Wall Street Journal, Desperate and Ineffectual or Just Clueless
June 29, 2009
I am now receiving one email every hour from the Wall Street Journal. It is now 3 38 pm Eastern time, and I spoke with a customer service representative about my receiving these automated spam messages. The customer service representative took my email address, verified that I am a paid-in-full, real-life subscriber to the print edition of the Wall Street Journal. The customer service representative apologized three times, I explained that if I received additional spam asking me to subscribe I would post another document of record in my Web log and ask my legal eagle to notify the appropriate agencies in New Jersey and Kentucky about this use of my personal email. In my opinion, I am not sure whether this means the WSJ is desperate and ineffectual or just clueless.
So, here’s the contact information for these spam messages:
Can’t read the fine print? Let me reproduce it for you:
The Wall Street Journal
This is a special offer made available only for first time subscribers to The Wall Street Journal. Thereafter, your subscription will be renewed automatically at the then current rate. Other restrictions may apply. Should subscription rates or terms change, the Wall Street Journal Online will notify you in advance. If you would prefer not to receive further commercial messages from the Wall Street Journal Online, please click here and confirm your request. To contact us by mail, send correspondence to: Customer Service Department, the Wall Street journal Online, 4300 Route 1 North, South Brunswick, NJ 08852. Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company. Our records indicate that your email address is opted in to receive this email. etc, etc.
Observations:
- I opted out last week, and the service here told me it took Dow Jones 10 days to stop sending spam.
- I am a subscriber and I use the email address in this Web log for work, not spam from publishers who seem to be a combination of desperate and clueless
- The customer service representative said I would not receive any more emails.
My thought is that when once respected publishers use the tactics of those selling Viagra, colon cleansers, and get rich schemes – there’s serious trouble in Wall Street Journal type outfits.
Watch this Web log for updates from a customer. If an outfit treats a customer to spamfests, imagine what the company will do to mere prospects! I suppose the paper will be gone someday and I should have pity. Unfortunately spam from legitimate companies riles my feathers.
Stephen Arnold, June 29, 2009
Social Networks and Security
June 28, 2009
Short honk: An azure chip consultant took me to task because of my skepticism about the security of social networks in the enterprise. I direct said azure chip consultant to “Study Shows High Vulnerability of Social Networkers”. No study is definitive, but I find the results interesting. One example: “A third of those polled said they include at least three pieces of personally identifiable information in their profiles.” Great for best pals. Not so great for some enterprise tasks.
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
Facebook Streams
June 25, 2009
You will want to work through this somewhat disjointed discussion of Facebook in ReadWriteWeb’s “The Day Facebook Changed Forever: Messages to Become Public By Default.” For me the most important point was:
In time, though, people may very well decide they are comfortable with their social networking being public by default. That will be a different world, and today will have been one of the most important days in that new world’s unfolding.
The reason? More content flows to monitor and mine. Goodie. Love those social postings.
Stephen Arnold, June 26, 2009
Text Mining and Predicting Doom
June 23, 2009
The New Scientist does not cover the information retrieval sector. Occasionally the publication runs an article like “Email Patterns Can Predict Impending Doom” which gets into a content processing issue. I quite liked the confluence of three buzz words in today’s ever thrilling milieu: “predict”, “email”, and “doom”. What’s the New Scientist’s angle? The answer is that as tension within an organization increases, communication patterns in email can be discerned via text mining. The article hints that analysis of email is tough with privacy a concern. The article offers a suggestive reference to an email project at Yahoo, but provided few details. With monitoring of real time data flows available to anyone with an Internet connection, message patterns seem to be quite useful to those lucky enough to have the tools need to ferret out the nuggets. Nothing about fuzzification of data, however. Nothing about which vendors are leaders in the space except for the Yahoo and Enron comments. I think there is more to be said on this topic.
Stephen Arnold, June 23, 2009
Data Tables Contain Deleted Data. Yikes. Revelation.
May 21, 2009
it was spies on Facebook. Then it was the LA Times’s spoofed via a year old Prop 8 story. Now – news flash – the issue is privacy on social networking sites. Yikes. What a scoop? Sky News in the UK published “Fears over Privacy on Social Networking Sites” here. The intrepid news hounds at Sky News reported:
Researchers from the University of Cambridge say that many social networking sites maintain copies of user photos even after users delete them.
I wonder if the wizards in the groves of academe figured out that quite a bit of other information and data lurk on these sites. In fact, unless the indexes have been rebuilt, my hunch is that my team could find some interesting stuff not searchable but available to those poking around with forensic savvy.
I am waiting for one of these intrepid reporters to define “delete” and “remove”.
Stephen Arnold, May 22, 2009
Google Health
May 20, 2009
A battle is shaping up among some heavy hitters for digital health services. If you want a useful summary of what Googzilla has been doing, you can click here to read Mark Gibbs’s overview of the service. For me the most interesting comment was:
Google Health provides an API based on a subset of the “Continuity of Care Record” API described as “a standard format for transferring snapshots of a patient’s medical history.” This API allows developers to build software that can create and read consumer’s medical records with sophisticated authorization and access controls.
Not much about search and data mining in the story, however. Keep in mind that Google products and services have search baked in. Google seems to be pursuing a consumer strategy whilst Microsoft is chasing the health enterprise. Lots of exciting coming in this sector. Health information is in the same sorry state as the US health care system. My thought is that it will evolve along the same lines as the US auto and airline industry. That’s a comforting notion, isn’t it?
Stephen Arnold, May 20, 2009
Security: Search a Factor
May 10, 2009
Security of online information is critical to any company who operates on the Internet, from large corporations to medical institutions to the federal government. Remember the stolen laptop? Security online, especially when setting up a database of searchable, confidential material, is a herculean task, because if it’s online–someone can search and find it. Case in point, a headline from May 7: US Med Data Held Hostage by Hackers; Ransom: $10M. See the article at http://bit.ly/16IoZi. Hackers stole over eight million cases of drug prescription records, social security numbers, and driver’s license details from Virginia on April 30. It was reported that several layers of protection failed and allowed the hackers access. It’s not the first time something like this has happened. Data security online must be improved, or we’re all going to be facing a lot more fraud in the future.
Jessica Bratcher, May 10, 2009
LexisNexis, Its Data and Fraud
May 3, 2009
Robert McMillan’s “LexisNexis Says Its Data Was Used by Fraudsters” here caught my attention. The story reported that “LexisNexis acknowledged Friday [May 1, 2009] that criminals used its information retrieval service for more tan three years to gather data that was used to commit credit card fraud.” Mr. McMillan added that “LexisNexis has tightened up the way it verifies customers.” The article noted that LexisNexis “was involved in other data breaches in 2005 and 2006.” Interesting. So 2005, 2006, 2009. Perhaps the third time will be the charm?
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
The Individual: The Fount of Crime
May 3, 2009
Most people don’t think of bad guys as the fellow who lives in the next flat or the nice girl with the lawn service. Those in bank security, law enforcement, and insurance investigators know that the individual is the key to certain interesting activities. The numerous comments about Spock’s sale to the Naveen Jane, the founder of Intelius and InfoSpace, were quite tame. You can read “Intelius Buys Spock, the People Search Engine” here. My thoughts on this deal included these musings:
- Mr. Jane is a canny lad. I think he senses that the value of a people-centric service will rise. If this takes place, Mr. Jane could make a tidy profit
- In the near term, the market demand for people information is likely to rise
- People data can be sliced and diced, and I think that Mr. Jane will make an attempt to generate some revenue from this property.
And crime? Well, I don’t have much to say about that.
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
Cyberwarfare Shoots Down an Aircraft
April 21, 2009
Short honk: Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Slashdot is reacting to the reality of cyberwarfare. You can read the Wall Street Journal’s tabloidesque coverage here. For those of you with a more scholarly approach to what’s been going on for many years, click here to buy and then read Information Warfare by Winn Schwartau. Although more than 15 years old, you may as well start with one of the best discussions I have examined. Put the energies and hand waving into practices that close security loopholes. The barn, the horse—you know the aphorism. Search is an important function in these escapades. Unlike some enterprise search vendors, some bad guys use sophisticated findability methods.
Stephen Arnold, April 21, 2009
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