The Apartment With Everything, Now Available Everywhere (Irony Included)

So here's something way more ironic than anything in the Alanis Morissette song of the same name. My wife found a gorgeous apartment to rent in San Diego, for only $1,000 a month (I will explain why she was looking in a moment). The place looked great in the photos and it sounded great in the description on Craigslist:

"2 Bedroom, 2 Bath, fully furnished, modern kitchen and bath, cable TV, Internet wi-fi, electricity, water, local phone included. Nestled in a quiet, almost suburban-like setting, you're just a few minutes away from world-class dining, shopping and the verve of theaters, clubs and nightlife. Great location, great features. All at a location that's exactly right, exactly where you want to be."

All that for $1,000 in San Diego, California? Sounds fantastic, but hardly ironic. So let me add the most interesting thing about this place, something not immediately apparent: it is also for rent in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, and many other cities in America. But even that's not ironic, that's just another sick cyber-scam.

Let me add some more data points. My wife and I have spent many years working in the field of information security--where uncovering online scams and other cyber-crime was part of the job--and we are planning to move to San Diego next month, for my new job as Security Evangelist for ESET, a software company dedicated to fighting cyber-crime. We don't need a furnished apartment, but this place looked inviting (and it could lead one to think rent in downtown San Diego is very affordable).

So here's the irony: The apartment that I wanted to rent in order to facilitate my move to a new job fighting cyber-crime turned out to be a cyber-scam!

I was going to provide links to the scam pages (they were mainly on Craigslist) so you could check them out--they were quite professional with fewer typos than your average scam --but after my wife sent Craigslist a description of the scam they pulled it from all the cities mentioned above.

Of course, there may have been other complaints but my wife actually got the scammer to send her an email, which provided further details of the scam that she passed along to Craigslist. Apparently the scammer claims to be out of the country and seeks to get the prospective renter to send her a deposit, presumably before they find out that the whole thing is a fraud.

Notes: I say "her" only because the name most often associated with these fake apartment listings is Amanda Dawson (although I'm pretty sure that is not the scammer's real name). Also note that I think Alanis Morissette is a very good actor and singer, I just don't like the song  "Ironic" because most of it isn't. I don't know why I have a problem with errors in works of art, but I do. For example, the great big hole in Lord of the Flies--you can't use a short-sighted person's glasses to make fire--spoils that book for me (maybe it's because I've been myopic since I was 11 and tried using my glasses to burn paper on several occasions until my father sat me down and told me the facts of light).

My 2001 Jeep Turns 111111

Just a quick post to pay my respects to the vehicle that has faithfully carried me down the road for the past 5 years, the 6 cylinder 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee 4x4 that I bought at CarMax. I missed the odometer turn over 100K, but somehow 111,111 miles looks even cooler.

White space rural broadband moves one step closer

"The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the organisation that helped ignite the Wi-Fi revolution nearly a decade ago, has published a new wireless standard that promises to bring broadband access to under-served rural areas.

Called IEEE 802.22, the new specification has been designed to take advantage of those portions of the radio frequency spectrum that are increasingly available as digital television switchover schemes make progress around the world.

With support for both VHF (very-high frequency) and UHF (ultra-high frequency) TV bands, sites as far as 100 kilometres away from a single transmitter could enjoy broadband speeds typical of more densely populated areas.

According to the IEEE, each transmitter will be capable of delivering up to 22 Mbit/s per channel “without interfering with reception of existing TV broadcast stations, using the so-called white spaces between the occupied TV channels”."

White space rural broadband moves one step closer

Blood Money: The economics of America's most common deadly genetic disorder

Blood costs money and I know where to get a lot of it, blood that is. Now that might sound callous but it's true and it could save a lot of lives as well as pump more than a billion dollars into the American economy. Please bear with me as I explain, and please pardon the pumping pun.

For several decades now, the supply of fresh human blood in America has been getting tighter, pushing the cost of blood-consuming medical procedures higher and higher. Expanding the nation's blood supply would not only reduce pain and suffering, it would have a positive economic impact. Taking a cold, hard, economic look at anything related to the health and well-being of our fellow beings is bound to bother some people, but the path to sustainable caring-giving within the boundaries of economic reality requires us to acknowledge that things like blood cost money.

While most of the blood supply in America is freely donated, the logistics of blood taking and storage are not free, indeed they are quite expensive. So the cost of a unit of blood is something like $150 or more. Why is that number so vague? Because the cost varies according to supply and demand and those vary by location. In the heartland of America, the supply is high relative to demand but the reverse tends to be true on the coasts. A fairly recent number quoted by a medical facility on the East coast is $175 per unit. That number goes down when supply goes up, but not all the way down since there are fixed costs like testing the blood (there's more detail here).

The extent to which an increase in the supply of blood would reduce the cost to those that need it is hard to determine and I have not yet found any research on that. So let's run with 20% of the $175 number ($35) and find out where the nation can save/make a whole bunch of money. There are probably at least 13 million Americans that have the potential for homozygous or compound heterozygous variations of the HFE gene. In English that means they are at risk of developing toxic levels of iron in their bodies due to "iron overloading" caused by something called hemochromatosis, the most common, potentially-fatal, genetic disorder in America.

The best defense against hemochromatosis is to give blood regularly. Let's say 6 times per year. Suppose that 45% of those 13 million people would become regular blood donors if they found out they had hemochromatosis (that's adjusting down from 100% for those that already know, those that already give blood, and those who have a hard time giving blood). According to my spreadsheet that comes out to $1.25 billion per year, $12.5 billion over the next decade. I can't resist saying that's quite a shot in the arm for our economy.

But that is just the beginning...encouraging more people to give blood in general could have a fantastic prophylactic effect IF blood banks would routinely run an iron panel on donors to screen for iron overload, the most telling sign of possible hemochromatosis. People found to have high iron levels could check in with their doctors and might also elect to get a genetic test to detect hereditary hemochromatosis ($99* from 23andMe). The iron panel is a relatively inexpensive blood test and before 1996 it was fairly routine.

(Don't get me started on the slimy corporate frauds whose greed caused iron to be dropped from the standard blood panel, leading to a significant drop in the rate of hemochromatosis detection and thus a tragically avoidable rise in human suffering.)

The fact is, early detection of hemochromatosis would save our economy billions in avoidable health care costs, disability costs, lost productivity and tax revenues. On top of that, early detection, combined with affordable genetic testing, awareness and counseling, could lead to the eventual disappearance of this condition.

The genetic form of iron overload probably occurred as a natural defense against a diet low in iron and the shift from a nomadic, hunting-based culture to city life made possible by the agrarian-revolution. Now, in a world of iron-rich diets and lifespans that extend past menopause, genetic hemochromatosis has become a life-threatening metabolic disorder. Let's get rid of it and save a lot of money, and a lot of human suffering.

Note:  Due to ignorance, many blood banks throw away blood from hemochromatosis patients or even charge them for “filtering.” This is infuriating, immoral, and should be illegal. The FDA is quite clear that the blood is good, and so is the NIH Clinical Center.

Broadband needs rural boost: Tennessee News

"Job opportunities will elude millions of mostly rural Americans because they lack access to high-speed Internet, according to a new report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In Tennessee, more than 489,000 residents lack that access."

Broadband needs rural boost on NWTNTODAY.COM

Is Satellite the Answer for Rural Broadband? Free 20 page report

Does your rural community have questions about satellite Internet service? Wondering if satellite connections can fill in for cable, DSL, or fiber? What are the limits of satellite Internet service and how much does it cost? Is satellite the same as broadband?

Just a quick reminder that you can find answers to these questions and more in a free 20-page report from the Rural Mobile and Broadband Alliance or RuMBA, written by veteran information technology expert Stephen Cobb, CISSP.


You can get the report from this page.

FCC: Rural areas still lag in broadband speeds

"More than 28 percent of the rural population in the U.S. lack access to midrange 3Mbps broadband service, according to a new report from two U.S. agencies."

The gaps appear to be closing, but many rural residents "still lack access to the kind of broadband that most Americans take for granted," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement. "That is not acceptable..."

FCC: Rural areas still lag in broadband speeds

WK&T Selects Calix for Large FTTH Project in Kentucky and Tennessee

"The ambitious project will provide this rural region with a broadband infrastructure capable of delivering service speeds of up to 1 Gbps. It will deliver voice, data and IPTV services to 21,000 homes and 99 community anchor institutions across a nine-county service area."

Another example of people finding an alternative to traditional big telco.

WK&T Selects Calix for Large FTTH Project in Kentucky and Tennessee

USDA rural broadband cuts will affect northern New York

"'We do not encourage our people to leave home in order to have what their city-dwelling counterparts have. We fear that this migration to technologically-progressive neighborhoods will decimate our rural landscape,' said Pat McKeown, executive director of the St. Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce."

USDA cuts will affect NNY

Not Happy With AT&T? The network of possible reasons is expanding

As a consumer, few things annoy me as much as TV ads extolling the virtues of something that is currently not working right, like AT&T's 3G data service. About this time yesterday I went to the AT&T web page that tells me how much of the 5 gigabytes-per-month 3G data plan on my MiFi wireless access point I have used. Simply going to this page is a fine example of how to: A. annoy your customers, B. tarnish your brand. Why?

1 .The Mobile Hotspot MiFi 2372 data device for which I paid $100 is treated like a cellphone in all AT&T literature (it is not a cellphone) so I have to log into a secure page to find how much of my $60 per month 5 gigabyte data allowance I have used, even when I am connecting from the device itself.

B. The first thing the page says is that information about my minutes is not available. Duh! This MiFi device has no minutes, it just has data. The info about the data usage is below the fold. This gives me zero confidence that AT&T knows what it is doing when it comes to mobile data services.

C. I have to do this any time I want to check my usage, which is sometimes multiple times a day because AT&T keeps sending me emails warning that I am about to go over my limit even when I am nowhere near my limit. (But they will charge me if I go over the limit).

D. I get logged out of the data usage page after a few minutes "for security reasons" which means that I cannot leave the page on the screen and monitor usage in real time. (Speaking as a CISSP, I see no reason to consider my data usage protected information, and no reason for my provider to deny me constant access to it.)

Even HughesNet, the satellite Internet service provider whose service levels and bandwidth caps I have lambasted in the past, does a better job of keeping me informed, in real time and with little effort, of my bandwidth usage relative to their daily cap.

This might sound like an obscure issue with a niche product, but I believe it is the shape of things to come. Bandwidth caps are the norm for 3G and soon 4G and maybe for other services too. Consumers of capped bandwidth need ways to monitor their usage to avoid additional charges. Putting on my marketing and branding cap I would say that cynical consumers will assume that those providers of capped bandwidth who make it tough to monitor usage are hoping to rake in the extra fees for going over the limit.

Now here's the real kicker: The usage page was down yesterday. That's the page that tells me how much data I have used. And it remains down 24 hours later. Today I got another "High Usage Data Alert" email from AT&T but had to place a voice call to check my usage. It took the AT&T person who assisted me several minutes to figure out what I meant by "How much data have I used?" Then she told me I had nothing to worry about because my monthly usage cycle had started over today, the 12th. To which I replied: "Yes, I know that is what is supposed to happen, but I just got a warning message, at 4PM today, the 12th, telling me my usage was high."

To which she replied "I apologize for that, it was sent because you were nearing your limit yesterday."

This rendered me temporarily speechless because I couldn't decide which aspect of the absurdity I wanted to highlight first. So when she asked "Is there anything else I can help you with?" my response was simply to ask when the web page would be coming back. Her reply: "They're working on it but we have no exact time."

And then I turned on the television to see an AT&T ad about the amazing "network of possibilities" with AT&T data networks. I suppose one possibility is that AT&T may get a clue about how to deliver useful and accurate data to its customers in a timely fashion. Designing a more practical 3G MiFi/WiFi device might also be a possibility. Watch this space for a review of the Novatel 2372, the first device to inflict a five colored LED on color blind computer users.