jameswharris

How Anne Got Phished and What We Should Learn from Her Experience

by James Wallace Harris, 2/2/24

My friend Anne called me the other day terribly upset. Her bank had just called her to say her account had been hacked. She was worried that her computer was the tool of the hackers and wanted me to look at it. Anne was freaked out and called me because I’m her computer guy.

The first thing I asked her was, “How do you know it was the bank who called you?” She said the bank’s name and phone number came up on her phone. I told her she needed to call her bank and confirm that. I told her the bad guys can pretend to be anyone. Anne said she would do that immediately.

When I didn’t hear from her for a couple of hours, I called her. A man answered. I didn’t think it was her husband but asked for Anne. A woman got on the line I didn’t know. I again asked for Anne. She said she was Anne. I was suspicious, so I asked this time giving Anne’s full name. She said, “Yes, that’s me.” I said, “No, you’re not.” and hung up.

I couldn’t call Anne, but I thought a text might get through. I texted “Call me right now.” The real Anne called me. I told her what happened. She said she’d been on the phone with her bank for hours and she had been phished. They stole $3500. I told her she needed to call her phone company immediately. “Tell them your calls are being redirected.” A couple of hours later, she called back to say her forwarding had been set to another number and the phone company had turned that off. Anne said the phone company couldn’t help her anymore and would notify their security people, but it would take a few days.

My guess is the phishers had gotten ahold of hacked data from Anne’s bank, so they knew a lot about her, enough to convince them they were the bank. The phishers then conned Anne into giving them more information. Then they rigged her phone so they would get her calls. That would allow them to confirm any transfer requests. That’s very clever.

Anne knew she had been duped, and it made her feel stupid. Anne is no dummy. She has two undergraduate and two master’s degrees. But we want to trust people, especially banks. We trust banks with our money, so we want to believe they’re dependable.

Anne brought over her laptop for me to check. It didn’t seem to have any malware or viruses, but Google would not work using Chrome. I couldn’t change anything on the computer because an IT department had it locked down. I don’t know if that was a coincidence that Google stopped working, or if the phishers had somehow jammed Chrome and Google without needing administrative rights. They wouldn’t have needed to hack her computer to steal the money, but it might have helped them by keeping Anne from searching for help.

Anne was still upset, frequently crying, and embarrassed by this event. Her bank had immediately replaced the money, but Anne was still afraid something else was going to happen. She’s so afraid that she’s changed banks and doing everything she can to protect herself. She cried off and on for days. At first, she didn’t want me to tell anyone because she was embarrassed about being conned. But I said she should tell everyone she knew to help other people avoid getting phished too. That’s when she said I could blog about her.

Now I’m worried. I’m thinking about all the things people should do to protect their identity and money. Once I started thinking about it, I realized the problem is immense. What should I do to be more proactive? We generally think of “identity thief” in terms of people, but phishers also steal the identity of banks. Solving phishing would require perfect identification of people and corporations. But since nearly everything happens online today, it’s easy to spoof both kinds of identity.

An antivirus program won’t protect you from this kind of theft, although the best ones try. Norton has a nice tips page, “How to protect against phishing: 18 tips for spotting a scam.” Its focus is on phishing emails because that’s what their software can deal with, but you also need to consider phone calls or even people coming to your door.

There are also all kinds of anti-fraud services for credit cards, but I don’t know enough about them yet. AARP has a whole website devoted to “Scams & Fraud.” It even has an article, “Bank Impersonation Is the Most Common Text Scam.” It makes me want to join AARP, but I wonder about trusting a company that has so many ads and popups.

Remember the old days when you had to go to the bank in person? And the bank was a big, impressive building? The digital world is both insubstantial and so damn shady. Since I read a lot of science fiction, I think of what the future might bring to solve phishing and identity theft.

The core problem is verification of identity. Right now, thieves can be you with a username and password. Hell, my iPhone needs facial identification before it will talk to me, so why don’t banks want better verification? You’d think banks would want two or three kinds of biometric proof of your identity before they transfer any of your money. But then, how do you verify your bank is your bank?

Another thing that worries me is the number of companies that have my credit card on file, or my bank account routing number. I hear about big companies getting hacked all the time. Maybe there should be a law against storing such financial information, or even personal information. It would be a pain in the ass if I had to fill out all my information every time I ordered an ebook from Amazon, but it might be worth it. PayPal is one solution to hide credit card information.

Just a bit of searching the internet on how to protect myself from fraud reveals it could be a subject worthy of a college major. Right now, banks and stores cover digital theft, but will that always be true? Insurance companies that insure homes are going out of business in some states because of too many natural disasters. Some retail chains are closing stores in areas where there’s too much “shrinkage” in their inventories. So, I can imagine banks going bankrupt or refusing some types of customers.

Right now, banks are making more money by laying off human tellers and using online systems. They probably save enough money downsizing buildings to web servers even with the cost of covering phishing theft. But at some point, they will decide that the cost is too high. I think the reason many people want to elect Donald Trump again is because they secretly want more of a police state. They’re tired of all the crime and cons. One way to solve it is to use computers and the internet. Americans never wanted national identity cards, but what will they think of being chipped like a dog? Things could get very weird in the future. If we really knew the absolute identity of every person and their location, it would solve a lot of crimes, but what would it mean to personal freedom?

Anne just called me. She’s learning. She got a phishing attempt in her email. She called to see if I thought it was the bank phishers. I didn’t think so. I told her that The International Guild of Phishers kept a dummies list on the Dark Web to share with each other.

At least she laughed at that.

JWH

Too Many Ways to Become Homeless

by James Wallace Harris, 1/25/24

I never could understand why my mother was so obsessed with dying at home until I got older myself. As the years pass, the more attached I’ve become to this house, and the more I fear becoming homeless, even temporarily. I’ve never been an anxious person, but this fear is starting to gnaw at me. Is that an old person thing? I never can tell what’s real about getting old.

Consequently, I’ve started paying attention to all the ways people become homeless — especially the ways that could make Susan and I homeless. I was going to write an essay listing the numerous ways people could lose their homes, but I found “15 Ways to Become Homeless” online and felt I shouldn’t duplicate it. Instead, I shall focus more on my specific feelings.

Whenever I see news about tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires, ice storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, I think about all the homelessness they cause. This horrifies me. It depresses me to see people lose their homes, which makes me anxious about climate change and weather. I wonder how refugees from natural disasters find new homes and how long it takes. I also wonder about the odds of it happening to anyone. If I knew how many homes and apartments there were in American, and how many are destroyed by nature every year, I could calculate the odds. (ChatGPT at Bing says the odds are 1 in 200 for the general population, and 1 in 25 for people under the poverty line.)

It also upsets me to see news about Ukraine and Gaza, or any other country at war. I see all those homes and apartments blown up and worry about the millions of war refugees. War is so cruel to civilians. I never worried about becoming a war refugee until recent years and people started talking about a second U.S. civil war. How can they even think of such insanity?

I don’t know how rational this fear is, but I’ve become afraid of trees. I frequently see videos on the internet of trees falling on houses and cars. I’ve even thought of having all the trees near my house cut down. But that would be hugely expensive.

Increasingly I’m seeing stories about people being made homeless because of investors using housing as a commodity. I was particularly depressed by this story I saw on YouTube (see below). Old people, mostly old ladies who looked in their eighties and nineties who had been living in a retirement community for decades, were pushed out when their monthly fees went from around $1500 to over $6000, all because some millionaire/billionaire figured they needed to make even more money. It disturbed me that all those long-term friendships were broken up, and all those carefully crafted comfortable homes left behind. I have thought about how Susan, and I might be safer, and life would be easier, if we could live in such a community, but now I wonder about their long-term viability.

A lot of people are becoming homeless because corporate and private investors see housing as a money-making opportunity. This is increasingly pushing people out of owning homes, or even renting them. But the rich also push people out by gentrifying a neighborhood. Lots of retired Americans can no longer afford to live in the United States, so they move abroad to take advantage of lower housing costs. But that only raises prices for the locals, pushing them out of housing. Thus, using housing as an investment makes Americans and people living in other countries homeless. It has a snowball effect. Would there be less homelessness if Airbnb was never invented?

Global warming, war, economic collapse, failed states, and growing class violence are generating millions of refugees. That’s why Republicans are so freaked out about illegal border crossings. Since we already have a housing shortage, immigration causes more homelessness, and an even greater need for cheap housing, compounding the political problem. On the other hand, we have a declining population which means a shrinking economy, and immigration is the only capitalistic solution for depopulation. Building more housing grows the economy.

We need to figure out how to increase low-cost housing. Most builders are in it to make money, so they build what people with money can afford. Capitalism is one of the main contributors to homelessness, so someone needs to figure out how to make capitalism become one of the solutions. Conservatives don’t want socialism, but do they really want Darwinian capitalism?

I wonder about all the abandoned homes in decaying cities and small towns. Could they be repurposed? Could small towns attract retirees and revitalize their communities? Any person with a retirement income is like having a job added to your community. Getting a thousand retirees would be like getting a factory that hires a thousand people. Wouldn’t it?

Most people become homeless when they lose their jobs and have no family or friend support. Many people become homeless when they become drug users or alcoholics. Then there a huge population of mentally ill people who are homeless. All those factors are what people consider traditional causes of homelessness. I worry about those people, but I don’t think I’ll become one. What I worry about are all the non-traditional ways people are becoming homeless.

What a lot of people don’t know is about half of single homeless people are over 50 years old. In general, 1 in 5 homeless people are 55 or older, and that percentage and age demarcation is growing larger. It’s almost impossible to be single and live just off social security. Collapsing pension plans are also causing homelessness. No matter how careful we create our financial nest egg, there’s always ways for it to be raided.

I know nothing about the real problem of homelessness. It’s quite a complex issue. All I know is what I see on television and read on the internet. It appears that anyone could become homeless, and that scares me. And the problem is getting larger every day. It’s like climate change, a problem we mostly ignore completely, or confront by slapping on political Band-Aids.

I feel like Chicken Little yelling the sky is falling. To paraphrase Joseph Heller’s “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” and say, just because the sky doesn’t look like it’s falling doesn’t mean it’s not.

JWH

I’m Too Dumb to Use Artificial Intelligence

by James Wallace Harris, 1/19/24

I haven’t done any programming since I retired. Before I retired, I assumed I’d do programming for fun, but I never found a reason to write a program over the last ten years. Then, this week, I saw a YouTube video about PrivateGPT that would allow me to train an AI to read my own documents (.pdf, docx, txt, epub). At the time I was researching Philip K. Dick, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of content I was finding about the writer. So, this light bulb went off in my head. Why not use AI to help me read and research Philip K. Dick. I really wanted to feed the six volumes of collected letters of PKD to the AI so I could query it.

PrivateGPT is free. All I had to do was install it. I’ve spent days trying to install the dang program. The common wisdom is Python is the easiest programming language to learn right now. That might be true. But installing a Python program with all its libraries and dependencies is a nightmare. What I quickly learned is distributing and installing a Python program is an endless dumpster fire. I have Anaconda, Python 3.11, Visual Studio Code, Git, Docker, Pip, installed on three computers, Windows, Mac, and Linux, and I’ve yet to get anything to work consistently. I haven’t even gotten to part where I’d need the Poetry tool. I can run Python code under plain Python and Anaconda and set up virtual environments on each. But I can’t get VS Code to recognize those virtual environments no matter what I do.

Now I don’t need VS Code at all, but it’s so nice and universal that I felt I must get it going. VS Code is so cool looking, and it feels like it could control a jumbo jet. I’ve spent hours trying to get it working with the custom environments Conda created. There’s just some conceptual configuration I’m missing. I’ve tried it on Windows, Mac, and Linux just in case it’s a messed-up configuration on a particular machine. But they all fail in the same way.

I decided I needed to give up on using VS Code with Conda commands. If I continue, I’ll just use the Anaconda prompt terminal on Windows, or the terminal on Mac or Linux.

However, after days of banging my head against a wall so I could use AI might have taught me something. Whenever I think of creating a program, I think of something that will help me organize my thoughts and research what I read. I might end up spending a year just to get PrivateGPT trained on reading and understanding articles and dissertations on Philip K. Dick. Maybe it would be easier if I just read and processed the documents myself. I thought an AI would save me time, but it requires learning a whole new specialization. And if I did that, I might just end up becoming a programmer again, rather than an essayist.

This got me thinking about a minimalistic programming paradigm. This was partly inspired by seeing the video “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Plain Text.”

Basically, this video advocates doing everything in plain text, and using the Markdown format. That’s the default format of Obsidian, a note taking program.

It might save me lot of time if I just read the six volumes of PKD’s letters and take notes over trying to teach a computer how to read those volumes and understand my queries. I’m not even sure I could train PrivateGPT to become a literary researcher.

Visual Studio Code is loved because it does so much for the programmer. It’s full of artificial intelligence. And more AI is being added every day. Plus, it’s supposed to work with other brilliant programming tools. But using those tools and getting them to cooperate with each other is befuddling my brain.

This frustrating week has shown me I’m not smart enough to use smart tools. This reminds me of a classic science fiction short story by Poul Anderson, “The Man Who Came Early.” It’s about a 20th century man who thrown back in time to the Vikings, around the year 1000 AD. He thinks he will be useful to the people of that time because he can invent all kinds of marvels. What he learns is he doesn’t even know how to make the tools, in which to make the tools, that made the tools he was used to in the 20th century.

I can use a basic text editor and compiler, but my aging brain just can’t handle more advance modern programming tools, especially if they’re full of AI.

I need to solve my data processing needs with basic tools. But I also realized something else. My real goal was to process information about Philip K. Dick and write a summarizing essay. Even if I took a year and wrote an AI essay writing program, it would only teach me a whole lot about programming, and not about Philip K. Dick or writing essays.

What I really want is for me to be more intelligent, not my computer.

JWH

Is Remembering Just Not Forgetting?

by James Wallace Harris, 1/17/24

I am fascinated by how works of pop culture become popular and then how they are forgotten.

I read this article, “The Percentage of Music on Streaming Services That Was Never Played in 2023 is Staggering” that got me thinking. Most music streaming services now claim to have catalogs of over one hundred million songs. This report is based on 158.6 million songs, with the following breakdown of plays:

79.5 million had 0 to 10 plays

42.7 million had 11 to 100 plays

30.0 million had 101 to 1,000 plays

 6.4 million had more than 1,000 plays

The report said 45.6 million of that first group got no plays at all, but ten songs in 2023 got one billion plays. This says a lot about pop culture. 86.2% of all those songs got less than one thousand plays. I guess that’s the background radiation of pop culture interest, showing how quickly society forgets.

I wonder if I played any of those songs with less than a one thousand plays during 2023. I wonder if I play a song that no one else played at all in 2023. I wonder how many people also play the same songs I play all the time from my favorite playlist.

When I was young, I wanted to hear the current hit songs and albums, read the latest books, go to the movies that just came out, and talk with my friends about the TV shows which broadcasted last night. Now, in old age, I’m years behind, and make no effort to keep up with current pop culture. I desperately cling to the past, hoping not to forget. I feel like I’m one of the characters at the end of Fahrenheit 451 trying to preserve a book.

My focus in old age is to find the best music, movies, books, and TV shows from all time. The trouble is digging through the mountain of old pop culture artifacts and finding the archeological gems. I work to remember what I love, but also find new loves before they are completely forgotten. I find those new loves by finding people who still remember them.

Of the roughly sixteen million albums that’s been recorded, how many are worth remembering and playing? Even if I played an album a day, and I lived another thirty years, I doubt I could listen to more than ten thousand of those sixteen million albums. There’s too much to remember.

It’s great that streaming services offer us access to all those songs, but they will be forgotten. That’s an immense amount of creative effort that’s disappearing from our collective consciousness. It’s also true for books, movies, and television shows.

How much can a culture remember of its best creative efforts? I once speculated that less than one hundred novels from the 19th century are remembered by the average bookworm. Literary scholars could name more, but I doubt even many English professors could list two hundred novels from the 19th century off the top of their heads.

Lately, I’ve been watching old movies from the 1950s. IMDB says there were 4906 movies made between 1950-1959 in their database, of which 165 were released in theaters. Here’s their list of the 165 in order of popularity. I would guess I’ve seen about 140 of them. But then, I was born in 1951. How many of these movies have been seen by people born after the year 2000? I have a tough time getting friends of my own age to watch old movies from the 1950s with me. However, I’m often surprised by young people on YouTube that have channels devoted to old movies. But what percentage of their age group are they? 0.001?

There’s always a percentage of the population that loves to explore old pop culture. I maintain a database system that identifies the most remembered old science fiction books. I follow people online who specialize in remembering old movies, old music, and old books. Only one of my friends is like me and searches out old books and movies. Is there a word for people like us, who cherish remembering old pop culture? It’s different from plain old nostalgia.

I’m currently reading The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick that was written in 1963 and published in early 1964. In it, characters from the 22nd century collect old records from the 20th century. I wonder if that will come true. Or will the music from the 20th century just sit on some computer, rarely played even by scholars? In the novel, Dick has his characters agree that a song, “Every Valley” by Aksel Schitz (book spelling) is their favorite vocal recording. I could find this (slightly different spelling):

Is this what Philip K. Dick couldn’t forget.

JWH

Reading Comprehension: Books vs. Audiobooks

by James Wallace Harris, 1/3/24

At 72, I’m still learning how to read.

I recently finished the audiobook of The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick and started to write a review for my science fiction blog. That’s when I realized I needed to read the book with my eyes before I could write a proper review. The Simulacra was a complex novel involving several plot threads and dozens of named characters. (Read the plot summary at Wikipedia. Get the book at Amazon.)

From my audiobook experience I found the book compelling, fun, and I was always anxious to get back to listening to the story. I was never confused by what was going on, but when I tried to summarize the novel for my review, I discovered I couldn’t recall all the details I needed to make a coherent description of the story. There were just too many science-fictional concepts. Nor could I describe all the plot threads without researching them.

I won’t describe the book in detail, I’ll do that in my review, but for now, The Simulacra is about a post-apocalyptic world where China attacked America with atomic missiles in 1980, and the U.S. government and Germany combined to form a totalitarian regime called The United States of Europe and America (USEA). It appears to be run by a captivating 23-year-old first lady named Nicole Thibodeaux. However, she has been married to five presidents and always remains young. Since this book was written in the summer of 1963, I assume Dick was inspired by Jackie Kennedy because Nicole spends most of her time charming people, decorating the White House and gardens, and putting on nightly cultural events. But Nicole is also ruthless enough to have people summarily executed, evidently wielding unlimited power. She has access to time travel no less, and one subplot involves her negotiating with Nazis to change the course of WWII. Other subplots involve an insane psychic pianist Nicole wants to play at the White House, the outlawing of psychiatry pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, what happens to the last legal psychiatrist, a pair of ordinary guys who have a jug band that plays classical music who want to perform at the White House, a trio of sound engineers who are trying to chase down the psychic pianist to record, and a small company that hopes to get the contract to construct the next president. This long paragraph barely scratches the surface of the whole novel.

My failure of completely understanding the novel from listening to the audiobook was partly due to aging memory and partly due to the complexity of Dick’s prose. I could have hashed out several thousand words describing what I remembered, although it would have been a bundle of vague impressions. Summarizing what PKD was trying to do was evasive from just listening to the audiobook.

Audiobooks are bad for remembering exact details, which I knew, but was painfully revealed when I tried to read the novel and take notes. I called up The Simulacra on my PC in the Kindle app on the left side of the screen, and launched Obsidian, a note taking program on the left side of the screen. I started reading The Simulacra again, but with my eyes. After two days, getting to the 29% read position on the Kindle edition, I had twenty-eight names, twenty-six plot points, several lists of other details, and several quotes in my notes. I figure there are three to five main plot threads, each involving three or more characters.

More than that, I realized Philip K. Dick had riffed on hundreds of ideas. As I read them, I remembered them, but I realized that while listening, I had not put most of them within the context of the story. It wasn’t until my second reading that I saw all these hundreds of creative speculations as being part of one jigsaw puzzle picture. And I’m not talking about the characters and plots. I’m talking about worldbuilding.

Rereading with my eyes allowed me to stop and ponder. Rereading allowed me to remember the bigger picture. However, listening to the audiobook let me enjoy the story more. The narrator, Peter Berkrot, did voices for each of the characters, and acted out their personalities. Listening to the novel, it felt like I was listening to an old-time radio drama where many actors performed a story.

At one point I got too tired to read and went to bed. But before I fell asleep, I listened to the part I had just read. Berkrot expressed emotions I had not picked up while reading with my eyes, but recalling the scenes made me realize that Dick had put them there. In other words, Berkrot had found aspects of the text I missed and was pointing them out with sound.

Over the ten years since I’ve retired, I’ve been learning the value of rereading books. In fact, I now feel reading a story just once is unfair to the author. It takes two or more readings to see the author’s vision. Reading a work of fiction just once provides one layer of understanding. It’s when we see multiple layers within a work that we start to truly understand it.

Switching back and forth between reading with my eyes and reading with my ears reveals both methods have their advantages. If I read once with one sense organ and reread with another, the two combine to create reading synergy.

For most of my life, I’ve always been concerned with reading more books, but the wisdom I’m gaining from getting old is showing me that both speed reading and reading lots of books is a distraction from deep reading.

Right now, I’d recommend:

Listen to an audiobook for the first reading to get the big picture.
Reread with a physical book or ebook to get the details. Read slowly and stop often to ponder.
Write a review to make deeper sense of a book. Putting things into words pushes us to make sense of things.
Read reviews and scholarly articles to get other perspectives.
Reread the book again to bring it all together.

This is what I’m working on with The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick. It’s not considered one of Dick’s better works, but I’m trying to discover if there is more to the novel than its current reputation.

JWH