Seebach Exhibit 7

Collect all 15!

While at a local Pizza Hut, I spotted a vending machine selling stickers. One of the types of stickers on offer was symbols of the Zodiac. A bright sticker encouraged me to buy as many as I could -- "Collect all 15!" Did they have duplicates? Three extra symbols not included in the normal Zodiac? Was the sticker lying?

Of such mysteries is life made. Most people, I am given to understand, do not wonder about things like this. That seems a shame.

Hello, Little Swimmer.

There is a living creature, which will be like my friend Dave, and my friend Jordan, but it will not be either of them. This is strange to me. They call it "Little Swimmer"; it is expected to be a girl. The name is a placeholder; I'm sure they'll think of a better name in the next couple of months. But, for now, it's strangely appropriate.

There's something strange about this. They are not my first friends to get married. They are not my first friends to have kids. They are not the first people I knew in school to have kids. But... It's Dave. I've known Dave for a long time, and it's weird enough for him to be married, but Dave having kids is just weird.

Right now, I don't even know whether this is a "person", or just a lump of tissue which will be a person. Who could tell? How would we know? But, in all probability, there will be a person one day. And, in all probability, she will live to remember things that I will never see. She will never see the dawn of the computer age; she will not see computers move from a strange thing which large corporations and universities have, in specially conditioned rooms, to appliances you can buy just about anywhere. She will not see these things. In her life, a resolution of 320x240 will be pathetically small. Cell phones will be commonplace. The internet will be a mere fact of life. We will tell her stories of the world in which we grew up, and they will be strange to her.

This is strange, and wonderful. The "miracle of birth" is really no big thing, but generations sometimes scare me.

I wonder if she'll read this.

Hilarious stupidity

This is one of the funniest messages I've ever received. It was sent anonymously, by "sentinel79@hushmail.com".

http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html

Page read. Four things learned.

Author is script kiddie.
Author is foreign.
Author is female.
Author has inflated ego, thinks doing little things are worth much more
than they are, likes to get paid to do nothing, and has no discipline.

"my hacker, my hacker, my hacker, my hacker, my ex-employee/lazy idiot."

What does this message tell us? First off, it tells us that the writer is really mad at me for something. Perhaps it's the spammer who wanted to hire me to fix his malfunctioning spamming scripts. He probably thought he had a reason to be mad at me.

Apart from the occasional idiot who writes me demanding that I help him break into someone's hotmail account, I don't think many people have mistaken the Hacker FAQ for an article pertaining in any way to script kiddies. Certainly, the consistent contempt shown for script kiddies should have been a warning. But perhaps our mystery correspondent is simply trying to be insulting.

Author is foreign. How does he conclude this? I have no idea. Perhaps because of the translations. However, whoever he is, he hates foreign people; he thinks this is a big insult. Very insulting. So, really, not only is this guy a coward in the normal ways, but he fears foreigners.

Then we get to "author is female". Where's he get this? We don't know where he gets this. But once again, we find that he's afraid of something. You gotta feel bad for anyone who has that negative an attitude about women. I mean, he can't plausibly really think I'm female - no one's that stupid. So he's doing it to be insulting, but what does it say that he thinks it's insulting?

The inflated ego I won't argue, but the rest of it seems like this is a guy who lost a job to a more-competent hacker, who looked "lazy" to him, and he's taking it out on the rest of us. The "lazy idiot" thing is particularly telling.

A great deal of bitterness went into that email, compounded with fear. He couldn't use a real name, or be identifiable in any way; too dangerous. He knows he's wrong, and he fears the outcomes of his actions.

In the end, all you can do is feel sorry for people like this. It's funny, but it's sad.

Giant eagles threaten Xinjiang province

Dissociated Press, August 22, 2007

Giant eagles are wreaking havoc in the northern province of Xinjiang. Originally bred as a response to an invasion of giant gerbils, the giant eagles have been preying on large rodents, medium-sized cats, small dogs, very small pandas, and tiny elephants.

The infestation is the worst in the province since 2003, when it was overrun by giant gerbils, or 1993, when it was overrun by Communist officials. The strategy of breeding giant eagles to prey upon the giant gerbils seemed, at the time, an exceptionally clever and forward-looking one; officials blame lack of access to 1950's science fiction and horror movies for their disastrous error.

"I knew an old lady who swallowed a horse."

Maybe he's not certified with Google technologies.

One of the best parts about being deposed is watching the deposition decay into a farce. A circus, even.

When I was deposed, I think this happened when I had to explain about the parody resume, but it's hard to be sure. In fact, just about every exhibit used in my deposition had errors.

Let's review them.

Seebach Exhibit 1: A bad copy of the first fax from CaDan I've been able to find. Surprisingly, there are no obvious errors in it, apart from the poor copy quality. Very notably absent is the promised disclaimer telling me how to get off of their fax list. (This isn't a TCPA defense, but might be a defense against claims under Minnesota's junk fax law. Some people mistakenly think it's a TCPA defense, but the statute is unambiguous.) Also worth noticing is that it was sent at 11:35 PM on October 10th, 2001 - a Wednesday.

Seebach Exhibit 2: The first "price list" fax I received from CaDan, we think. This one's missing the second page of the fax - we don't know why. To the best of my knowledge, the original complaint had both pages. So, an incomplete exhibit. It was sent at 8:21 PM on October 16th, 2001 - a Tuesday.

Seebach Exhibit 3: The "opt-in/opt-out" fax. This exhibit is missing its date - but we have the original, and know that it was sent on August 8th, 2002, at 2:06 AM. That's a Thursday. (Be patient with my obsession about weekdays; it's going to be relevant, I promise.) The lack of a date on this exhibit is important, because the discussion of whether or not I responded to it is relevant to their claim that I had a responsibility to tell them to stop breaking the law. The original fax (and the complaint) have the date on them; this was just a bad copy.

Seebach Exhibit 4: This is another fax ad. Sent at 11:36 AM, November 22, 2001 (a Thursday). I cherish this one. There's a disclaimer on it saying:

If you would no longer like to receive this information please let us know by sending this back to us stating "remove".

Conspicuously absent is the number to which to fax it back to! They list their voice lines only. Also wonderful is that there are three sentences in this fax; two with two exclamation marks, one with three!!! Normally a sign of a sick mind.

Seebach Exhibit 5: Apparently, they tired of introducing their own violations of federal law as exhibits in my deposition; they introduced instead a very strangely copied and/or clipped copy of part of the plethora.net home page. The cover page has no date listed, but the contact page is dated 6/19/03 on their printout. I wonder if they considered the possibility that the content was not the same in June of 2003 as it was in October of 2001?

Seebach Exhibit 6: This is my favorite. I love this. To understand this, go look at my resume page and see if you can pick "my resume" out from the crowd of links. Your goal is to have a resume you can introduce as an exhibit to get an accurate transcript of my work history.

Go ahead and do this. Did you pick the one described by the text "I was once told you cannot get a job without a padded resume. Here's mine."? If so, what were you smoking? That one's a joke. If you tripped to that, congratulations! You're apparently smarter than the Defendant in this case, who presented the parody resume with complete sincerity, apparently never having read it. For that matter, why wasn't this introduced during the discussion of my background, earlier in the deposition?

Seebach Exhibit 7: A google search on the word "Peter" and the word "Seebach". The funny part is the naive question:

(46.18) Q: Showing you what's been marked as Seebach Exhibit 7, this is actually just the first page of a Google search of your name.

A: Mm-hmm. (Note to the reader: I WAS VERY BAD HERE! I was instructed always to answer with a clear "Yes" or "No". Please do not raze my house to the ground and sow my back yard with salt.)

Q: And it brings up quite a lot of articles that you've apparently authored, or at least somebody named Peter Seebach has authored, right?

A: No. Many of these are database entries about me written by other people.

Note that they didn't even tell Google to match only "Peter Seebach" - it would have matched anything with both "Peter" and "Seebach" in it.

They go on to try to prove that I'm a "hacker". As we know from previous commentary, Dan Rogers uses the word "hacker" to mean "person who breaks into computers". Especially Microsoft computers.

Seebach Exhibit 8: A Google search presented as a search on our fax number. This was played up to show that our fax number shows up on sites other than our own - it's on the POCIA website. This may even be true - but in fact, the exhibit was a search on our modem bank number, not on our fax number. (I had to explain what a dialup number is.) How hard can it be to use Google? Too hard, apparently, for "organizations that are doing the right steps to protect their organization".

Seebach Exhibit 9: I can't include Seebach Exhibit 9 here, because it would cause a collapse of the space-time continuum. See, Seebach Exhibit 9 was a print-out of this blog. Presumably included because, hey, it's a blog, and it sounds really cool, but they didn't ask any questions about it. They've previously said in court documents that my first post about this stuff constitutes a clear statement by me that I am collecting faxes specifically to "make money".

Seebach Exhibit 10: The Star Tribune article referred to in that first post. Actually a correct copy, but the article never got the corrections I asked for. No questions asked apart from the accuracy of it. Note that I didn't correct the obviously, stupidly, false statement by Rick Luzaiach - after all, I have no reason to believe he didn't say it, even if it's false. The newspaper article doesn't say he's right, it just says he said that. Yeah, he's that kind of guy; he apparently sees the world as a series of people trying to cheat other people. One wonders where he gets that idea. Are all these people like that?

There you have it. Ten exhibits. Ten reasons for which they're stupid. The attentive reader will be wondering when I explain my obsessive focus on where in the week various dates long-past fell.

Let's have one last quote:

(48.10)Q: Do you know when you actually received -- and when I say "when," I mean the time of day the faxes from CaDan generally arrived on your machine.

A: All different times.

Q: Well, would it surprise you to know that they were sent after 6:00 p.m. Friday, or Saturday or Sunday?

A: (here, I review the four exhibits) Empirically, they are sent at varied -- widely varied times.

Q: Just going by your memory, do you have a recollection:

A: No, no recollection.

But, you see, I don't have to have a recollection. I have 78 faxes from these fine examples of calendrical innovation. I can look it up whenever I want, not relying on my "recollection." And of the four exhibits that they chose to show were sent on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, a Thursday, and another Thursday. They were sent at 2:06 AM, 8:21 AM, 11:35 PM, and 11:36 AM. Only one of them could possibly be called "after 6 PM", and it was sent on a Wednesday. Perhaps they meant to say "there is a specific Friday in history, and no fax we sent was sent before 6 PM on that particular Friday;" sort of a division between epochs.

The claim that faxes were sent on Friday evenings dates back to the deposition of Dan Rogers, wherein he said, under oath: (as always, the deponent is "A". "Q", in this case, is my lawyer, who has been astoundingly patient with the hassles introduced by writing about this in my blog.)

Q: Was this "please deliver to technology manager" line created by the RightFax software?

A: Looks like it might be.

Q: Well, is it or isn't it?

A: I don't know. I didn't send the fax. I didn't see what it generated.

Q: You testified earlier that you did, in fact, run the fax. Who ran the fax to send these?

A: I don't know that one. I approve the faxes. I say those are good. Whether I hit the button or Paul hits a button or anybody else hits a button, that can be depending on who's working on Friday nights, when they're sent.

Friday nights, huh? Friday seems to come up to three days early in CaDan's strange alternate universe.

Advance!

I got a check today. This check is interesting because it's the first half of the advance on my forthcoming book, The Cranky User. It's weird; it's one thing to have signed a contract, and it's another thing to have written a rough draft of a book, but it's another thing entirely to actually get paid. It's not that I don't get paid for writing the rest of the time; indeed, it's about all I get paid for recently. However, this is the advance on my first actual book. Not just a couple thousand words; an entire book.

The book is well on its way to being ready. The first draft is done, and reviewers are (I believe) reading that to send comments which will be used to revise it; actually, there's not that much time for revisions, but this is essentially a second revision pass now. If all goes well, the book will be in copy editing by this time next month, or sooner. And, somewhere down the road, it'll be officially done.

It's frustrating, because no matter how much I work on the book, I always find myself thinking it's not really done. I don't know that it ever will be; any book trying to capture something difficult will always be looking for one more good example, one more analogy. Ahh, well. We do what we can.

With any luck, there will be a snippet or two up here in a month or two.

Breeder reactor

Jesse and I like to play word games, and one of my favorites was invented spontaneously at Perkins one night. It's a word-association game, called Breeder Reactor. Here's how to play.

Someone writes a word at the top of a piece of paper. Word, concept, person's name, just about anything. So, it looks roughly like this:

Pass the piece of paper to the next player. That person now writes two words under the first one, one on the left, one on the right. These words should be words suggested by the first word. There's no rules, no limits; just whatever comes to mind.

Now pass the paper to the next player. If there's only two people, maybe that's the first player again. This player writes three words. One inspired by the left word, one inspired by the right word, and one, and here's the fun part, which in some way reflects both of the words above it.

Keep doing this until you reach about the width of the page. Then, you do one of two things:

1. You can start folding back in - do only the terms which are combinations of the two terms above them.
2. You can just not add terms to the edges, or alternate lines which shift right and left from the lines above them, or alternate wide lines and thin lines, or otherwise keep going.

Do this until, say, you've filled a page. You can have additional fun by trying to think of themes to use for a whole line of items, although you will only sometimes have any chance to do so.

Here's a snippet of an actual game we played:

You get the idea. Well, maybe you do. A lot of the references are things that only the player writing them down understood. For instane, there's a character in Metanoia named Jane, who is an angel - technically a Cherub - who favors a Desert Eagle handgun as her weapon. So, "cherub + sword" gets us to "Desert Eagle". A few of my other favorites from that game:

• "fanfic" + "Hunter S. Thompson" = "Ranma in Los Vegas"
• "canned" + "pants" = emergency pants
• "tentaporn" + "eww!" = "redundant"
• "riot" + "bipartisan" = "football"

That was unsettling.

So, our settlement with Mobile Cellular Unlimited fell through, which is to say, they changed their minds about the compromise agreement we had reached on confidentiality. The agreement was that the existance of a monetary settlement was not confidential, but the amount was. They decided they couldn't have that, but that means "no settlement".

Since there's no longer any agreement, I can now cheerfully point out that $1,500 on seven faxes was a sweetheart deal, and they should have stuck with it - especially because, as we told them before they started fighting it, we since found six more of their faxes, possibly seven, bringing us to at least thirteen faxes from these wonderful folks. Looks like we're going to trial early next year.

My guess is that the defendant's lawyer underestimated the importance of confidentiality to his client. Looking at their faxes, it's pretty clear that it's a big deal to them; after all, they removed all trace of identifying information from their later faxes, presumably to hide from the complaints. The knowledge that, yes, these people are willing to pay some money is dangerous to them... And now it's public anyway.

The new faxes are interesting; they're landscape-formatted faxes saying "DUMP CABLE NOW!", and if you don't have the whole set, it's not immediately obvious who's being advertised, because the name and address required by Minnesota law are strangely absent. But, if you have earlier ones, it's pretty easy to see the pattern; a few faxes with full contact info, one with a phone number (but no company name), and then a couple with only an answering service number. Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. We should have guessed that these people sent faxes without ID on them; in an affadavit, Richard Luzaich testified that:

Any facsimilies sent out with MCU's name on it satisfied Minnesota law as MCU's name, address, and telephone number were included on such facsimiles with a statement that any recipient could call to delete their facscimile number.

What he doesn't say is that they sent a few faxes - we have three, at least - which do not have MCU's name on them, but which are identifiably MCU faxes. Sneaky! Such faxes aren't even close to adhering to the Minnesota law, to say nothing of the federal law.

The hearing was interesting. A personal favorite of mine was when the Defendant's lawyer claimed that his client was a small company which couldn't afford to pay damages in such a case. According to the deposition of Richard Luzaich, they have 30,000 current customers, and probably have had 100,000 different customers. They spend between $2,000 and $5,000 on each fax run - and we know there were at least 13 such runs. They said that, to be profitable to them, a fax run had to bring them fewer than fifty new customers (as in, the number they needed was not as high as fifty). Well, let's do the math; that's no less than $50 in profit per new customer, if it's making the fax run profitable. And there's 30,000 current customers out there. It's pretty hard to imagine that they're not rolling in money. Indeed, if they weren't lying in the deposition, it's pretty clear that, were I awarded the maximum damages allowed by law ($19,500) and reasonable attourney's fees, the company would still be paying us substantially less than they spent on the junk faxes, and would probably still show a profit on their decision to continue breaking the law long after they were first sued over it.

But hey, let's all feel really sorry for Mobile Cellular Unlimited, who get to go to trial. The judge is not some conciliation court judge they can bamboozle; it's a real State Court judge, who will read the law. The world's smallest violin plays; people who willfully broke a law because they were too greedy to stop may end up with a small profit instead of a big one.

It's like an object-oriented BCPL.

Inform is one of the coolest languages ever. It's a language for writing text adventures.

What makes it really neat is that it's an incredibly, well, weird language. It's a language designed for two goals:

1. It can compile easily to the Z-machine, the virtual machine Infocom used for their old text adventures.
2. It's good at modern text adventures.

As a result, it has very strange convenience features, and a lot of odd rules. The syntax is weirder than perl. And, underneath it all, the language is basically designed to hurt your head. Got a variable? It could be a string, a dictionary word, an object, or maybe even just a number. You can tell which, sometimes, but I don't know how that works.

Here's a sample of what Inform looks like:

  Object -> MuddyPrints "muddy footprints"
    has  scenery,
    with  description "A trail of muddy footprints. Why don't
             adventurers ever wipe their feet?",
      name 'muddy' 'prints' 'footprints' 'mud' 'floor' 'trail',
      before [;
      Smell: "Eww. That's not mud.";
      Mop:
        remove self;
        ++cleaned;
        "You clean up the muddy footprints.";
      ],
    ; 

That defines an object. The "->" means that this object is contained within the last object declared with no ->'s in it. (-> -> is another level of containment, and so on.)

"has" introduces attributes - these are predefined flags, which are either true or false. "with" introduces properties, each of which is a 16-bit value, or perhaps an array of 16-bit values. The ones in single quotes are "dictionary words" - words the game's parser will recognize. "[;" introduces a subroutine.

If you have a subroutine for "before", that's called before the game allows an action. As a convenience to the user, it is treated as though the user had written "switch (Action)" before any unattached labels found within it, and put the needed ##'s in front of the labels. (I can see the eyes glazing over from here.)

But it's a really good language for this stuff. It's quirky, yes, but those footprints worked perfectly from very early on in the game. Not hard to write. Not all that hard to understand. It's worth learning, if you have any interest at all in telling interesting stories.

Where do they find these people?

"Yeah, Microsoft."

That's what he said.

To understand this fully, you have to see the whole conversation. Here's part of the transcript of the deposition of Dan Rogers, who is the "Dan" of CaDan corporation, the company which sent me no less than 77 junk faxes. The "Ca" apparently refers to the company's founder, his wife Cassandra. (She hasn't been deposed yet.)

In this transcript, "Q"uestions are asked by my lawyer, and "A"nswers are given by Dan Rogers, answering on behalf of CaDan corporation.

(Starting around Page 20 of the deposition)

Q: And why did you send this out?

A: Well, Microsoft had just made a strong effort to communicate security due to a significant amount of breach of security that was being recognized in the early part, mid part of 2002, and there was a lot of concern about Microsoft's credibility in the marketplace. Maybe back door ability to get into fire walls, things like that. And with that awareness now we want to make sure clients knew that Microsoft was not part of the problem, and it was a pretty critical message that needed to go out. I don't know if your client benefitted, but I'm assuming he did, by that awareness.

Particularly Internet providers, they're probably one of the biggest hacked in the computer industry, and getting current information, correct information or the ability to know where they can source organizations that are doing the right steps to protect their organization is critical.

Q: Was there a particular product that this was for?

A: Yeah, Microsoft.

Q: A particular Microsoft product?

A: Yeah, Microsoft security products.

Curiousity sparked, I went and looked up the ad he was talking about. It was sent on Thursday, May 16th 2002, at 9:50 AM. (I'll tell you why I care about that later.) Here's what it says, with some effort at preserving the formatting.

TRUST THE INSIDERS TO KNOW THE RIGHT

COMBINATION FOR NETWORK SECURITY

Establish sound security measures and policies		Deploy Strategic Technology Protection Program tools
(picture of combination lock dial)
Define virus protection processes		Manage security updates and upgrades

WE'LL HELP PROTECT YOUR ASSETS

Microsoft(R) Certified Partners are dialed into Microsoft's commitment

To making customers' systems more secure. As such, we're up-to speed on

Microsoft's Strategic Technology Protection Program that ensures you Get

Secure and Stay Secure through special tools, services, and ongoing support.

Unlock your full potential. Call or e-mail us today.

What's the problem here? Well, ignore the fact that I'm not a client, and never was. The problem here is that this guy wouldn't know "correct information" about security if it bit him in the ass. The problem is that, in fact, Microsoft is the problem, and the reason that, to the best of my knowledge, Plethora Internet has never had a security breach is that we do not run Microsoft products, at all. We're not stupid. I sometimes boot Windows on my laptop. In fact, between my initial draft of the developerWorks article I linked to there, and the final editing pass (about two weeks), there were three more critical security updates for Windows XP. And, so far as I know, a grand total of zero security holes discovered in the BSD unixes we run our systems on.

The problem is that this guy is a salesman who is simply not competent to make or evaluate technical decisions; he doesn't show any sign of knowing what the words mean. "Yeah, Microsoft." Microsoft is not a specific product to anyone but a stock broker; to the rest of us, they are a giant company with dozens of different products, only some of which are "security" products. Furthermore, even I, a casual user, know that Microsoft's security push had to do with their regular product suite. It's not about "security products", it's about Windows, Outlook, and Office - the programs responsible for an overwhelming majority of the security breaches in the world today. But not all of them, I must admit.

I put gas in my car!

I put gas in my car today. This may not seem like it's news, but it is to me; it's been just under a full month since I last put gas in my car. This is why I love my hybrid; I went 502.2 miles, with an average milage on this tank of 54.9 miles per gallon. (For the metric folks, that's about 4.3 l/100km) That's a low number for my car, but it's summer, and I hate the heat, so I run the AC all the time.

For those who haven't heard about it before, my beloved and wonderful car is a Honda Insight, the world's coolest car. It's small, it's zippy, it handles really well, and it uses almost no gas.

Once upon a time, I was trying to be more conscientious about the way I spent my money, so I decided to reduce the number of trips I made to the grocery store - I was going to Lunds, which is some distance from my house, because they carry a few foods I can't buy elsewhere.

When I got home, I decided to figure out how much money I was saving by not going to the grocery store as often. I spent $139 on groceries. I spent $0.48 on gas.

Never mind.

There's a lot to be said for getting the most efficient things you can. I do compact fluorescent bulbs for the same reason.