Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 (12 page)

Now, here's why you don't pose as an elite hacker, unless you are, because you'll always give yourself away, like Jonesy here. First, elite hackers don't use their personal email accounts to mail the blackmail notes, like Jones did, since they're pretty easy to trace. Second, if you're not an elite hacker, then you probably don't know what the going rate for online extortion is and may underbid: which is why, we suspect, Jones apparently was tickled when Playboy electronically wired him £60—about $100—as his “payment.”

Third, if you're not an elite hacker, you may not know how to hide what money you've extorted. Jones certainly didn't; he transferred the money into his personal bank account, which, electronically speaking, is like sending up a flare so the appropriate authorities can bear down on you like a cadre of hawks on a field mouse.

So, no real surprise that shortly after Jones's extravagant £60 extortion payday, his parents' home was the recipient of a pre-dawn raid by members of both U.S. Secret Service agents
and
officers from the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. From there it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to two years in prison. Jones's lawyer suggested Jones had been bored and committed the crime just for fun and not financial gain. This is an interesting argument—that attempting to extort a large corporation is fine as long as you're just doing it for kicks and giggles. In this case, the judge wasn't buying it. “You were bored and disappointed you had not found employment in the computer world as you hoped,” the judge told Jones. “But this was a
planned invasion. Your e-mail to Playboy set out your motive to extract money.” And off to the slammer he went.

Interestingly, Jones's science degree will be even less useful to him behind bars than it was stocking shelves. In the words of the hackers, he's been “0wnz0red” (which for us lay-people simply means “screwed”).

Source:
The Telegraph
(UK),
The Register
(UK)

 

O
n one hand, eBay is
a great way to get a whole bunch of crap you don't actually
need
without pathetically cruising your hometown looking for yard sales. On the other hand, it's a fine way to drive yourself utterly insane when you get trapped in a bidding war with some fool who doesn't realize that that collection of
Speed Racer
posable figures was meant to be owned by you and you
alone.
The next thing you know you've spent a third of your monthly take-home on tchotckes that would fetch no more than 25 cents at a swap meet. Isn't technology
wonderful
?

eBay rage will sometimes drive losing bidders to more frightening extremes. Take the case of “Paul,” a New Orleans native who bid on a collection of band uniforms and dance costumes that he figured he could resell at a profit (probably on eBay—because after all, if more than one person bids on something, doesn't it prove there's a market for it?). But, drat it all, there was one obstacle between Paul and his dream of slightly used epaulet-bearing clothing: “Chuck,” in New York, who was bidding on the same lot of uniforms. And when all was said and done and the dust had cleared on the virtual bidding floor, it was Chuck who came away with all 480 pieces of band/dance paraphernalia, at the price of $360.

Well, Paul must of heard of that famous salesman maxim: “Everything is open to negotiation,” because rather than accept his defeat and find something else to bid on, Paul began to badger Chuck directly through e-mail and by phone to sell the aforementioned auction winnings to him. Alas, Chuck liked his band clothes so much that he would not part with a
single stitch, at least not to Paul. So Paul decided it was time for more, shall we say,
dramatic
methods of persuasion. He took a train from New Orleans to New York, then allegedly broke into Chuck's house, and threatened Chuck's wife with a gun; Chuck was not home at the time.

Well, Mrs. Chuck held on to her husband's winnings, and Paul left without the precious band uniforms. Chuck's wife then called the police, who picked up Paul in a taxi he was taking back to the train station. When the police questioned Paul about the incident, apparently he didn't deny showing up at Chuck's house, but he did dispute the “waving the gun around” part. The gun just happened to fall out of his briefcase, he said. This leaves open the question of why there was a gun in his briefcase at all, but let's leave that now. A better question is why was Paul willing to pay $300 to go from New Orleans to New York by train (as was the going price when we checked while writing this) just to wheedle Chuck out of his band uniforms? Why he didn't just kick in an extra $5 to top Chuck's bid in the first place?

That extra $5 could have saved Paul a lot more than the cost of a train ticket: Paul was charged with burglary, coercion, and criminal possession of a weapon, which mean if he's found guilty he's going to spend at least five years in the state pen. Which seems a pretty steep price for band uniforms, even by eBay standards.

Source: Court TV

 

W
e don't want to suggest gas prices were high in 2004,
but when people started offering up their first-borns for a full tank, it began to get a little bit crazy. That being the case, one is not entirely unsympathetic to the 107 people who used an interesting glitch in a magic Michigan gas pump to drive away with free gasoline.

At this particular pump, in Pittsfield Township, someone made the discovery that if you fed it a Michigan driver's license instead of a credit card, it would let you take as much gas as you liked. Michigan licenses, like credit cards, have magnetic data strips on the back, which is apparently what confused the poor automated gas pump. But since the license isn't set up to be charged for purchases, the gas you pumped ended up being free. And who doesn't like free?

Well, the owners of the gas pump for one, and the local law enforcement for another. Both of these considered the folks who took free gas to be—what's the word in English? Oh yes, that's right—thieves. And here's the kind of amusing thing about the whole “use your drivers license instead of your credit card” scam: while a Michigan driver's license isn't set up to be charged for gas, it
is
set up to transmit the information on your driver's license, like your name and address. Which is what it did, handing that information right to the police. You would think that some of those people swiping a government-issued ID to steal gas would have thought about that tiny detail. Apparently not.

All of those people who came in for free gas—some of whom filled up as much as fifteen times in three weeks—are going to end up paying one way or another. Let's hope the cops let them resolve it with a credit card. A real one, this time.

Source:
Boston Globe

 

W
ho among us who has a cell phone
has not had the urge to throw the thing as far as its tiny little clamshell body could be hurled? If it's not spotty coverage, it's random roaming charges or the fact in so many places you can get
ticketed
by the police for nothing more than your right to blab away on the phone while driving your two-ton SUV at 80 miles an hour down the highway. As if anything
bad
might happen.

Well, here's what we say: if you're that angry with your phone, chuck that baby as far as you can. Catharsis is good, if somewhat expensive. However—and this is key—throw only
your
phone. Start throwing somebody else's phones, and then you might have a problem.

“Hal” of Fargo, North Dakota, recently learned this lesson when he stomped into a Verizon Wireless store with the intent of registering a complaint about his cell phone service. Well, actually, he wasn't planning on just dropping off a sternly worded letter of complaint. As he admitted to a local paper, his plan was to go in there and actually yell at people. But he just couldn't stick to the plan. “I just lost it,” he later admitted. “I just started grabbing computers and phones and throwing them. I just destroyed the place . . . I kind of regret that I did it, but I hope my message got across.” Oh, we bet they could hear him now.

Possibly, but more likely the message the employees of the store were receiving was: there's a crazed idiot in the store, which is why, not long after one of the employees was beaned in the shoulder with a hurled communications device, they
holed themselves up in a back office and called the police. Hal, his rage apparently spent, was arrested without incident and charged with felony criminal mischief and misdemeanor simple assault. It is our suspicion he won't have to worry about roaming charges for some time.

Source: CNN

 

W
ant to make people in a rail yard nervous?
It's simple. Just put something in the rail yard that's not supposed to be there. After the terrible bombing of a train in Madrid, Spain, in March 2004, anything unusual in a train yard is automatically suspicious, and of course, anything suspicious is automatically bad.

This is why the police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the FBI were very, very nervous about the object they found at a commuter rail yard in Philadelphia in May 2004. It was a motion detector—a small monitor that lets someone know about comings and goings in the yard. It was found by a conductor and turned over to a police officer (who, in an entirely different dumb act that we'll leave largely unconsidered, kept the thing in his locker for a week before turning it over to his bosses). No one knew where it had come from; no one knew what it meant. The local media had a field day speculating about its possible terrorist origins, which undoubtedly made the thousands who daily rode the rails oh
so
secure.

But finally the truth was revealed. The motion sensor was not placed in the rail yard by terrorists but by an employee of the rail yard, specifically an electrician. Why did he put in the rail yard? Because he wanted a nap. With the sensor in place, the electrician would be alerted when his boss was on the way over—he could wake up totally refreshed and look like he'd been busy at work all that time. It would have been positively ingenious, had not all of Western Civilization been spooked about possible acts of terrorism.

The electrician was not immediately fired, but as the chief of security for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority rather dryly noted to CBS News, “I think he is about to begin taking vacation time immediately.” He should probably catch up on his sleep. He should probably also avoid traveling by train.

Source:
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
CBS News

Greek mythology tells the tale of Prometheus, who saw poor little humans shivering in the dark and stole fire from the gods to give to man. And for this he was severely punished by the gods. We imagine Prometheus reading this next chapter and saying, “For this, I was chained to a rock?” Yes you were, Prometheus. And we're sorry.