Digital Choke Daynotes

 Monday, August 29, 2005       mail    link   the story

The latest natural disaster in New Orleans area (hurricane Katina) is an opportunity to help others. Many people need help, and relief organizations are poised to help.

And the phishers are also poised to help

If past disasters are any indication, your readers can expect to see spam/phishing mail that will happily take your money for “Hurricane Katina Relief”. All they need is your credit card number, PIN number, etc.

Readers are well-advised to be cautions with unsolicited mail with this type of plea. And messages with attachments purporting to be pictures or news about the hurricane should *not* be opened, as they will contain worms or viruses.

Readers should only contribute to reputable organizations. I’d recommend the Red Cross, there are others. The Red Cross has a web site at http://www.redcross.org/ (note that it’s not a ‘dot com’). Type in the link in your browser, then donate from there.

Caution always with unsolicited email – don’t open it, don’t reply to it, just delete it.

An interesting story about a teenage "cybercriminal" ... and his downfall. Find it here.

I spent part of the day setting up the new Windows Software Update Server (WSUS -- version 2). I'm installing it on an existing test Software Update Server (version 1). The new version has some good new features which will be helpful around the office. More testing this week to see how it will integrate with our existing use of SUS.

 Wednesday, August 31, 2005       mail    link   the story

Reports at the Internet Storm Center about the emergence of apparent phishing sites and mails relating to the hurricane Katrina tragedy here, just as predicted in Monday's post. (Not that it was terribly hard to predict.)

As usual, be careful about where you go, and links you click on.

I've mentioned this before, but now (Sept 1, 2005) the entire US can get a free credit report. One free report per year from each of the three credit bureaus. (One news story about this is here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9120681)

Beware of other 'free' credit reporting sites; they aren't. They usually sign you up (sometimes very quietly in fine print) for a credit reporting service with a monthly cost.

The real free site is here: http://www.AnnualCreditReport.com . The only (optional) charge is to get your "FICO" credit rating score. That might be useful to get once a year. Otherwise, I suggest that your spread out your free requests once very four months to get good coverage throughout the whole year. Also, watch out for default choices for email alerts.

Once you get your free credit report, print it out immediately. Make sure that you store it in a secure location to prevent others from seeing it. And be careful where you browse from while getting your report. For instance, you wouldn't want to do this at a public hot-spot, or perhaps even at the office connection to the Internet (or on your unsecured wireless network at home). Also be careful about storing an electronic copy of the report.

Check your report for errors, and report them (in writing) to the credit bureau. Don't close any inactive accounts, though, as that can actually reduce your credit score rating. But look for bogus entries -- could be an indication of possible credit fraud.

 Friday, September 2, 2005       mail    link   the story

I've been mesmerized by much of the web reporting on the Katrina disaster. One such site is here http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor , where a few people in a ISP data center in downtown New Orleans are blogging (and vid-caming) their struggle to keep their business running.

And the talk about rebuilding (or not rebuilding) the flooded areas of New Orleans brought to mind this little-known fact about my hometown:

The talk about New Orleans being below sea level, and how to recover from the levee breaches (and prevent future flooding) brings to mind the problem faced by Sacramento (California) in the 1850/60's. It's a little-known fact how the downtown area of Sacramento was raised a full story because of flooding.

This was during the 1850-1860's; Sacramento was the capital at that time, and is situated at the confluence of two rivers (Sacramento and American). The annual spring floods caused major problems then, so much so that there was talk of moving the CA state capital to another city (San Franscisco was one choice). So Sacramento had a choice to make after those large floods.

From a PBS production called "Viewfinder", this part of the transcript (here: http://www.kvie.org/programs/kvie/viewfinder/subterranean/ViewFinder-SubterraneanSacramentoTranscript.pdf or http://tinyurl.com/amr3s ):

"In December of '49 and January of 1850, Sacramento was impacted by a serious flood. It was called the "Great Inundation." The people who were leading the city come to the conclusion that they've just got to do something to keep the water out -- and the first thing you do is you build a levee. They'd build them a couple feet tall and then the next flood came over that. And they'd build them a little higher, and the next flood would come over that*

"The flood in 1862 does an enormous amount of damage to the city, and so they immediately galvanize around the idea of raising the town. Before they could raise the street, though, they had to build brick retaining walls on each side of the street. And when those brick retaining walls were built they then had two walls and they came in and filled in between them, to the top of the walls. And then they turned around to the property owners and said, "Well, you better do something about your buildings * or not.
That's your decision if you want to leave them in the hole, that's up to you."

"That left property owners with two choices. They could raise the level of their building up to 12 feet to meet the new street level. That meant using 1500 to 2000 jacks to raise a typical building an inch and a half a day! Or the first floor could just become the basement. That would make the second floor the first floor, which then would make the third floor the second floor..."

The labor was done all by hand (this was in the 1860's), moving dirt from an area several miles away, and was done mostly by Chinese laborers.

Although (sadly) most of the underground areas are closed to the public (with other areas filled in), the original brick walls are still visible in the Fulton's West End Bar and Grill in "Old Sacramento" (our historic area on the Sacramento waterfront -- which has a great Railroad Museum, by the way).

So, there is precedent for raising a city to cope with floods. Much of Sacramento (and much of the surrounding area including the delta area near SF) is stil protected by levees. They've held up pretty well, with some notable exceptions. We usually get a levee break every couple of years, mostly in the (SF/delta area, where farming tracts are lower than the river level. Although one cold winter in 1990's that was followed by a fast thaw caused the river water to get withn a few feet of flooding the entire City.

My sympathies to those affected by the problems down south. To the rest of you, donate carefully -- Katrina donation scams are out there, as I predicted.