Schinckel.net

Internet Banking uses industry-standard encryption to help keep you safe online, while our Factor2 Personal Icons help protect you from unauthorised transfers from your account. The first time you transfer money to another financial institution or use BPAY, you will be asked to choose three secret icons that you’ll need to select every time you use these services.

(From Savings & Loans - Internet Banking - Information)

Okay, so let me get this straight. You have introduced a second set of paswords, right?

Each time you use BPAY or transfer funds to another financial institution, you will be prompted with nine icons, including your three chosen icons, in a random order. You will need to select your secret icons in the correct order before you can BPAY or transfer funds.

Okay, I have some issues with this.
Firstly, if someone already has access to my login details, they have breached security. They can look at personal details about me, including the address my credit union has on file. But not my date of birth. Which they might be able to get by google.
Okay, you are trying to do something nice and stop someone stealing all of my money if they happen to get my PCLink access details. And you give me a system where I need to click on three icons.
Surely shoulder-surfing is easier to do if you just have to see the three icons someone clicks on, rather than try to see what keys they have pressed on the keyboard.

If you forget your Factor2 Personal Icons, you will need to call our Member Contact Centre on 13 11 82 to have them reset.

Okay, so someone could get my login, pretend to forget my icons, and ring and get them reset. So the system can fairly easily be bypassed. But then I wouldn’t be able to get in myself. Granted, it is a level of security that didn’t exist before, but I don’t really see that it is any more secure. If they have gotten in, it stops them transferring all of my money out.
Until they ring, read off my address, google my date of birth, and then they can steal all of my money. Now, it happens I have been pretty good at keeping my date of birth private. I even use a faked D.O.B. for lots of online sites. Which I have to remember when I have used that fake.
It’s just lucky I don’t have much money in there…

I’m feeling pretty down today. Which really annoys me, because I have a Touch Football tournament on this weekend, and I’d love to be able to really focus on that, and prepare. At least I will have plenty of motivation to go hard, though.

See, my Year 12 IT Studies kids are supposed to be handing in work, or have handed it in already. I have to submit my results to SSABSA tomorrow, and at this stage I don’t have anything that even slightly resembles a full marks book.

I have found this to be the worst aspect of teaching. Trying to get all of the required work from a cohort of students.

It makes me feel like a bad teacher. Why can’t I manage to get all of the students, or even a majority of them, to submit all of the required tasks? Am I doing something wrong? I know there are stacks of things I would approach from a different direction if I were teaching the subject again, or if I could do it over. But surely I m not single-handedly responsible for their lack of work.

Having had discussions with other teachers at my school makes me think not. One of the Maths teachers mentioned she had 3 out of 17 students who have submitted all of their tasks. A Science teacher had similar things to say of his class.

At some stage, students need to stand up and take responsibility for their own actions. Regardless of excuses they make (the computer network is down, or whatever), I have continually reminded my class of the tasks they have not completed. And yet with some students, I have received no more than 20% of their assessable work. And these are the very same students who have not attended at all in the “extra week” I have put on for them, since I was absent all of last week.

Perhaps I just need to go “fuck it”, and hand out a whole bunch of failing grades.

Of course, that would only result in me getting hauled through the admin team’s offices, wanting to know why so many students scored so badly. So I spend countless hours giving students way more help than I would really like, and quite a few of my website projects look fairly similar.

Stiff shit. I’m over this whole thing. I am just killing days until the year finishes.

I noticed an ad in my Adsense section today. At first glimpse, it looks like an advertisement from Apple for iTunes.

Version 7.5 Free Download The Latest Version. Just 99c a Song Fast Download - 100% Guaranteed.

Then I hovered over the ad, and noticed the link: iTunes-Classic.com. I followed the link, and came across the dirtiest, dodgiest site I have ever seen. Well, maybe not the worst, but it’s pretty scummy. “Download straight to your iPod” Free, written everywhere over the site. And then when you click on a link, and go to the “Join” page:

3 year Unlimited VIP Membership for only $49.95 - $11.65/year 2 Years Full & Unlimited Access for only $16.44/year 1 Year Unlimited Access for $29.88 Supercharge my Internet connection with our award winning Download Accelerator for only $14.95 and download up to 300% faster!

I’ve even hunted around this site further, and I suspect it is one site of many that do similar stuff, since there are domain names like: transaction-id.com secure.signupsecurity.com and so on, with product names and so on. My tip: they don’t offer any services, and charge $50 to allow you to download iTunes, which is free from Apple. Their FAQ even says this, but they spin some shit about making it easier for new computer users to be parted with their money find the software they are looking for.

I’ve received two emails from Gotalk in the past couple of days, relating to my services with them. Until the end of October, I’ll have been on WildIT’s $36/month (or similar) plan. This is a 265kbps plan, with 12Gb/month before shaping, although I’ve never really been shaped, and I’ve pushed down over 23Gb in a month. I also have a couple of hosting setups, although they don’t deliver much traffic.

The two emails dealt with these two services. I’ll include them, as they are kind of relevant. I’ll address them in detail individually.

Dear Matthew

As you are aware, gotalk acquired the telephony and internet business of WildIT in late March 2007. gotalk is an Australian owned full service communications provider and we strive to provide our customers with quality services and best value for money. The products we offer include landline, mobile, internet and broadband voice (VoIP). Our aim is to make our customer’s life easier with great service and the use of the latest technologies, all on a single account.

We are streamlining the number of service plans on offer, and the purpose of this email is to let you know your plan options with gotalk.

Recommended changes to your plan

gotalk has reviewed your current plan, and recommend below what we believe is the gotalk plan that best suits your current needs, based on the information available to us.

Your current Broadband plan is :

DSL SERVICES

Service Number 08######## - Plan RG 256/64 ADSL (non-monthly)

From 1 October 2007, we will move you to the following gotalk plan :

DSL SERVICES
Service Number 08########
New Plan gotalk Standard 256 @ $39.95/mth
Includes 1000 MB

Please note that gotalk will automatically move you to the above gotalk plan on 1 October 2007. It is important that if you would like to find out more about this plan, or discuss other plan options, you will need to do this by 30 September 2007. You will find plan information on our website at www.gotalk.com, or please call us on 1800 468 255 and we’d be happy to discuss your options.

If you have additional services such as dial up internet, VoIP or hosting from WildIT we will contact you again shortly regarding these.

Free upgrade from ADSL to ADSL2+

gotalk also offers a free upgrade from ADSL to our hi speed ADSL2+ service. To see if ADSL2+ is available in your area, please check here or call us on 1800 468 255 to check availability and to take advantage of this free upgrade.

Thank you for your patience during the transition phase from WildIT to gotalk and we look forward to meeting your communications needs today and in the future.

Kind Regards

The gotalk team

Okay, my hassles with this. I’ll start with the pedantic. Why must you boldify your company name, every time you have it included?

Now that that is out of the way, it’s down to business. My current WildIT plan includes at least 12Gb of data, for more than 10% less. Yet you want me to move to a plan with a much lower data allowance? Based on the evidence you have? Either you have crappy evidence, or you are fucking useless at interpreting it! I suppose you also come to the conclusion that evolution isn’t real, based on evidence?

Secondly, are you expecting me to only look at this on the last day before my plan changes over to your ridiculously expensive, low data plan? How am I supposed to churn before then if I only look on the last day? Then I’d be without internet for several days, or pay you shitloads for internet.

The other letter I received is regarding hosting, and it is even worse. I’ll leave out the majority of it, but know that I have four hosting accounts, all of which cost me nothing. That’s right, not a dollar. Ever. No money at all changes hands regarding the four sites I have set up.

Your new hosting internet plan from 1 October 2007, will be gotalk hosting. This hosting plan gives you 500MB of disc space and 10GB of data for just $19.95 per month. Excess data is charged at 8c per MB and is capped at $50.00.

Okay, let’s let the bold thing slide again. But can you seriously expect me to pay $20-$70 dollars per month for hosting? I currently pay nothing! My other site, located at a reliable, proper hosting company, costs me around $.10/day. That’s $3/month, and includes a hell of a lot more services than you offer. And it’s reliable, and not staffed by fuckwits, apparently.

So, gotalk (ever heard of capitals, by the way?), I won’t be continuing my services with you. And don’t you dare try to charge me a disconnection fee. You still owe me a month’s worth of service, since I paid that in advance. But I suspect you won’t be paying that back to me, will you.

9000 hits upon my site. Even if you factor in images, scripts, etc, there is no way there are that many pages. 207Mb downloaded by Yahoo! Slurp. I have less than 1/6 of that in data. Especially since I get less than 1% of my traffic from Yahoo! I’m fairly tempted to block their stupid crawler altogether. Fuck You, Yahoo!

I hate that when I type in a query to Google, like: appscript network It returns a heap of hits for AppleScript network. Fuck you Google. If I meant AppleScript, I’d fucking write AppleScript!

Printer sharing via the Airport Extreme Base Station is great. Once you have installed Bonjour for Windows clients too, then everyone can find the printer easily, and print to it. Except if you happen to turn off your printer, and then restart your base station. When you turn the printer back on, it won’t be recognised by the base station. Unplugging the USB printer and plugging it back in fixes the issue with not being able to find it. This is kind of annoying, as we turn our printer off when it is not in use. And I often need to restart the base station (that’s’ the other thing. If you even add a port forwarding entry, you need to restart the stupid thing!).

Well, this is not a good start to my hosting on a new host. I’ve been there less than a week, and already there has been a significant downtime (approx 2 hours). Hopefully this is not a habit…

The Santa Rosa MacBook Pros have an issue where, depending on the type of wireless access point, if you use WPA (or perhaps even WEP, although why you would even bother is beyond me), when you run on battery power you get a kernel panic. The latest firmware update seems to have fixed this issue. It also seems to have fixed the issue where my machine wouldn’t automatically connect to a wireless network when waking up from sleep. Finally, the third issue I had, with not being able to permanently trust a certificate because I don’t have the root certificate, also seems to be fixed. Finally, painless wireless networking.

Here’s an interesting little bug. Create a copy of a timed event in iCal (or just go to any timed event, I’m just making a copy so I can delete it later). Edit the start or finish time or date. When you are finished editing, press Tab. The time or date change will stick. If you chose a start time, the end time will adjust so the event is the same length. This is very cool, if, like me, you have lots of fixed-time events. Okay, now edit the time again. This time, instead of pressing Tab when you are finished, press Enter instead. Notice how the edit was actually discarded? This is crazy, crazy behaviour. The sort of thing you should be shot for. I mean, since when does Enter imply “ignore the edits I just made”? I mean, seriously. And this is before the fact that most of my friends hate me sending iCal invitations, as they don’t see the link for them to click on. I have to resort to sending gCal invites if I want responses!