Seth's Blog

Last week, while looking at Google Voice I noticed a button that said “Get $10″. I thought it meant “get $10 credit for trying it” so I pushed the button. Ten dollars credit showed up. Since Google Voice is free for the calls I make I had no use for $10 credit but maybe someday….

A few days later I happened to look at my credit card bill. Google had billed me $10! I didn’t even know they knew my credit card number! It hadn’t been required for the $10 transaction. I haven’t consciously used Google Checkout. I haven’t given it to them in any other connection. Talk about data mining…

When I go to Account Settings listed under my Gmail address, one of the sections is My Products, meaning My Google Products. Under that is listed Google Checkout, although I’ve never signed up for it and (I thought) never used it. So why is it there? I looked in Google Checkout. The Google Voice $10 transaction is the only transaction listed. As far as I can tell, this proves I didn’t use Google Checkout in the past (say, 4 months ago) and forget about it. Google really did get and use my credit card number without telling me, much less asking me.

My credit card company quickly gave me a refund.

A year ago my gmail account was hacked. I recovered it in an hour or so, not before a friend of mine had an amusing conversation. Recently, judging by James Fallows’s experiences, there has been a rise in these attacks. My mistake, I believe, was using the same password on my gmail account and another account. I suspect the recent outbreak of gmail break-ins is happening because there was recently a large exposure of passwords elsewhere.

But I can’t be sure because I cannot compare break-ins over time. What does a graph of break-ins-versus-time look like? Is what Fallows has noticed a recent spike?  (It probably is.) If so, that supports my explanation of its cause (passwords lost elsewhere). Or has there been a steady increase over time? That would contradict my explanation. It is revealing that Fallows provides two security suggestions, one of them really time-consuming (two-stage verification) in the long haul. He says nothing about making sure your gmail password is not used anywhere else. If he could have seen that break-ins-versus-time graph, he could better judge whether the gmail hacks are due to duplicated passwords. If I am right about the cause of these hacks, Suggestion #3 should have been don’t use your gmail password anywhere else — and would have been the most effective.

Gmail developers can help all of us be safe at reasonable cost by publishing graphs that show break-ins (and probability of break-in) per day. I think that is estimated by the number of account recovery requests they receive per day. After my gmail account was hacked, I contacted Google to recover it and soon did. Perhaps those account recovery requests could involve the person making the request giving a reason (e.g., “account hijacked”). Then Google could simply tell us (with a graph?) the number of hijacked accounts reported per day.

Security departments and others don’t like to provide this sort of information. Persons at the top of companies worry it will scare customers! Those in security departments worry people will be less scared — thus reducing their power. From a user point of view these are horrible reasons not to make this information public. With accurate knowledge of the likelihood of break-ins, gmail users can make reasonable estimates of the costs and benefits of various security options. Without knowing the likelihood of break-ins, they can’t.

My former student writes:

A lot of people here now are calling for a return to normalcy and peace! A fair number of people are beginning to blame the protestors for all the chaos and the fact that we can’t go out and we can’t go to work and Egypt is burning and we can’t order food from restaurants anymore! I think they are the same people who didn’t really support the protestors in the first place though- so we’re still safe- they’re not growing. Unfortunately many of my family members are among those- they just want to go back to work and they’re worried about money and they think we have gained enough concessions. They think the sacrifice is too big.

At the same time, there are maybe a hundred thousand or more protestors in the square right now, peacefully standing and holding signs for the president to step down. And more keep pouring in. My cousin Akram is getting ready to go meet my cousin Khaled and about 20 of his friends to go to the square. Aunt Magda is angry with Akram and telling him that he won’t set foot out of the house but actually he is tying his shoelaces now….. The Friday prayer ended about an hour ago so now is the time when most people will be arriving there or on their way. My cousin Karim actually went back to work at Vodafone today after 4 or so days off because of the revolt.

I have promised everyone that I wouldn’t go out today because of all the anti-foreign sentiment. There have been steady streams of emails about foreigners being detained, politely, and spoken to and then released after some time. But there are people calling the news stations in angry about Obama’s order for the president to step down. One woman asked, “Can any country accept an order for their president to step down?” There is a lot of hostility towards America right now and I don’t think the US can win no matter what they do. People criticizing the states for not making a strong enough statement requiring Mubarak’s departure, others angry that America would order the president of another country to step down, some angry about all of the past support, and others angry that America would meddle at all…

We haven’t seen any violence in the square so far today as there was on Wednesday and Thursday, just a massive sea of anti-mubarak protestors. We haven’t seen much of the pro-mubarak supporters today- it seems that they have been hugely overtaken.  I really hope it stays peaceful but a lot of people are going out angry today because of the attacks on the peaceful anti-mubarak supporters of the last two days. Many see it as an obligation to go out now and defend those who have been attacked. I am really proud of all those people brave enough to go out…

One of my students is in Egypt. She writes:

I may be leaving here soon. Two of the foreigners here that I know that were in the protests have been arrested by the army and taken to a military academy- they were able to contact the German embassy as they are German and the embassy came to take them and keep them safe in a hostel until they are able to leave the country. People are beginning not to trust any foreigners here, not only journalists, and have begun to say that foreigners are spies stirring up trouble on behalf of foreign governments. The German girl that I went to the demonstrations with saw her own Egyptian neighbor talking to the army officers about her and her landlord and her roommates while she was being detained. Of course all journalists are being attacked right now. And the mood has just become very hostile towards foreigners. We are getting reports on a mailing list called Cairo Scholars (for foreigners living in Cairo) of all different types of incidents directed at foreigners here.

I downloaded this week’s This American Life (Scenes From a Mall) just to hear one little snippet again. Ira Glass asked three eighth-graders about the economy.

GLASS Has the recession affected the three of you?

GIRL 1 What!? “Recession”? What does recession mean?

GIRL 2 That’s a big word.

GIRL 1 We’re not the smartest people here.