It’s awesome. Mainly because it’s in Russian! Ty Ezbrannyj - You are the one!

The secret to a happy marriage for men is choosing a wife who is smarter and at least five years younger than you, say UK experts.

‘Younger wife’ for marital bliss

—–Original Message—–
From: PayPal Billing [mailto:billing@customerdata.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:13 PM
Subject: Account Verification Form
Dear PayPal customer,

During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification
procedure we have detected a slight error in your billing information.
This might be due to the following reasons:
1.A recent change in your personal information (ie. change of
address, email address)
2.An inability to accurately verify your selected option of payment
due to an internal error within our systems.

Please verify your information. To do this we have attached a form to this
email. Please download the form and follow the instructions on your screen.
NOTE: The form needs to be opened in a modern browser which has javascript
enabled (ex: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Opera 9)

We are requesting this information to verify and protect your identity. This
is in order to prevent the illegal activity of PayPal accounts.

Please do not reply to this email.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.Sincerely, PayPal
security team.

PayPal Email ID PP836

Remember, this is the Internet. Just because you’re not the type of person who would sell your grandmother to Russian gangsters for a dollar doesn’t mean there aren’t a thousand and one other people out here who would. (Sell your grandmother to Russian gangsters that is, and probably their own as well.)

This email was good. No spelling or obvious grammar mistakes. The only warning signs were (a) the sending email address (billing@customerdata.com) and (b) the fact that they attached an html form for the user to fill out. The html document was encrypted and wrapped in a javascript tag. NOT GOOD!!

It’s excerpted from a Czechoslovakian science fiction film from the 1960s. Surprisingly good. This scene has a decidedly anti-western theme to it.

In a report on their findings the researchers said: ‘We conclude men’s cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.’

They call it “reproductively focused cognition.”
Rest at the Daily Telegraph

“It’s not so much the sight, it’s the smell that can get to you very quickly.”

The smell also tends to stick with you the most, too. I remember my mom was canning beef a few years ago and the canner ran dry, scorching some of the meat. I just about couldn’t eat the beef after that. It smelled exactly like one of the cases that we had in the lab where a lady’s skull had been scorched. It wasn’t something that I had thought about in years, but the smell from the canner instantly brought that memory back. Anyways, read the rest of the article. Go Zack!

Bugs & Bodies

Zachary Venable, a forensic entomologist turned educator, presented a workshop for environmental educators on forensic entomology-using insects to help determine what has caused an animal’s death and how long since an animal died recently at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center.

I thought the lead sentence in the accompanying article was appropriate too:

What a marvel the first photographic images must have been to their early-19th-century viewers — the crisp, unassailable reality of scenes and events, unfiltered by an artist’s paintbrush or point of view. And what an opportunity for manipulation. It didn’t take long for schemers to discover that with a little skill and imagination, photographic realism could be used to create manufactured realities.

Following up on saturday’s post about Facebook spam, Slashdot this morning posted a link to a new “quiz” that illustrates the amount of information that a Fakebook developer can get about you even if you NEVER install their application.

Slashdot being slashdot, the phrase “sheeple” emerges fairly quickly:

Should Facebook users be more cautious? Absolutely. But most Facebook users are sheep-le who won’t give a second thought to this kind of thing.(reference here)

But another user has a good point:

The nature of facebook, like many other things people use, implies a certain degree of privacy and control over your exposure. It’s not at all the same as just blathering all your crap on a public forum for all of google to index and serve up somewhere.(reference here)

The thing about sheeple, is that we are all sheeple at some point or another. You simply can’t be “savvy” at everything. Yes, I may be sophisticated about technology, but there are plenty of things where I have only naive and superficial understandings.

The bottom line is that facebook is not as private as you think. Anything you put on facebook is ultimately available to people who you might not want to have it available to. Most people have an expectation of at least semi-privacy that one would expect having a conversation with a friend in a public area. Yes it’s possible for someone to overhear it, but it’s not something that is going to wind up on the frontpage of the newspaper. But really, posting on facebook is like putting an advertisement in the newspaper or going on TV.

Links
Sheeple, XKCD : http://xkcd.com/610/
Facebook quiz : http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=114232425072
Slashdot comment thread: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/23/1458246/Facebook-App-Exposes-Abject-Insecurity?from=rss
Sheeple definition (wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheeple