Gah.
Just tried to make a payment for something using my PayPal credit card. PayPal declined the transaction. No biggie, it wasn’t an urgent purchase. So I login to my PayPal account and find that the money has already been debited, and has a status of “pending”.
So, I call PayPal up, sure that this can be straightened out. I mean, I’ve had a lot of really good experiences with PayPal support in the past. Never a negative one.
Yeah, I call them up and explain this to them. The response? “The transaction is being authorized. It will take 10 business days for this to clear.”
…
Yes, that’s right. The transaction will be declined. The funds are being “authorized” back to me. This will take 10 days. In the meantime, the online service (no, nothing like that :p) I’m buying can’t be bought because I don’t have enough cash in my account (shy by 30 bucks).
Gah!
Can’t believe I forgot to mention this! Today is SysAdmin appreciation day!
G’won, give your SA a huge, a mug and a free lunch! 
(for those who are wondering, yes, I observe the ’secretary’, ‘boss’, etc days by doing this for my respective coworkers)
For a lark, here’s UserFriendly’s cartoon on the subject.
Just highlighting a feature I’ve come to love at Bloglines: my ClipBlog. It’ll generally be a quick quote from what someone else has posted that has caught my eye. The byline should be description enough:
What I find interesting from business, tech, and whatever else hits my radar. Sometimes it’ll be messy, but then bugs on the windshield normally are.
There are already a few subscribers, but I thought I’d point it out since it’s something I use regularly (even when I’m not blogging).
Haven’t posted one of these in a while, but here’s a very cool time waster. My high score is 3500.
Here was me thinking there’d be nothing to blog about….
Just over two weeks ago, I wrote a completely idiotic blog post. Stupid in fact, about how to make simple, secure passwords.
Of course, one of my readers showed me my stupidity, and I thank him for it. He advocates passphrases.
Well, today an Incident Response Specialist (big head security dude) for Microsoft wrote a fantastic post outlining this in great detail.
In his first blog post evah (!!!) Robert Hensing (background available via Google) talks about passphrases in great detail.
Some really choice quotes?
Worse still, attackers (either automated or human) don’t even need to GUESS the password. There are hacking tools a-plenty that will let a miscreant sniff your network traffic to scoop out authentication material for the LM, NTLM and Kerberos protocols and then brute-force that material back into a working password. Sure you can protect the network with segmentation, encryption (IPSec etc.) and even 802.1x and I’m a big fan of all of these concepts, but really they just workaround an issue that you still need to address. The inherent vulnerability in your network which is – the password.
So here’s the deal – I don’t want you to use passwords, I want you to use pass-PHRASES. What is a pass-phrase you ask?
Let’s take a look at some of my recent pass-phrases that I’ve used inside Microsoft for my ‘password’.
“If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane“ (Jimmy Buffet rules)
“Send the pain below!“ (I like Chevell too)
“Mean people suck!“ (it’s true)
So why are these pass-phrases so great?
1. They meet all password complexity requirements due to the use of upper / lowercase letters and punctuation (you don’t HAVE to use numbers to meet password complexity requirements)
2. They are so freaking easy for me to remember it’s not even funny. For me, I find it MUCH easier to remember a sentence from a favorite song or a funny quote than to remember ‘xYaQxrz!’ (which b.t.w. is long enough and complex enough to meet our internal complexity requirements, but is weak enough to not survive any kind of brute-force password grinding attack with say LC5, let alone a lookup table attack). That password would not survive sustained attack with LC5 long enough to matter so in my mind it’s pointless to use a password like that. You may as well just leave your password blank.
3. I dare say that even with the most advanced hardware you are not going to guesss, crack, brute-force or pre-compute these passwords in the 70 days or so that they were around (remember you only need the password to survive attack long enough for you to change the password).
Really, continue reading if you want more info.
:giggles:
Apparently I’m patently anti-Microsoft, pro-Linux and a complete and utter liar who imagines things…
Or something.
Read the thread and enjoy. If you can figure out where this guy’s coming from, please let me know 
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=15133
As far as I can tell this is real.
PayPal is settling a class action lawsuit.
You can access the settlement info page directly from PayPal, to prove it’s not a fraud.
Basically, anyone who’s an American and opened an account between Oct 1, 1999 and Jan 1, 2004 is elegible to participate in the settlement. You can fill out a short form (50$ settlement) or a long form (possibly larger settlement) to sign up.
I can’t test this, since I’m not American, but according to Slashdot (where I read this) it looks pretty real.
Some caveats:
- only open to US citizens and residents
- you may need to prove you’ve suffered financial loss
- this is a class action suit, if you are intending to sue under the grounds of this suit, you are automatically part of the mass tort agreement… take the money (IF you are suing under the same root issues as the suit)
If you get money, feel free to send me a bit to jer AT notsure DOT net
Over the last 6-8 months I’ve gotten to know a lot of folk to varying degrees at Microsoft. Some I’d consider real friends. Others are acquaintances I drop emails to on occasions, others are just people I “know” very loosely.
At least once a month I’ll exchange a couple of emails with Eric Rudder or Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates (though that has only happened twice).
I don’t say that to impress because, realistically, they’d probably never remember my name. My point isn’t to name drop.
My point is that through these short, sweet and infrequent conversations I’ve come to realise that these guys are just average, human guys. Blogging put a human face to Microsoft for a lot of folk. These emails put a human face to it’s leadership for me.
So, it came as no surprise that I read about a recent dinner some interns had with Bill Gates where the thing that struck most was:
This was certainly not planned, but I notice a little girl coming down the stairs from where Bill came. I thought, “no way!” Turns out, I was right. It was his oldest daughter. [ ... ] She came up to Bill, held hands with him, and sat down. They talked and interacted. She had a band-aid on her finger. For five minutes it was Bill Gates as Dad and not Bill Gates as Chairman, Chief Software Architect, self-made billionaire, or richest man in the world.
The rest of the post is well worth a read as well. As one of the commenters put it:
That is an incredible blog post. It held me until the very end and made me want more!
… I’m not the only one who’s overly unimpressed by the Google IPO story. At least this time I can say I was ahead of the curve. John Batelle highlights some headlines:
WHY not to bid on Google IPO
San Jose Mercury News (subscription) – San Jose,CA,USA
GOOGLE IPO May Hasten Staff Turnover
San Jose Mercury News (subscription) – San Jose,CA,USA
JUST Say No to Google IPO
eWeek – USA
GOOGLE’S IPO: Asking Too Much?
BusinessWeek – USA
BEHAVIOUR experts see pitfalls in Google IPO frenzy
Stuff.co.nz – New Zealand
VIRUS Puts Damper on Google IPO Pricing News
NPR (audio) – USA
Next up: the”Bloom Is Off The Google Rose” article. If history is any guide, it is already being prepped at any number of publications.
In other news, it took me too long to write my “Novell May Challenge Microsoft” article, and the major news pubs are picking it up. I’ve meant to write it for 6 months. It’s good to be ahead of the curve on an idea (whether you’re right or wrong). I dropped the ball on that one, but picked it up with that Google thing.
I’m considering passing it off to Larry Osterman, for no reason other than that he’s tall.
I’ve been waiting with bated breath for this to break… And break it is.
You saw the trailer? … maybe you want to watch it again… real close like… get your nose right up in there and pay attention to the logos…
Into the rabbit hole we go my friends… MWUAHAHAHHAA!!!!
Bzzz… Bzzz… varrao mites…. awesome babbbbyzzzzz….
