Online flower prices still grow and grow...
Posted: Tuesday, February 9 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
If you study hidden fees and price distortions for a living, Valentine's Day is your Super Bowl. Can you name another industry where the true price of an item is routinely more than double the advertised price? Yet that's precisely what you'll encounter this week, when you realize that Valentine's Day is Sunday and you'd better get your order in fast.
In fact, really fast. Before we get to the nitty-gritty of the free market mess that is Valentine’s flower shopping, let me tell you procrastinating lovers out there this important news: Because Valentine's falls at the end of weekend this year, price distortions are even worse than usual. To get a good deal, you're going to have to accept shipment on this Thursday , Feb. 11, a full three days early. Most sites are applying weekend shipping rates to Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So as we click through the thorny world of flower shopping online, know that you should really place your order immediately to avoid paying a serious procrastinator's premium.
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Why so much FAIL in the digital world?
Posted: Friday, February 5 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Progress seemed inevitable when Disney's Carousel of Progress ride opened in 1964. Not anymore. Image courtesy, Disneyworld.disney.go.com
Lately, Internet users have been poking fun at each other at record rates, using sites with names like EPIC FAIL to chronicle technological foibles and missteps. Perhaps they are laughing to stop from crying.
Technology letdowns such as dying cell phone batteries or lost computer files can to lead to everything from pesky annoyances to computer rage, clinical depression, or worse. A growing body of research suggests that the invasion of the digital age is literally rewiring our brains, eroding skills once considered essential for a happy adult life. Gadgets were supposed to make our lives easier and save us time. Instead, we are more stressed and have less time than ever. What is the cause of this epic failure?
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Study: 73% use bank password everywhere
Posted: Tuesday, February 2 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
For years computer security experts have been preaching that users should never share the same password across their connected lives -- at online banking sites, at Amazon, on their Web mail services, even on their cell phones.
Apparently, most people ignore that advice.
A new study by security firm Trusteer found that 73 percent of Web users take their online banking password and use it at other Web sites. And about half of all consumers utilize the same password and user name at online banking sites and other sites.
"I must say I was very surprised,” said Amit Klein, chief technology officer of Trusteer. “It is surprisingly sad that such a large portion of users use their banking credentials at other sites. ... It exposes those users to attacks that would otherwise be impossible. I thought that people would take banking credentials more seriously, but it turns out that in this digital age, this is not the reality."
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Give me your money, or your computer gets it
Posted: Friday, January 29 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Courtesy PandaLabs
Turning hijacked computers into cash is still hard work for most computer criminals. They've got to trick the infected PC into sending spam, then trick a recipient into buying a useless product -- or they have to steal online banking passwords, log onto a victim’s account, bypass the bank’s money transfer fraud controls, and so on.
It's much easier to just demand cash directly from infected users -- a crime that's the Internet's equivalent of kidnapping.
"Give me all your money or your computer gets it-" is the basic proposition.
The technique was dubbed "ransomware" many years ago by computer virus researchers, and is not new. What is new is the explosion of ransomware, thanks to the evolution of ever-more-believable tactics during recent months.
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Mortgage 'relief' leads to foreclosure notice
Posted: Tuesday, January 26 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
For nine months, Deb Franklin said, she did exactly what JP Morgan Chase and President Barack Obama told her to do. She made her mortgage payments on time, delivered via Western Union, after they were reduced from $1,433 to $1,233 through Obama's Making Home Affordable program. After three payments, the mortgage relief was supposed to become permanent, but a maddening string of paperwork headaches landed her in limbo. Then, on the day after Christmas, a "bomb dropped" on her life.Deb and Rick Franklin
A letter from a law firm representing Chase said the bank had begun foreclosure proceedings against her.
"It was devastating, just devastating," Franklin said. "I ended up on the couch shaking so badly that my husband started piling blankets on me saying, 'Are you OK?' And I told him, 'I'm not cold, I'm scared.' "
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The how – and why – of switching banks
Posted: Friday, January 22 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
Arianna Huffington made waves recently when she went on national television calling on consumers to dump their big banks and deposit all their money into local, community banks. Huffington's site, HuffingtonPost.com, threw its weight behind a Web site designed to make breaking up with your bank a little easier -- MoveYourMoney.info. It includes a ZIP-code based locator to help consumers pick through the thousands of banks in the U.S. It even sports a short, cleverly edited video that juxtaposes the classic film “It's a Wonderful Life” with images from testy congressional hearings about the banking industry.
Driven largely by Huffington's media popularity, the site quickly gained traction. Huffington's appearances on MSNBC's Countdown and CNN's Larry King Live, among many others, had some observers calling MoveYourMoney a movement. One of Huffington's partners in the venture, Dennis Santiago of Institutional Risk Analytics, says visitors have searched for banks in more than 16,000 ZIP codes -- better than half the ZIP codes in the country.
It's far too early to tell if Huffington has done something that might genuinely take a bite out big banks -- real data probably won't be available for months. But Huffington is tapping into frustration that has been building since 2008 banking collapse and bailout, say advocates for credit unions and smaller, community banks.
"It has been developing for the last several months," said Bill Hampel, chief economist of the Credit Union National Association. "Annual growth in credit union members had been very weak for the past several years...but during the first 11 months of 2009, our growth rate doubled." Credit unions added 2 million new consumers during that stretch, Hampel said.
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Facebook: The end of secrets?
Posted: Wednesday, January 20 2010 at 05:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
What would a world without secrets look like? Thanks to Facebook, we may find out.
Privacy experts continue to watch in wonder as hundreds of millions of adults around the globe do things online that they would never do in person. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created a stir recently when he offered a simple explanation: He suggested Web users now see privacy as quaint, and = Facebook is creating a new social norm.
If you look at the data, he's right. According to researcher Larry Ponemon of The Ponemon Institute, Facebook has hypnotized even the most private people , an elite group he calls "privacy-centric." They make up only 8 percent of the population. These folks won't even sign up for supermarket loyalty cards, but they will post pictures and tell stories on Facebook. In fact, they are so mesmerized that, untrue to their nature, they don't even spend more time tweaking their Facebook privacy settings than regular users.
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Facebook full of fake Haiti fundraisers
Posted: Monday, January 18 2010 at 12:40 pm CT by Bob Sullivan
Facebook is posting warning messages on its site.
Fake fundraising efforts for the Haiti disaster are spreading like wildfire on Facebook. Dozens of fan pages have been set up, urging users to join and promising a $1 donation for each member. One group this weekend attracted 1.5 million members before it was disabled.
Meanwhile, during the weekend, Facebook officials had to beat back a rumor that the firm had promised a $1 donation for every member that changed their status to include a message about Haiti.
"This status is being tracked, the owners of facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for the Haiti earthquake disaster for everytime this is cut and paste as a status," read one form of the bogus claim. "You only have to leave it for a minimum of 1 hour. Lets all do our bit to help."
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What the cyber-attack from China means
Posted: Thursday, January 14 2010 at 05:57 pm CT by Bob Sullivan
Gregory Fayer opened an e-mail on Monday night that looked like it was from a fellow lawyer at Gipson Hoffman & Pancione. Instead, it was a message that placed Fayer and his firm in the middle of what might be the biggest international cyber-conflict to date.
This week, search engine giant Google disclosed that it had also been a victim of cyber-attacks from China, and has taken the bold step of threatening to shut down the Chinese version of its search engine. On Thursday, computer security firm VeriSign said it had traced the Google attacks back to "to a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof," and that 30 companies were targeted.
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Six new credit card booby traps on the way
Posted: Tuesday, January 12 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
What Congress giveth, credit card companies are poised to take away.
In six weeks, the final major provisions of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act will take effect. The law prohibits many egregious tactics used by card issuers, such as retroactively raising interest rates on consumers' balances. But issuers have reacted to the sweeping new consumer protection law by quickly inventing new egregious tactics, including raising rates and lowering credit limits on half of all U.S. cardholders.
And that may just be the beginning. Bill Hardekopf of Lowcards.com expects a series of new “gotchas” from card issuers in the year ahead, as they struggle to recover revenue lost to the CARD Act or the economic downturn. Here are six new booby traps consumers should watch for this year.
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