B of A's Bot Chat Specialist

I got an odd sort of maybe-phish the other day in the name of Bank of America.  The phish part was that they warned me about trouble on my account.  The odd part was that they did not ask me to "reply to this message," and did not ask me to "call this number"--only to check in st the B of A web page.  

I did check in at the web page,, and here is the odder part--nothing seemed out of line.  No blockage on the account, entries looked all right, blah blah.  So I popped over to the B of A customer service and fired up internet chat and--well, I'll spare you the details but I told my little story and they started firing back a list of warning signs for possible phish.  Whereupon I guilelessly typed

That is great, but I'm not 100 percent sure you are hearing me. Note that this email did not contain any of the obvious phish tags--.

And that was when it finally sank in on me: of course they weren't hearing me because there was nobody there.  Talking to a bot about a phish. Welcome to the new world.

Update  A friend says--oh, there was somebody there all right, just trained to talk like a bit.  Could be.

Afterthought.  I realized a little later that there was an obvious giveaaway in the email--came from "banksofamerica," i.e., plural instead of just one bank.  But I still don't know--what, exactly, was the scam?

Toldja...

Last summer I speculated:

I'm one of the many who thinks that Facebook is walking dead--that once the kids figure out they are sharing space with their grandparents, they'll stampede the exits.

Link.  Ha, now this.

Or "Maculate Deception"?

The Pope's Twitter handle is Pontifex. UB's Wichita Bureau claims that he has copped PontifexUS.  Evidently somebody else nicked off Pontifex Maximus, but what about Pontifex Minimus or Papa_Ratzi or EpopofEmor?  Anyway, Good Yontiff, Pontiff, and welcome to the new world.

If I Were Chinese, it would be 25,000,001

In China, 25 million people use their cellphone as their ebook reader.

[Per Atlantic blog; somehow the link will not load.]

Some Footnotes to Tim Wu

I spent a good chunk of the day with Tim Wu's Master Switch, and I can testify that it was time well spent: highly entertaining and enlightening history of what you might call "the communications industry," and in particular on, industry structure. Wu is big on "the cycle" --periods of free-flowing creativity and experimentation followed by he agonizing (and inevitable?) period of consolidation, when somebody gets control of the toll gate and, well, charges as toll.

I won't bother attempting a fullscale review at this late date, though I will indulge myself by noting a couple of points that intrigued me. One, if you like free competition in media, one of your natural allies is (ready for it, folks?)--Richard Nixon.  The combination of a free-competition ideology, a strong-minded and determined communications wonk and (who knows? Very likely) Nixon's own deep-seated resentment of what he saw as "the establishment: obliged to give us the cable revolution and the open-skies satellite policy, without which our world would have been much different.  And two, I'm impressed at how long it takes some changes to ripple through the system.  The Supreme Court put an end to the movie supply chain monopoly, and then to Ma Bell: in both cases, it was years before the full impact of the change filitered down to the masses (and in the case of telephone, it was over almost by the time it--finally--started).

Anyway: the cycle of free-flow and tollgate: with the internet, it seems we are still in something like free-flow but seen through Wu's eyes. it doesn't seem likely that we will stay there long.  Ma Bell seems to have pretty well clawed her way back to centrality (after a brief haitus during which none of us could make head or tail out of our phone bills anyway).  She doesn't have full control of the internet pipes just yet, although she has plenty of enablers standing ready to help her finish the job, not least Steve Jobs, who emerges as the dark energy at the end of the book (I read my Amazon download with my Iphone reader app).

If my search command is working right, there are just three mentions of Facebook, but given that the book was closed--what?  A couple of years ago?--I'm a little surprised there are that many..  But assuming Wu is still on the beat, I'd love to know what he thinks of this.

Remember Second Life?

  Yesterday it was a flippant aside; today I really mean it: what ever happened to Second Life?  You remember Second Life, yes?  As Wiki says, it's a "virtual world" where,

Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world (which residents refer to as "the grid").

A couple of years back, for all the buzz you might have thought Second Life was on the verge of becoming our First Life, taking over our brains, our energy, and our, you know, everything.  And then--what?  There's still a website, of course, but right now it is still showcasing the news that "Valentine's Day is Monday, Feb. 14."   Thanks, we know that and we wonder where is the Avatar who should be updating that.  Could it be that he is over at Facebook playing Oregon Trail?  Meanwhile the Wiki reports that the sponsoring company closed half of it office last year, and is down to 245 employees--Facebook, for comparison,  declares it has over 2,000.  Could we be hurtling towards history's first-ever virtual Chapter 11?

Teaching to the Laptop Generation

Apparently the teaching types are all in a flutter over an initiative at the University of Chicago Law School to ban the internet in the classroom (link).

Perhaps because I am an internet junkie myself, I have never been much bothered by internet connections in the classroom. Last year I was riffing an off-the-cuff account of the career of Michael Milken when I remarked on how Ted Turner had paid him a “tip” of (as I said) “something like two million.” A voice in the back said “that’s not what Wiki says!” And of course, the correct number is fifty million. Well, fair enough. Wiki was right and I was wrong, and the instant correction added just a tiny frisson of electricity to the moment.

What perplexes me is not the internet but the laptop itself. We are training a generation of lightning typists. I teach my finance course out of a file of spreadsheets. I send the file to students. For a while I would also flash the spreadsheet on the screen. But I realized that the students were all typing the whole damn spreadsheet, even though they already had it in their file. I still give them the spreadsheets. But these days, I try to limit what I put on the board, so they won’t have as much to copy.

This is a technical problem and I don’t think I (or anybody else) have solved it just yet. But hey, big deal. The occasion is piled high with difficulties, and we must rise to the occasion. We’ll just have to figure out different and better ways to teach.

Fn.: Evidently my student was cleverer than I realized. In five minutes of trying, I haven’t been able to come up with the Wiki page to which he would have been referring. But look here.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Franklin D. Roosevelt: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Michael W. Chertoff (link): "But I have no question about the fact that [Osama] bin Laden and [Ayman al-Zawahiri] and others like them quite consciously use the media, including the Internet, as a recruiting tool," Mr. Chertoff said. "In terms of recruiting, I would say that the principal way to enter the U.S. is through the Internet."

[Thanks, John]