A grumble, avoiding phishers & incompetence

grumble

After I got back from my friend's funeral in Bowen (not Mackay which was where I was going to visit him while he was alive), I came back & found my computer wasn't working. Because it was pouring rain that week & I don't have a car it wasn't until the next week I could put it in at the shop, which turned out to be a blown motherboard & CPU which required me to re-install Windows XP once I had them replaced which all took another week, then I found my original install disk has become corrupted & it won't install 2 dlls I need to connect to the internet, so I'm using a computer I bought for a friend who then changed their mind & using floppy disks to swap the information back & forth. It's a bit of a pain when dealing with new email on this computer, old email on my main computer & files on both computers.

Also my phone wasn't ringing & I never got the calls when people rang & the voicemail service hasn't been 100% reliable; & my mobile phone would never divert to my voicemail service so when it was off (most of the time), out of area, or when I didn't answer no one could get through; & when it does ring it's so quiet I often miss it. When I did ring people I went for a couple of weeks of getting busy signals or ringing when people weren't home about 90% of the time, so I was feeling a bit isolated for a while at a time when I was a bit depressed over the death of my friend.

Phishing:

I verge on the paranoid when it comes to email. Recently I did a survey on Microsoft's web site to see if I could spot phishers & although I got all the fakes I also picked several genuine emails as being phishers because they had links to click in the email. I always use the bookmark in my web browser which is originally done by typing in the internet address or I type the internet address or I use the eBay toolbar for eBay for any account that involves money. It's good to find out from your bank, ISP & other places where your details are entered what protocols they use for contacting you so if you ever get an email purportedly from one that doesn't fit their protocol you know it's a fake. Be a bit wary even if they do fit the protocol though.

Some fakes are easier to spot, for example something supposed to come from eBay that has something between eBay & the top level identifier, eg. ebay.accounts.com.au (fake - the domain is 'accounts.com.au') instead of accounts.ebay.com.au, but some are really tricky & use invisible characters so the address looks like it is the right on in the email but really the link takes you to a phishing site. Some don't even spell check their fakes & they are obvious. Basically if it's real they should be able to tell you all your details & if they want you to tell them your details it's probably phishing. Be especially wary of anything that doesn't use your name. Generally I find real sites email me something that shows they know who I am such as a list of personal details & the last 3 digits of my account number or something.

Phisher's do variations of emails for every bank there is. It's such a worry to hear that my BankSomewhereI'veNeverHeardOf account is overdrawn & I need to re-enter details by clicking on this link that has the wrong country internet code on the beginning (the right hand side before the first slash) of it by an email sent to an address that only spammers ever use (my Club Mac email address), not. They also do letters from your ISP saying stuff like "Due to an enormous amount of SPAM being sent from your account in the last month your account has been temporarily disabled. Click here to reset it."

I've taken to using full headers & the internet ('whois' search of APNIC etc.) to find the ISPs of those sending them & reporting them.

Basically it's a good idea never to click on anything in an email unless you know it's OK, i.e. your trusted friend is recommending something like http://gutenberg.net.au/, which is a site that has just about all out of copywrite books that've been entered on a computer available & doesn't want your details (personal or financial), or you've just entered your email address on a web site you trust & you get an email from them asking you to click on a link to confirm your email address just after seeing web a page saying they were going to do this.

Incompetence & a grandiose opinion of oneself:

I often said what we think we know about stuff is inversely proportional to what we actually do know (I've even said "You can tell Jenny knows more about YYY than I do because I'm more confident of my ability in that area" which probably sounded sarcastic at the time but wasn't) & now it's been proven.

Check out "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Vol 77, No. 6, pp 1121-1134.

Perhaps this quote sums it all up:

As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (p. 3).

Makes me feel a little better about not feeling so confident about myself.

Blessings,
Joe :-)