This morning’s e-mail brought an amusing little spam (identifying information withheld):

Hi,

My wife is a wonderful cook. I am of a mind to believe that she has the best recipe for chocolate chip cookies that there is. Colleagues, friends, and neighbors,(especially neighbor kids) all want to know every time she is planning a batch so they can sample the tasty morsels. If you would like a copy of this great recipe, send $2.00 along with your email address to the following address.

S C--
Box --
--, Montana --

The amusing part was that it seemed so homemade: cutesy copy with a return e-mail address that was likely valid. Conveniently, the named post office box was also used by a legit business owned by the couple (sayeth Google). With just a few minutes of research, I had home and work numbers, addresses, ISP, and even pictures of the couple.

The question was what to do with this information. Usually my spam gets filtered into a folder which I rarely open. When I do, it’s to scan for false positives or, when I get particularly annoyed, to forward some off to abuse@ addresses. But this one was so homey it had evaded the filter.

For the first time, I had concrete information linking a spammer to the act. I immediately thought of Mark Eckenwiler’s success using a small claims court to get $500 against a telemarketer. Yet the TCPA, the statue under which he sued, has no provision for spam.

So I went to SpamLaws.com and discovered that Montana has no anti-spam statute. But Iowa does. The law specifies that the mere act of transmission to/through Iowa is enough to constitute a (civil) offense, provided the e-mail breaks certain rules (see ¶3).

I believed the e-mail broke subparagraphs (c) and (d) because it had no mechanism to request removal, and the headers were incomplete. So I took a trip down to 6th & Kellogg and spoke with the clerk. She gave me forms for filing a small (i.e., less than $5k) claim and told me the fees: $50 to file, and about $8 for service by certified mail. (It costs more if you use the sheriff as process server, but I couldn’t do that for Montana.)

Now things were seeming less cool. I didn’t want to spend nearly $60 for something that could be easily derailed if they are at all suspicious of certified mail. Worse, if I got a judgment, the Iowa court couldn’t garnish wages or dip into bank accounts in Montana. (It is possible to transfer judgments, but that’s additional time and expense.)

All of this could be recouped, of course, because I’m entitled to “costs and reasonable attorney fees.” Still, I began to feel some doubt about my “case” and my motivations. I imagined my spammer couple, living (as they do, according to the census) in a small town, trying to supplement their income…

Then I thought: wait, what am I thinking? I’ve never heard of these guys, so they must have bought a list and/or software to do this. They took that additional step of paying money to annoy me. No, this would not stand.

So I called them.

(To be continued…)

I have a number of credit cards, though I really don’t use most of them. My favorite is my ISU credit card, which I got a few years ago. It features a nice, crisp version of the Cyclones logo on a strong red background. I’ve always liked it (inasmuch as you can “like” a credit card.)

Anyway, the issuer upgraded me to a gold card some time ago and sent me a new one. This one was much uglier: the whole face was gold, with no contrast other than a dark outline of Cy. I kept it, but since my original card had plenty of room before expiration, I rarely used it.

Today, I got another copy of the gold card. Since there were years left before the other’s expiration, and the new had the same account number, limit, and all that, I can only conclude the bank is saying “Seriously, dude, use this one.”

You have to be a true nerd to remember, but there once was a command-line program called pkunzip.exe. When you wanted to get the files out from those big .ZIP files, pkunzip — named for the creator of the ZIP file, Phil Katz — was the biggest game in town. (Though there were those who dabbled in others such as .RAR, .LZH, and .ARJ — ahh, how I remember my utility belt of decompressors…)

Anyway, the reason you probably haven’t heard of PKZip (which still exists, some ten years after its zenith at version 2.04g) is that another company stole the crown: Nico Mak Computing, now renamed after its flagship product. WinZip.

It seems that nobody wanted to type pkunzip -e filename.zip in the brave new world of Windows. Through the use of a better interface (still going strong nine versions later), WinZip handily beat the inventors of the format.

I think there’s a lesson for the Linux team in there somewhere.

Tire pressure: a vitally important contributor to vehicle handling, safety, and fuel economy — and not just for Explorer owners.

Why, then, does everything surrounding its maintenance seem so stone-age stupid? Put this little stick on, watch where it pops up. Okay, now some air — not too much now — now do the stick again. Is it enough? Wait — have you been driving this? Are you using the “at rest” psi or the warm one?

True, there are some lovely cars that will show you their tire pressure right on the dash, which some hope to make even more practical.

Which is great, but what about when you have to fill the damn thing? Where are the advances in air compressors? Why can’t I drive up, right now, in any car and find a pump that lets me type in the pressure? I could attach the head, and the pump would then alternately fill and measure until the tire was correctly inflated. In future, this could be done with even less work as the car wirelessly told the pump the appropriate pressure based upon data.

But even now, I don’t see why I should ever have to bend down and use a gauge. That shit may have been cool in the days of full service fill-ups, but that time has passed.

I had an opportunity to speak with a member of law enforcement the other day, as we discussed whether I really needed to be exceeding the posted limit by 14mph. As luck would have it, we both essentially agreed I could: he said he was going to be nice and “give me a warning.” Had I been 15mph over, he said, a citation would have been issued. (Amusingly, the words “give me a warning” were as close as he ever came to one; he gave me nothing written, never mentioned my speed again, and after returning from his cruiser said only “You’re free to go.”)

I mention this in part to praise the fine officers in (whatever the hell Illinois county I was in) but also, of course, to bitch. When the dude asked me for proof of insurance, I discovered mine expired something like 01 Feb 03. Not the insurance, mind you, but the proof. (The cop said it was fine — if we had it into ’03, it was extremely likely to be renewed.)

Yet it got me to thinking: what do we need these documents for, anyway? Why don’t the law enforcement guys, tricked out as they are with shiny little laptops, just pull up the car or driver license and check for an insurance company endorsement? Forget the (easily forged) printed slip — have the carriers do data exchange. After all, if all these privacy violations are inevitable in the networked future, we might as well get some convenience out of it.

I’ve been doing some evaluation of used cars the last few days, and I’ve discovered there’s a perfect tool to use for testing car stereos: what I call “the newlywed mix CD.” I found a disc from a Jan. ’03 wedding and it had a great variety of tunes — from “Low Rider” to U2, Celine Dion to some jazzy arrangements — that I just played portions from to get a feel for the systems.

Plus, in most cases it’s no big deal if you forget to eject it.

OK, make that Friday. I was traveling this week, so computer access was not available. As such, I’m going to be doing a big batch of movie reviews for the films I saw over the past 6 days.

I could backdate them to the actual days I saw them, but I detest backdating as undermining the reader’s trust that posts are made in real time. So I’ll be posting them in chronological order, starting with the movie I saw Friday.

You ready?

I’m probably not going to do a proper update until Tuesday. I’m enjoying my extended weekend.

Pepsi is running some stupid commercials with a white kid cradling a snifter full of Pepsi as old white guys talk about how they made their first billion. The kid won his from Pepsi, of course — and now apparently thinks hanging out with pretentious old guys is cool, provided they have a “foosball table.”

This preposterous scene seems appropriate for this particular contest. Why? Well, let me save you the time of reading the official rules. Here’s how it goes down:

1. Through 27 Aug 03, Pepsi draws a total of 1,000 names from entrants who submitted 10-digit codes from Pepsi products to the game Website.
2. Those people are flown (or, if they live nearby, driven) to Orlando, FL. Coach. They get a 2 night hotel stay, single occupancy, and $100 spending money. Oh, yeah, and an appearance on a show “currently anticipated to be broadcast on live television” on the WB 14 Sep 03.
3. Before the show starts, each person selects a distinct six digit number from 000,000 to 999,999. “All numbers selected will be recorded in a digitally signed database.”
4. Pepsi also picks a number, which they call “the Billion Dollar Number.”
5. The person closest to the BDN wins a million bucks. If (s)he guesses it exactly, (s)he also wins $1,000,000,000.
6. The million is paid in full. The billion is paid — here’s the fun part — either as a) $5m/yr for the first 20yr, then $10m/yr for 21-39, then $710m in year 40 or b) a $250m lump sum payment. If you don’t choose (b) within 60 days, you get the “40-Year Payment Schedule.”

So it’s literally a one in a million shot — provided you’re picked to be part of the thousand to begin with. Pepsi’s chance of paying out the $1b is 1 in 1,000. Not that they would, of course. Their insurer will make the payment.

And who better to insure this prize than Warren Buffet’s company?

Ok, um, no particular reason I’m mentioning this, but why the hell don’t all cars have some mechanism to prevent the battery from being totally drained? I have to believe that a simple mechanism/program to turn the lights off before the charge was too low for a reliable start would not be that expensive to implement — a decade ago.

“Well,” you might say, “there is such a mechanism. It’s called: don’t forget to turn off your damn lights.” (You might say that, if grammar wasn’t terribly important to you.)

Anyway, I’ll accept that explanation only from people who disable their O/S’s recycle bin/trash can, never use the backup battery in their PDAs/phones/etc., and love UNIX. Otherwise, it’s just nice to be user-friendly.

I was cruising on a stretch of road with a 40mph speed limit, and I look up to discover I’m being tailgated — by a Ferrari. It’s a red Testarossa, with that unusually placed mirror. What’s more, he’s not just on my ass, he’s moving rapidly from side to side as if there’s some imaginary slalom course in our lane.

Fun stuff.

“Call for price.” Those simple words in any catalog drive me crazy. While I’ll grant that they make some sense for items that fluctuate in price during the gap between press and distribution, I know that the practice is also used to satisfy manufacturers who don’t want their products advertised below a certain level, lest the public think them cheap.

Even then, the “lowest advertised price” policy works right up until you get to the Internet. Then the practice becomes ridiculous, as when Amazon says “To see our low price, add this item to your cart.” At least one vendor has found an even more annoying method. (Workaround: in a search list, you can sort by price. With a query that’s general enough, you can figure out what the price is.)

It’s time to stop this silly practice. The Internet provides more pricing information than is available anywhere else. Cost is an essential and unavoidable part of e-commerce transactions, and there is no reason customers should be expected to jump through hoops merely to learn it.

I hope retailers will soon discover that fact.

Someday, the techies tell us, we will have Location-Based Services. Cell phones will tell us where we are and how to get where we want to go. I anxiously await that day, but until it comes I rely on a plain ol’ cellular and the patience and generosity of my net-enabled friends, to whom I am eternally grateful.

I don’t usually lift entire briefs from StudioBrief (would that be fair use?), but this one begs for comment:

Paul Hogan To Portray “Straight-Gay” Man
Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan will make his first fully Australian film in 16 years, when he returns to the country to star in Strange Bedfellows, about two straight men who declare themselves to be a homosexual couple to qualify for tax benefits, then have to learn how to behave like one when a tax investigator comes calling., the Australian Associated Press reported today (Tuesday). Hogan told the wire service that the Bedfellows script was the funniest he had ever read. “It’s the first script I’ve had where I thought, ‘I don’t have to rewrite any of this’,” he added.

Just as a refresher about Hogan’s ability to spot/create good writing, I present his writing credits. Yep. Exactly.

I’ve gotten a few e-mails confidently dismissing yesterday’s Weird Al post, noting the activity falls under “fair use.” I have a massive fair use (and “first sale”) post I’ve been meaning to do for some time.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, today is not that day.

To this point, let’s just say that all parody is not equivalent. Relevant case law in this area includes, most prominently, Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music, Inc. [syllabus]. That case concerned a 2Live Crew song “Oh, Pretty Woman” and whether it constituted fair use of the Roy Orbison original.

Was it a parody? Certainly. Did it therefore constitute fair use? Not necessarily. I’m sure you’d love me to go into the four tests in detail, but instead I’ll allow those who care to read the original decision. (Anyone? Anyone?) I’ll just leave you with this nugget from one analyst:

It is important to distinguish between parody of the original work, which is fair use, and use of the original work to parody something else, which requires permission. For this reason, entertainer “Weird Al” Yankovich has been unable to write any of his parodies to the tune “Purple Rain,” as the copyright owner with the unprintable name (it used to be “Prince”) has so far refused his requests for permission to use the tune. — What is “Fair Use” in Copyright Law?

“Weird Al” traditionally asks for permission not just because he’s a nice guy, but because he treads a very fine line, legally. Which is shame. The bigger shame, of course, is that Eminem doesn’t hold other people to the same standards he has for himself.