Crooks are hard workers, working even on weekends.  PayPal was the target this Saturday.

Jesus R. Distilling?  Hmm.  This one looks muted and don't even use the PayPal brand power.  The stick is 'attempt of unauthorized penetration'.  More sophisticated attempt could involve actually triggering a real PayPal notification and then weaving into the message exchange with a similar looking From address and appearance.

BTW, the link above goes to:

The crook is trying to take advantage of the URL display bug that Microsoft recently patched.  Obviously, SR SkinCare, a legit site, was penetrated and enslaved into relaying PayPal passwords to some other destination.  I will give them a call on Monday.  Maybe they will give me a free skincare session for delivering the bad news.  Heh.

I think it would be informative to talk to one of the skilled phishers.  If you are such a person and not a clueless newbie, please contact me via e-mail or through blog comments.  Don't worry about me tracking you down because I am more interested in getting the inside stories and how the numbers work.  Besides, If you know what you are doing, you shouldn't have any problem avoiding being traced.

Update:

I had to replace the URL hack above with an image because the text version was triggering some anti-virus software.  How are we suppose to discuss phishing with overly sensitive anti-virus hounding us?

Last Thursday, my son fell off his bike and hurt his left arm so I spent the afternoon at the hospital.  My past experiences with doctors and hospitals is 90% frustration and it was no different this time.  I think the medical practice can be overhauled to let trained professionals other than doctors handle mundane medical treatments which should result in:

• more affordable health care
• reduce health insurance costs
• higher quality of service
• less waiting
• less forms
• create more jobs
• improve local economy

The main idea is to encourage specialization and leverage technology to allow clusters of medical service 'stores' to spring up.  You can go to an X-ray shop to get an X-ray without making appointments as if it was a photo shop.  Next door is the X-ray diagnose service which uses remote pool of specialist doctors to assist in difficult cases.  To get a splinter or a cast, go to the bone shop where someone who is truely skilled in splinters and casts will provide you with better service than average nurses and doctors.  Nearby is a store specializing in medical supplies.  Another store could sell books and videos that help people treat minor injuries themselves.

As to the issue of liability, stores are individually owned so they can be closed down for malpractice without threatening rest of the 'medical mall'.

Maybe I am dreaming, but I think this is possible.  If not, some of ther solution must be found because I just don't see the medical system changing for the better in the future without a drastic change like the one I am proposing.

Just a trail of thought I started today…

While we may have information at our fingertips, we lack control over them in time.  We used to consume news at twice a day, morning and evening.  Now news consumes us any time of the day, whirling around us like a relentless hailstorm.  The worst part of it is that we seem satisfied with living in that hailstorm.

I doubt we can do much about reducing the need for information, but we can do something about making the inflow of information more manageable.  For starters, granuarity of information we are exposed to at one time and the pace of delivery should be addressed.

Tim Bray is now working for Sun.  Congratz, Tim.  While I personally think the 'sun' is setting, I am also expecting Sun to make earnest, albeit frantic, moves in unexpected directions which should make way for a spectacular sunset.  Tim is riding into some seriously wild fun.

I tried Onfolio, mentioned by Ray Ozzie this morning.  Onfolio is an IE 'sidebar' for clipping information you find on the web and share them via e-mailing.  You can save webpages locally and search them later.  You can also launch it on its own as a 'deskbar'.  Onfolio Publisher is just a simple HTML editor that saves in MHTML format.  Standard version cost $20+ and Pro version costs $50 more.  Publisher is available only in the Pro version.

Onfolio reminded me of a product I designed long time ago that allowed web users to record their browsing sessions online and share them with friends.  Mine used a VCR metaphor so it's different from Onfolio in that respect but collecting and sharing is the same.

Onfolio is a neat product, but I didn't enjoy the UI at all.  Sidebar UI was too restricting and deskbar UI had window overlapping problem.  Online Publisher was too simple as a 'report' editor.  Onfolio is written in .NET so I felt it was too heavy for the benefits it provided.  .NET is cool but it's not yet ready for everyday desktop use, particularly if it is a utility running all the time.  I think I would have like it more if it had more blogging support and smaller footprint.  Too bad.

Wow!  ArtRage 1.0 is finally out.  It's a fantastic painting program available for free from Ambient Design.  Having a graphics tablet helps, but you can draw some good paintings even without one.  I like it's simple UI also.  Very cool.  Thanks to Scoble for mentioning it.

Here is a painting of mine:

Searcher

Quality of video codecs is not something I dwell much time on but I throughly enjoyed ExtremeTech's excellent comparison of video codecs.  They compared the quality and performance of four codecs: DivX5, WMV9, Quicktime, and MPEG-4.  DivX5 and WMV9 came out on top although I thought WMV9 was clearly superior to DivX5 except in encoding speed.  Two surprises for me.  I thought Quicktime was better than the comparison showed and didn't know MPEG-4 sucked that badly.  Phew!

Sense of humor is alive and well in Ireland.

Lacking an event or notice panel in my blog, here is a manual reminder of the Corporate Blogger's Dinner which will be held on March 24th at Venture Frogs in San Francisco.