from Mexico until the airline lost it. After giving the customer the runaround for two days, during which they initially claimed to have no record of any dog, and then claimed the dog was being cared for at the Mexico City airport, the airline changed their story (again!) and claimed that the dog had gotten out of its carrier and run away. At the time I just assumed that it was some sort of clumsy effort to cover up the fact that someone had stolen the dog and its carrier – especially since the airline never produced the carrier from which the dog supposedly escaped. And I might have gone on thinking this was the case, except there has been another case this week – and this time the disappearance took place on American soil…
You can read the story here if you want to, but the basic facts are that an Army officer was relocating from San Diego to a base in Germany, and paid Delta to ship her two dogs (a beagle and a German shepherd), but only the beagle arrived. When the customer asked what had happened, the airline told her that the dog had escaped from its carrier and run away, and offered to refund the shipping fee. In other words, the exact same story they gave when a customer’s dog disappeared in Mexico City. It was a dubious story the first time, but Mexico does not have the sort of compulsive airport security we’re becoming accustomed to seeing in the US, and it’s just vaguely possible that someone left a door open just at the time the dog managed to work its way clear of a carrier guaranteed by the FAA to be impossible for a dog to escape. At a US airport, however, we also have to believe that the cargo area was unattended and unmonitored, that no video cameras anywhere caught anything, and that someone left an access gate to the airport open and unmonitored…
All right, it’s still barely credible, given some of the laughable excuses for “security” we’ve been seeing out of TSA lately, although given that this was the third such incident in the past year (there was a second case about a month after the one I noted) I would really have expected Delta to handle it better. It doesn’t take too many episodes like this one before your reputation for being a safe way to transport your pets (formerly quite good) goes completely in the crapper. Unfortunately, there really isn’t much the customer (or any customer) can do about a case like this; pets are considered property, and unless a specific dog is a pedigreed show animal or the equivalent, it doesn’t really have a value in the legal sense. The customer can sue the airline for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but such cases are hard to prosecute, and you’re still not likely to gain any satisfaction by doing so. Of course, you could also tell everyone you can about the airline losing your dog…
From a business standpoint, I have to point out that if your security is bad enough that someone can steal a dog out of your baggage operations, it’s also bad enough that someone could steal things for which you could be sued for significant amounts, and it’s probably also bad enough for someone to sneak IN (say, with a bomb) which could result in enough liability to bankrupt your entire corporation, not to mention getting the responsible parties charged with several hundred counts of criminal negligence, negligent homicide, or even treason. The fact is, letting people make off with your customers’ belongings is not the same thing as allowing your employees to steal the office supplies. Whether the dog was taken by an employee, by someone who was able to sneak into the baggage area, or lost because your security was preposterously bad, it’s no way to run a railroad – or, in this case, an airline…
You can read the story here if you want to, but the basic facts are that an Army officer was relocating from San Diego to a base in Germany, and paid Delta to ship her two dogs (a beagle and a German shepherd), but only the beagle arrived. When the customer asked what had happened, the airline told her that the dog had escaped from its carrier and run away, and offered to refund the shipping fee. In other words, the exact same story they gave when a customer’s dog disappeared in Mexico City. It was a dubious story the first time, but Mexico does not have the sort of compulsive airport security we’re becoming accustomed to seeing in the US, and it’s just vaguely possible that someone left a door open just at the time the dog managed to work its way clear of a carrier guaranteed by the FAA to be impossible for a dog to escape. At a US airport, however, we also have to believe that the cargo area was unattended and unmonitored, that no video cameras anywhere caught anything, and that someone left an access gate to the airport open and unmonitored…
All right, it’s still barely credible, given some of the laughable excuses for “security” we’ve been seeing out of TSA lately, although given that this was the third such incident in the past year (there was a second case about a month after the one I noted) I would really have expected Delta to handle it better. It doesn’t take too many episodes like this one before your reputation for being a safe way to transport your pets (formerly quite good) goes completely in the crapper. Unfortunately, there really isn’t much the customer (or any customer) can do about a case like this; pets are considered property, and unless a specific dog is a pedigreed show animal or the equivalent, it doesn’t really have a value in the legal sense. The customer can sue the airline for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but such cases are hard to prosecute, and you’re still not likely to gain any satisfaction by doing so. Of course, you could also tell everyone you can about the airline losing your dog…
From a business standpoint, I have to point out that if your security is bad enough that someone can steal a dog out of your baggage operations, it’s also bad enough that someone could steal things for which you could be sued for significant amounts, and it’s probably also bad enough for someone to sneak IN (say, with a bomb) which could result in enough liability to bankrupt your entire corporation, not to mention getting the responsible parties charged with several hundred counts of criminal negligence, negligent homicide, or even treason. The fact is, letting people make off with your customers’ belongings is not the same thing as allowing your employees to steal the office supplies. Whether the dog was taken by an employee, by someone who was able to sneak into the baggage area, or lost because your security was preposterously bad, it’s no way to run a railroad – or, in this case, an airline…
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Belled Cats & Paper Tigers
I was reading the latest variation of the article about how grade inflation is a travesty that will eventually destroy our educational system (courtesy of the New York Times online this time around) and reflecting that efforts to regulate the behavior of people in jobs from which they can never be fired is even sillier than the belief that media outrage (or even public outrage) can influence the actions of the CEOs of privately-owned companies, when I ran across a link to one of those “rate my instructor” sites we keep hearing about. At this point in history I’ve had somewhere between 100 and 200 students at MSU, and some of them have apparently had quite strong feelings about me (good and bad, thank you), if my teacher evaluations are anything to go by, so I decided to look myself up on the rankings. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I wasn’t listed. Neither were any of our full, associate or assistant professors, or any of our professors of the practice. In fact, there were only two listings for the entire Management Department: a graduate student who dropped out of the program nearly a decade ago, and a member of my own cohort – who did not have a single rating…
Puzzled by this, I did a quick Internet search and looked myself up on a few of the competing sites. Still no listing for me – or for any of our faculty, in fact. There were a few listings for other departments in the business school, but none of them were names I knew – and I should tell you that there are a number of quite prominent people working in this institution. That none of them should be ranked anywhere online seemed extremely odd to me, until I realized that I for the most part these are not free services – you have to pay to get to any of the really good parts of any of them, and no college student is going to do any such thing. Even if they were willing to spend the money – and most people in that age group are much more interested in buying beer and/or pizza – the rating system would have no real legitimacy with the audience. Which is to say, there would be nothing to keep a low-ranking instructor (or a graduate student) from logging in and reading what his or her students had to say about him or her – or worse yet, making several bogus rankings to make him or herself look better…
There’s also no reason to believe that the people who own the site would have any interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the people posting, especially if they were members who have already entered their personal contact information (and credit card numbers) into the system. I doubt any graduate student would really care, and it’s a certainty no tenured professor ever would, but junior faculty who are trying to qualify for tenure in schools where your teacher evaluations are weighted in that decision might – and there’d be no way to be sure that some psychotic bastard wouldn’t try to take revenge for a bad rating or two that cost him or her a job. Even without a fish-eyed admiral from the “Star Wars” movies yelling “It’s a Trap!” to warn them there’s no way any undergraduate with the sense God gave a gerbil would ever risk being ratted out by such a concern…
I can’t say for certain, of course, but I imagine that there are sources on campus – or somewhere very nearby – where a wide variety of intelligence regarding courses to avoid and instructors to stay away from is available to all of our students; certainly there was in my day, and with social networking available it’s probably too easy these days. I’m not saying there’s a Facebook group called “Max P. Belin DIE DIE DIE!!!” out there, but I must admit that I’d be completely unsurprised if there was – and rather astonished if at least some of our more hard-assed instructors HADN’T been so honored…
And I’d be completely floored if anyone in this institution believed for even one moment that there was anything they could do about it…
Puzzled by this, I did a quick Internet search and looked myself up on a few of the competing sites. Still no listing for me – or for any of our faculty, in fact. There were a few listings for other departments in the business school, but none of them were names I knew – and I should tell you that there are a number of quite prominent people working in this institution. That none of them should be ranked anywhere online seemed extremely odd to me, until I realized that I for the most part these are not free services – you have to pay to get to any of the really good parts of any of them, and no college student is going to do any such thing. Even if they were willing to spend the money – and most people in that age group are much more interested in buying beer and/or pizza – the rating system would have no real legitimacy with the audience. Which is to say, there would be nothing to keep a low-ranking instructor (or a graduate student) from logging in and reading what his or her students had to say about him or her – or worse yet, making several bogus rankings to make him or herself look better…
There’s also no reason to believe that the people who own the site would have any interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the people posting, especially if they were members who have already entered their personal contact information (and credit card numbers) into the system. I doubt any graduate student would really care, and it’s a certainty no tenured professor ever would, but junior faculty who are trying to qualify for tenure in schools where your teacher evaluations are weighted in that decision might – and there’d be no way to be sure that some psychotic bastard wouldn’t try to take revenge for a bad rating or two that cost him or her a job. Even without a fish-eyed admiral from the “Star Wars” movies yelling “It’s a Trap!” to warn them there’s no way any undergraduate with the sense God gave a gerbil would ever risk being ratted out by such a concern…
I can’t say for certain, of course, but I imagine that there are sources on campus – or somewhere very nearby – where a wide variety of intelligence regarding courses to avoid and instructors to stay away from is available to all of our students; certainly there was in my day, and with social networking available it’s probably too easy these days. I’m not saying there’s a Facebook group called “Max P. Belin DIE DIE DIE!!!” out there, but I must admit that I’d be completely unsurprised if there was – and rather astonished if at least some of our more hard-assed instructors HADN’T been so honored…
And I’d be completely floored if anyone in this institution believed for even one moment that there was anything they could do about it…
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
A New Sport - Part II
If you missed yesterday's post about scambaiting, and the rules of the game, you may want to go and read it - and take a quick spin by the linked site advocating this game - before continuing. Because while the New York Times article played up the light-hearted aspect of this passtime, and my post did too, some of the posts on the "419 Eater" forum are deadly serious - and it occurs to me that I don't want to give you the impression that I'm taking this pursuit lightly...
As noted on their FAQ, most of the hard-core scambaiters aren't doing this for fun. Some of the worst of the Internet scams have had terrible consequences for the people who fall for them, including people who have bankrupted themselves, gone into crushing debt, or even become homeless because they believed what some random yutz on the Internet was telling them. The worst cases are the ones that pop up right after any major natural disaster, claiming to be relief organizations that will use your donations to help people who've just been left homeless (or worse) by hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and the like. Others will come up with the most pathetic tear-jerking sob stories and send them to literally millions of people, hoping to nail that one-in-a-million person who will fall for their sad (fabricated) story. And no, most scammers are neither poor people who need the (stolen) funds in order to eat nor crusaders attempting to right past (or historical) wrongs; the majority are simply criminals, and many appear to have links to organized crime...
What struck me about the scambaiter forum wasn't the glee that some of the participants were taking about making scammers try to bite their own backs - although there were many such posts - but rather the comments about how every time one of these "lads" gets played by a "baiter" (as they call themselves) he will be that much more cautious before sending out his next reply, and how every hour that a scammer spends responding to "bait" messages is one hour he can't spend preying on actual victims. It has become clear over the last decade that no amount of government action or law enforcement efforts can ever eradicate Internet scams, but as I read through the baiter literature, it seemed clearer and clearer that if you had enough scambaiters, they might be able to stem the tide - and if somebody could find a way to make scambaiting as profitable as the scams are in the first place, that might actually bring enough people into the fray to change the whole picture...
Now, I don't mean to suggest that scambaiters are cyberspace superheroes, bravely fighting back evil criminals who would wreck pain and suffering on innocent (if occasionally gullible) people for their own selfish ends; I'm sure a lot of the baiters are just doing this for fun, for personal satisfaction, or for the enjoyment they get upon seeing a picture of a cybercriminal with a large fish over his head in the mistaken belief that this will get a scam to work. But on the other hand, if you've ever wondered if the popular image of hackers as electronic vigilantes - Robin Hood with a laptop - is ever actually true, I think we can now say with some confidence that sometimes it is. Out there in the deep blue reaches of cyberspace there really are a dedicated corps of men and women who are donating their time towards making our world just a little bit better than it was when they woke up this morning - defending the defenseless and destroying (or at least seriously inconveniencing) the forces of evil...
They may not wear tights, leap tall buildings at a single bound, or strike terror into the hearts of evildoers, but I'd be pressed to call them anything other than heroes just the same. Maybe there's hope for this Internet culture of ours after all...
As noted on their FAQ, most of the hard-core scambaiters aren't doing this for fun. Some of the worst of the Internet scams have had terrible consequences for the people who fall for them, including people who have bankrupted themselves, gone into crushing debt, or even become homeless because they believed what some random yutz on the Internet was telling them. The worst cases are the ones that pop up right after any major natural disaster, claiming to be relief organizations that will use your donations to help people who've just been left homeless (or worse) by hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and the like. Others will come up with the most pathetic tear-jerking sob stories and send them to literally millions of people, hoping to nail that one-in-a-million person who will fall for their sad (fabricated) story. And no, most scammers are neither poor people who need the (stolen) funds in order to eat nor crusaders attempting to right past (or historical) wrongs; the majority are simply criminals, and many appear to have links to organized crime...
What struck me about the scambaiter forum wasn't the glee that some of the participants were taking about making scammers try to bite their own backs - although there were many such posts - but rather the comments about how every time one of these "lads" gets played by a "baiter" (as they call themselves) he will be that much more cautious before sending out his next reply, and how every hour that a scammer spends responding to "bait" messages is one hour he can't spend preying on actual victims. It has become clear over the last decade that no amount of government action or law enforcement efforts can ever eradicate Internet scams, but as I read through the baiter literature, it seemed clearer and clearer that if you had enough scambaiters, they might be able to stem the tide - and if somebody could find a way to make scambaiting as profitable as the scams are in the first place, that might actually bring enough people into the fray to change the whole picture...
Now, I don't mean to suggest that scambaiters are cyberspace superheroes, bravely fighting back evil criminals who would wreck pain and suffering on innocent (if occasionally gullible) people for their own selfish ends; I'm sure a lot of the baiters are just doing this for fun, for personal satisfaction, or for the enjoyment they get upon seeing a picture of a cybercriminal with a large fish over his head in the mistaken belief that this will get a scam to work. But on the other hand, if you've ever wondered if the popular image of hackers as electronic vigilantes - Robin Hood with a laptop - is ever actually true, I think we can now say with some confidence that sometimes it is. Out there in the deep blue reaches of cyberspace there really are a dedicated corps of men and women who are donating their time towards making our world just a little bit better than it was when they woke up this morning - defending the defenseless and destroying (or at least seriously inconveniencing) the forces of evil...
They may not wear tights, leap tall buildings at a single bound, or strike terror into the hearts of evildoers, but I'd be pressed to call them anything other than heroes just the same. Maybe there's hope for this Internet culture of ours after all...
Monday, December 27, 2010
A New Sport
Almost from the very beginning of email we’ve all been dealing with the mass mail messages commonly known as “spam” in reference to an otherwise innocent potted meat product. We’ve talked about the ethics of using such techniques in this space before, and the debate continues as to whether there is (or even should be) any distinction between commercial email messages used as a legitimate marketing technique and fraudulent messages that exist only to scam people out of money and/or personal information. But regardless of your feelings about spam, the big question remains what to do about it. An entire sub-industry of software systems intended to detect and screen out spam messages has sprung up in recent years, and modern email systems are devoting more and more effort to diverting such messages to specialized “spam filters” – or rejecting the messages altogether. I’ve always wondered if there was some way to harness these missives for good purpose, either for commercial gain or personal satisfaction – and a story I ran across today suggests that there might be…
A recent technology column in the New York Times online told the mildly amusing story of a common email scam – a message from a friend or acquaintance claiming that the sender is stuck in London and needs your help to get home after having their wallet stolen – and an exchange the author had in which he tried to provoke various responses from the sender. It’s a variation on the old game of trying to get a telemarketer to react in various ways while tying up their time on the phone (trying to convert them to your religion, telling them the sad story about having your heart broken, threatening suicide if they don’t keep talking to you, or asking lots of questions about their pitch and then hanging up), with the added bonus being that email scammers will say or do almost anything if they think there’s the slightest chance of you sending them money. It seemed like a novel way of harmlessly wasting time until I read the comments at the bottom of the page…
It turns out there is an entire online community of people who participate in this kind of sport, informally known as “Scambaiting,” with their own forums and discussion boards (such as 419 Eater, a reference to the section of the Nigerian Penal Code that deals with email scams) offering detailed ways to make online scammers do interesting things for your own amusement. In particular, there’s an entire section of scambaiting which deals with trying to get scammers to send you a picture of themselves naked (or at least of someone very attractive in a state of undress) in return for the money which you will not, of course, ever have any intention of sending. While most people in the community acknowledge that the odds of ever gaining anything of value through these games is really no higher than your chances of actually making money by going along with an online bank scam, there is still a certain amount of personal satisfaction to be had from making these Internet criminal do silly things for your amusement. In addition, I think it supports an argument I’ve been advancing for some time now about the way in which our world is changing…
I’m not sure there ever was a time when the average person would have wired an extravagant sum of money to a bare acquaintance on the basis of a voice they might or might not recognize on the telephone, or the postal, telegraph or email equivalent; but if there ever was such a time, it appears to be ending now. Gradually, as time goes on, even the completely credulous, the utterly stupid and those suffering from dementia will fail to fall for this type of Internet scam, and both the criminals and those who take amusement from baiting them will move on to other pursuits. And while I am generally in favor of the world wising up, being more responsible and paying closer attention, it’s hard to deny that we’re also losing our innocence and becoming a colder, harder, and much more hostile world…
A recent technology column in the New York Times online told the mildly amusing story of a common email scam – a message from a friend or acquaintance claiming that the sender is stuck in London and needs your help to get home after having their wallet stolen – and an exchange the author had in which he tried to provoke various responses from the sender. It’s a variation on the old game of trying to get a telemarketer to react in various ways while tying up their time on the phone (trying to convert them to your religion, telling them the sad story about having your heart broken, threatening suicide if they don’t keep talking to you, or asking lots of questions about their pitch and then hanging up), with the added bonus being that email scammers will say or do almost anything if they think there’s the slightest chance of you sending them money. It seemed like a novel way of harmlessly wasting time until I read the comments at the bottom of the page…
It turns out there is an entire online community of people who participate in this kind of sport, informally known as “Scambaiting,” with their own forums and discussion boards (such as 419 Eater, a reference to the section of the Nigerian Penal Code that deals with email scams) offering detailed ways to make online scammers do interesting things for your own amusement. In particular, there’s an entire section of scambaiting which deals with trying to get scammers to send you a picture of themselves naked (or at least of someone very attractive in a state of undress) in return for the money which you will not, of course, ever have any intention of sending. While most people in the community acknowledge that the odds of ever gaining anything of value through these games is really no higher than your chances of actually making money by going along with an online bank scam, there is still a certain amount of personal satisfaction to be had from making these Internet criminal do silly things for your amusement. In addition, I think it supports an argument I’ve been advancing for some time now about the way in which our world is changing…
I’m not sure there ever was a time when the average person would have wired an extravagant sum of money to a bare acquaintance on the basis of a voice they might or might not recognize on the telephone, or the postal, telegraph or email equivalent; but if there ever was such a time, it appears to be ending now. Gradually, as time goes on, even the completely credulous, the utterly stupid and those suffering from dementia will fail to fall for this type of Internet scam, and both the criminals and those who take amusement from baiting them will move on to other pursuits. And while I am generally in favor of the world wising up, being more responsible and paying closer attention, it’s hard to deny that we’re also losing our innocence and becoming a colder, harder, and much more hostile world…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
