Meddling

It would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

There are 614 posts filed in Meddling (this is page 60 of 62).

What’s going on here?

This is a little disconcerting. The London Sunday Times claims that the FBI denied the existence of a document whose existence the Times later claims to have confirmed. The document in question allegedly regards an investigation of a Turkish and Israeli nuclear-secrets smuggling scheme: one in which American officials are alleged to have taken part.

So far there has been no mention of this in the American press, from what I can see. Not sure what’s going on here, but I think the activities involved are serious enough to warrant further investigation.

Female Marine dead, sheriff says

Ed Brown, the Onslow County sheriff investigating the disappearance of missing Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach now says she’s dead and a search is on for her body. Lauterbach was 8 months pregnant and had previously claimed to have been assaulted by a superior officer.

What I don’t understand is how the sheriff could be so sure she’d dead. No one has been able to find her body, nor can police find the guy they suspect of killing her. A lot of what I’ve heard seems to indicate she had planned to go away, so what would make the sheriff say she’s dead?

U.S. doubts source of Persian Gulf radio transmission

Did I call it right or what? I was happy to see that the U.S. Navy now doubts the source of the radio transmissions accompanying the Iranian speedboat confrontation this week.

It goes without saying the Persian Gulf is a tough neighborhood. Our big ships can be attacked at any minute with little warning or chance to escape. This necessary hair-trigger posture usually keeps sailors safe but can occasionally cause tragic accidents in the confusion and rush to act.

I give our ship captains a lot of credit for taking a deep breath and making the right call in this latest incident.

NY Times covers “ghost calls”

On a related note to the hang-up calls I mentioned, Slashdot pointed to a N.Y. Times story on so-called “ghost calls.” The story is a good primer on what web resources exist for tracking these calls. In other words, this story describes the kind of battles I’ve been fighting for the past few months.

The story also provides an interesting tip for defeating the calls that I hadn’t heard of before:

Because the predictive dialers try to identify answering machines by measuring the amount of time that someone or something speaks, one way to defeat them is to give a long greeting, as an answering machine does, rather than a simple hello followed by a pause.

Be sure to check the comments in the Slashdot post, as the geeks (as usual) have excellent information on how these predictive dialers really work.

Annoyance Calls

For the past few weeks we haven’t just been getting car warranty calls. Another annoying situation has established itself where we’ll get a hang-up call at 9:15 PM on Sunday evenings, followed by one about 6 minutes later. Then, at 4:25 AM on Monday morning the phone will ring again and – just like the other calls – there will be nothing but a dial tone.

I’ve since configured Asterisk to block these calls so they will no longer get through. Even so, I plan to see how good the crackerjacks at AT&T are at tracking them down by filing a complaint with them. Back in my BBS sysop’ing days, I had a phone number to the phone company group that could track any number. I’m sure I can find the AT&T equivalent with a little effort.

This has gone on for weeks now and its time to fight back.

Tasering rule of thumb

After reading about another tasering incident, this time on an irate Best Buy customer in Florida, I’ve decided that the problem I have with the incidents I’ve seen is that in none of the cases do the officers make any attempts to detain the suspects before they go for the phasers. Officers should never unholster a taser unless they at least first attempt to place a suspect under arrest. If you don’t have probable cause to arrest someone, you certainly don’t have cause to taser them.

Mouthing off to a cop is one thing, resisting arrest is another. Causing a commotion in Best Buy is no excuse to shock someone.

Spellcheck: a phisher’s best friend

If you’re going to the trouble of faking a PayPal email and spamming the universe with it, at least run it through a spelling checker before sending it. Typos (and random exclamation points) highlighted:

Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:05:20 -0600
To: markt
Subject: Security Center Suspicios Activity – Action requierd
From: “PayPal. Inc.”
Reply-To:
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Thieves don’t want THIS credit card number

One of my first jobs was a part-time position stocking and cashiering at Dart Drug in Sterling, VA. It was a throwaway job in many respects, working for minimum wage with some shady characters and finally quitting after being falsely accused of helping myself to the till. The job was useful in that while working there I once helped track down a killer, but that’s a story for another day.
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