We are fooled by spam – we really are

Posted by William Gallagher

I had a legitimate request to re-enter some credit card details the other day and still I hesitated. We are so used to these so-called phishing spam scams. So many of the details were legit – it was for an online backup service that I do use, that was the name of the machine that backs up to it, that was the right renewal date and the expired credit card number was correct – that I didn’t just chuck the email away. But I also didn’t click on it: I separately went to the online backup company’s website, logged in there and checked the details.

But apparently that’s unusual. And so unusual that I can’t brag about it: the odds are that I’ve been fooled by scams before and will again. Seriously. You get these stupid spam messages and you wonder how anyone can be taken in by them. Intellectually you realise they must be because the spam keeps coming, it must be worth the spammers’ time, but you will be head-jerk-backed shocked at how effective those emails are at getting people’s details out of them:

Even on the worst-performing phishing websites, 3 percent of users still submitted their data. On the most effective phishing sites, as many as 45 percent did.

Google notes in its write-up that this is big business for scammers, as one attacker can be responsible for millions of phishing emails.

Once a hacker is able to access someone’s account, they spend an average of three minutes figuring out how much it’s worth, and will apparently move on if the account doesn’t seem valuable enough. According to the study, hackers use Gmail’s own search function to figure out if an account is worth their time, looking for terms like “wire transfer” and “bank.”

What happens next probably won’t surprise you: The hacker tries try to get money from an account’s contact list. They send emails to the person’s friends, family and colleagues with fake stories like “we were mugged last night in an alley” in the hopes of getting them to send cash.

Google Study Finds Email Scams Are More Effective Than You’d Expect – Damon Beres, Huffington Post (7 November 2014)

Read the full piece for more details and some advice about stopping being scammed. Mind you, if you’re reading this and you also click through to read that, you’re probably more aware of the issue than most people. And being aware is a key protection.

What customers? US store chain fights Apple Pay

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m not that interested in Apple Pay – a system by which you wave your iPhone at a cash register and have paid for your goods and services – because it isn’t in the UK yet. And also this is the latest of several so-called contactless payment systems and I’m just used to standing in queues behind people making rather a lot of contact as they bang their devices onto shops’ own devices. I mean bang. Loud enough to cover the swearing.

But Apple Pay went live recently in the States and it has two advantages. First, there are a lot of iPhones, this isn’t like trying to light a revolution with an Amazon Fire phone.

Second, it’s got Apple. And the company’s stated aim was to start with the idea of what makes this useful for customers rather than businesses. That sounds like bollocks: this is a gigantic company claiming to be on the side of the individual, the little person, yeah. Only, this is the firm that did the iTunes Store. Now, not everyone likes that but it was so easy to use for customers that it more-or-less, near-as-dammit killed off pirate stores for most people. There is still piracy and still people finding ways to get music that hurts artists and is a bag of spanners over the head to morality, but before iTunes, it was all you could do.

Come iTunes, come a lot of people paying a lot of money. And yes, Apple gets a massive cut. So you can easily, readily see why other firms are unhappy about this. But you can also see the result. Many film studios got together to make a rival to your buying films off the iTunes Store. It’s called Ultraviolet, which is just a meaningless name and it’d be great if that were the only problem.

The only real problem is that these firms aren’t even pretending to be in it for us. For a group with a completely legitimate reason to want to do without Apple, they don’t even seem to be able to get along with each other. This varies and in small ways improves, but it has been the case that to watch a film on Ultraviolet, you had to sign up to an Ultraviolet account. So far, so familiar and so identical to Apple and its iTunes Store. But remember that you go to this to buy a film, one film, and typically you get there because the shiny disc version you bought comes with a redemption code. Okay, so you expect to enter that code and you expect to sign up to the service but you don’t expect to have to sign up again. And, the first time I tried this some years ago, again. There were three separate signups in the process.

Translation: these firms won’t even share their sodding databases.

That’s a group that gets along, that’s a group that is going to stay together. And that’s not a group that is going to agree on anything technical like the ability to get the films to work.

Seriously. You start this process, you begin thinking you’re doing something wrong, you eventually twig how stupid it is yet you’re invested now, you’ve spent a lot of time logging on and it becomes like a crossword puzzle where sheer determination to finish gets you to the end. The first time I did this, I got there, I got it working, and I couldn’t watch my film. Physically could not get it to play.

The second time, I couldn’t even find my film.

All that effort for one movie and when I got to it, it was hidden. As a customer, what I want when I go to buy a specific movie is to see all other films but that one first.

This was the Veronica Mars movie and if you’re not feeling the rant yet, let me give you three facts. The day I heard Veronica Mars would be distributed on Ultraviolet, I knew I’d buy it off iTunes instead. I backed Veronica Mars on Kickstarter so I got a free copy of the film on Ultraviolet and I still bought it off iTunes. Spent money again because I could not get Ultraviolet to work.

And here’s fact number three: Warner Bros, distributors of Veronica Mars, sent me a refund for my iTunes purchase.

So they spent all that effort, all that money, setting up an online store and because it fails to work, they end up spending more money to pay customers for the inconvenience.

Here’s the thing.

We’re going to get it again.

With Apple Pay.

There are companies in the States do not want to work with Apple and, as ever, that makes total sense. But it already looks likely that they’re going to cock it up because they already have. If you were in the States and had an Apple Pay iPhone, you’ve been able to pay for your shopping at CVS, a pharmacy chain. You’ve been able to not because CVS decided to support Apple Pay but because it long ago decided to support Google’s fairly failed rival, Google Wallet.

Both systems use technology called Near Field Communications (NFC): the phone and the cash register have to be near to each other. CVS has the equipment and now they have two phone systems that will work with it, but it looks like this phone-based payment thing is taking off, it looks like customers are taking to it.

So CVS appears to have shut it down for them.

It now appears that fellow major pharmacy chain CVS is… shutting down the NFC functionality of its payment terminals entirely, a move presumably intended to thwart Apple Pay. Google Wallet services are obviously also being affected by the move.

Multiple reports on Twitter and the MacRumors forums have indicated that CVS has sent an email to its stores indicating that NFC support is to be turned off. It is still relatively early in the day in the U.S., but we are now starting to see reports of NFC indeed being turned off at CVS stores.

The reason behind Rite Aid’s and CVS’s moves to disable unofficial Apple Pay support in their stores is presumably related to their participation in Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a retailer group developing its own mobile payments system known as CurrentC. A claimed internal Rite Aid message shared with SlashGear supports this notion, instructing cashiers to explain to customers that Apple Pay is not supported but that MCX’s solution will be available next year.

CVS Stores Reportedly Disabling NFC to Shut Down Apple Pay and Google Wallet – Eric Slivka, MacRumours (25 October 2014)

They haven’t even got their alternative working.

I like Apple and at least in part because they make things that work. I’d rather a world where there were many companies doing things that work, I’m strange like that, but for God’s sake, choosing to stop your customers paying you money is a bit thick.

Is this good or bad? Quicken 2015 for Mac is out

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve never used Quicken, not once, not on any platform, but when I was writing about computers I was aware of it as a popular accounts and budgeting application that ran on both Mac and Windows. Then I became aware that the Mac version became significantly poorer than the Windows one. Now after a seven-year hiatus without a new Mac one, there’s a new Mac one.

That’s got to be good.

But it’s still not on a par with the Windows one. I looked at the company’s chart listing great features both versions have and the first one is:

Free feature improvements included*

Golly. I’d consider that padding wherever it comes in the feature list but that it’s number one – and that it comes with a footnote which says this is only true until August 2015 – I’m not running to buy this.

Still, the Mac needs this kind of software: there are people who run Windows machines solely to run Quicken on. True, maybe today they run Windows in a partition on their Mac so it’s the same machine but it’s still a big and expensive faff.

I’m choosing to look at this instead as Quicken coming round to the Mac market and I’m choosing to see this as a first step. That’s partly because the company explicitly asks you to vote on what missing feature you’d like to see done next.

I don’t think that’s very impressive. Especially not as I understand that all the features on offer are already in and working for the Windows version. I get that it’s got to be harder converting them to OS X than it might seem, but still if I were tempted by Quicken, I think I’d wait a few years until they’d caught up.

If you’re in need of a money manager for Mac, take a look at the official site and see for yourself. You can’t try out a trial version of Quicken for Mac, there isn’t one, but the company does say that there is a 60-day money back guarantee. Look into the detail of that before you buy, though, okay?

Your fee is part of how you advertise yourself

Posted by William Gallagher

There are many online services now where you can hire writers and they all have several things in common. Without fail, the writers are charging practically no money at all or sometimes literally no money at all. This is because everybody thinks they can write and part of their stupidity is that they conclude that the way to get writing jobs is to be cheaper than anyone else.

Cue a race to the bottom as every amateur undercuts every other amateur and the professionals are left being told they’re too expensive.

Now, I’d be okay with this and I might even enjoy the karma that the quality and effectiveness and sometimes actual comprehensibility of the writing you get for free is exactly as bad as you’d imagine.

Unfortunately, companies who are stupid enough to hire writers who charge no money will tend to conclude that writers are crap. You can mock them for this but it won’t change their minds. They’ve gone to a writer, the writer is crap, all writers are crap.

It bothers me that this is what they conclude and I am only a little bit mollified by the fact that they’re going out of business on Tuesday.

There is a word for companies like this and it’s the same word for amateur writers: “goodbye”.

But in this race for the bottom you can unconsciously believe that you have to lower your prices to get any chance of a look in. Often, it’s true. That destroys or at least dents my argument a bit but then this undoes the dent, this repairs it and gives it all a polish: an app developer raised his price as an April Fools’ joke and it worked.

San Francisco-based developer Giacomo Balli doubled his take on his iPhone apps thanks to an April Fools’ Day joke. When he ratcheted up the price to an eye-popping $4.99 for an app that catalogs books, he got downloads instead of complaints.

The App Store lets devs change the sale price of their apps pretty much any time they like, but most folks take conventional routes: cutting prices during sales or dropping prices to free. Balli made his previously free apps premium with just a toggle.

“There weren’t any app updates, either,” he told Cult of Mac over the phone. “Just the price.”

How a dev doubled his revenue with an April Fools’ joke – Rob LeFebrve, Cult of Mac (22 August 2014)

The full piece has some thoughts about how this worked and how it had something to do with the specific target market for this app.

But the thing to take away for me is that your price is part of your advert for yourself. If you say you are worth something, you’re worth it.

Three years of checks and balances

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve mentioned this before but I’ve realised more about it. One of the key things I recommend you do is to check your bank balances every day. That’s it. It keeps you focused and, moreover, it keeps you really aware of how what you do pays off.

Now, that’s not to say that you can or should only measure your productivity and worth by how much money you earn. I’m a writer, I’d be insane to do that.

But it is a measure you can see and now that it is so easy to check our accounts online, it’s a really fast and handy measure.

The reason I’m telling you this again today is that I’ve now been doing it since 2011. Today is my third anniversary of checking all my accounts every single day: I have checked without fail 1,095 days in a row.

And this is what I have just realised: while I might want those balances to be healthier, the fact is that whenever I doubt I’ve got the discipline to do something, I can now look to 1,095 days in a row where I did.

Are you still on AOL?

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve disliked AOL ever since doing some work for them. Nothing against the company, I wasn’t there long enough to get any sense of the place – I was just freelancing and I have a feeling I was actually freelancing for some other firm, probably BBC, and working with AOL on their behalf.

But I did have to create some AOL pages and that was enough.

It was stupidly awkward, just a true pain and you ended up making every page look the same because you only have so many days of life left in your body.

Then around that time someone bought AOL – was it Time Warner? my mind’s gone – and the story was that this corporation mandated that all employees switch to AOL email. And then quietly stopped mandating when they found that it was so bad.

But AOL and CompuServe were once what the internet is today and if it isn’t true that everybody used them, it might as well have been true. Just as today if it isn’t true that everybody has fled AOL and CompuServe, it ought to be true.

The only advantage to staying on AOL is that you get to keep your @aol.com email address and for some people it’s worth the hassle to keep that.

What I didn’t realise was just how many people that is. I mean, seriously. It’s a lot. Enough that people who pay to just keep their email address is adding up to $143m US (£85m UK).

We’re in the wrong business.

Read a little more at Re/Code.

Do a test run on online banking transfers

Posted by William Gallagher

Cheques are a pain but online banking can go wrong with a typo. Perhaps this is another reason to use services like TextExpander or 1Password, to have the correct sort code and account numbers to hand. But when you’ve been given a new account to pay into, check it first.

Transfer a single penny.

If the recipient gets that, you’re good to go: you know for certain that it works.

There is the chance that someone else is sending a penny – why does that sound rude? – on the same day but yours will arrive with your reference.

It’s an idea nicked from PayPal which checks out your bank details by doing something similar: it deposits some random, if very small, amount and you have to confirm what that amount is. But that’s done as much to confirm that you are you as it is to check that the bank details have been entered correctly so I’d keep it simple.

This does depend on who you’re paying. If it’s a firm you don’t know, you may find it hard to learn whether they got the payment or not. But then if then phone up demanding to know where your big cash transfer is coming you get to say well, duh, if you’d check your accounts more often you’d be paid now.

Using your travel time

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s been a long time since I drove very much at all. There was a time where, for several years, I would drive from Birmingham to London and back on a day at least once a week. But that would be a three-hour drive in the morning, leaving around 5am, and a four-hour drive back in the evening.

Plus I’d do eight to ten hours work in the middle.

So that was, what, help me count here: up to 17 hours away from my home office. And all but a ten-minute lunch break of it spent working.

When I got my first book contract, it obviously came with a deadline and I could not afford to lose 17 hours on a London day each week. I also obviously couldn’t afford to walk away from the eight to ten hours paid work, even if I hadn’t enjoyed it. This was Radio Times, easily one of my favourite writing jobs in my career.

But I could reclaim at least some of the travel time. If I gave up driving and instead went by trains or coaches – very often coaches because, wow, the price of trains that early in the morning – I could write. Not all the time. Once or twice on a train coming back I’d take a look at the crowd with me and feel wee bit uncertain about getting out a couple of thousand pounds of computer equipment. And sometimes I’d just be too tired.

Quick aside? The train from London Euston to Birmingham New Street goes via Birmingham International where there is the airport and the National Exhibition Centre. Amongst very many other things, the NEC hosts rock concerts. One night, I fell asleep on the train and woke up with my face pressed against the window.

And on the other side of the glass were a group of AC/DC fans pressing back and grinning at me.

Anyway.

I forget how long this went on for but it was probably three months. The book was published in November 2012 – it’s BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair and I am deeply proud of it, I feel honoured that I got to be the one to write about that – so this would be late 2011, maybe early 2012.

But what I remember with total clarity was that when it was done, when I had delivered the first draft and could go back to driving, I had saved slightly over a thousand pounds in petrol.

Now, that’s not an accurate figure for saving because it doesn’t account for all the money I spent on trains and coaches. But it was a shock of a figure. Shock enough that to this day I refuse to let myself think about all the months of petrol I’d paid up to then. At least ten years with at least once such drive per week. You add it up, I feel ill.

It was also shock enough that I could not go back to doing it again.

So from that day on, I stuck to trains and coaches for my London work. I sold the car, even.

We still have a car: Angela has one and I use it when necessary or when we’re both going somewhere, I will usually be the one who drives us. Gives her a break from all the driving she does in her work.

Today it was necessary. I dropped Angela off at a place this morning, drove to a couple of jobs, then to a Theatre Cuppa gathering in the early evening and back. Then Angela was off to a production meeting for her theatre work (you cannot believe how proud I am that I can say that to you, I just find the very words delicious) and I was off to a Writers’ Guild committee meeting.

My meeting was quite short but it then took me an hour and a half to get home by bus. I’d driven 170 miles in about six hours today, the last 10 miles were a 90-minute series of bus rides. And those bus rides had more adventure in them. I got to see stand up rows between passengers and drivers, I somehow got to see one woman passenger flash another one even as I actually couldn’t quite see why. The flasher was not complimenting the flashee.

But I missed a lot because I was writing. I wrote nothing all day except some notes at the various places I drove to so I was behind. But on these buses, while keeping an eye on timetable information through my various iOS travel apps, I got to write.

I didn’t enjoy that it was 90 minutes, I didn’t enjoy the drizzle as I got off the last bus. But I got things done and so instead of feeling knackered and pointless tonight, I feel I’ve got on with something and that I secretly deserve to watch the first episode of Community, Season Two, which the finest of fine people has just loaned me.

There are 24 episodes in this season. That’s my productivity destroyed for the rest of the week.

The world is a good place when there are people like this in it

Posted by William Gallagher

It just made me happy. A guy by the name of Zack Danger Brown – you know what he says to everybody about his middle name – launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his making a potato salad. His stated goal was to raise $10 (£5.85) and as of this moment, with 22 days left to go, he has got 5,660 backers contributing a total of $46,052 (£26,873.46).

The page’s description just keeps tickling me:

We’re making a lot of great progress. I think it’s time for us to think about getting hats made. I added a new donor level for people who want hats.

And he made a stretch goal – long since beaten – where he says:

$1000: I’ll do a live stream of the potato salad making

Go take a look and back this vital work on Kickstarter.

Keep your balance

Posted by William Gallagher

Here’s a tip for staying on top of everything in your life: check your bank balances every day. All of them.

I’ve been doing this for the last 1,044 days without fail and that means quite a few things. Firstly, it means there are days I really don’t want to do it but, so far, I always have. And there are days where I’ve done it just after midnight because I couldn’t wait to see if a particular fee had been paid in.

Most of all, though, it means I know everything. Yes, the finances, but also I know who’s paid and I know it just about the moment they have. There’s one firm I work for sometimes who is really quick at paying. They could be terrible people but I’d carry on working for them because of that.