Great moments in management

Just suppose...
One morning you open up your e-mails and find a note from your mortgage company telling you to make your payments to some new address and new bank account. You'd check it out before sending anything, right...?

Supervalu Inc., the Eden Prairie-based grocer, fell prey to an e-mail scam this year, sending more than $10 million to two fraudulent bank accounts, according to federal court filings.
...
The company said it received two e-mails -- one from someone purporting to be an employee of American Greetings Corp. and another from someone claiming to be with Frito-Lay.... Both e-mails claimed that the companies wanted payments sent to new bank account numbers.

Supervalu sent more than $6.5 million in nine payments between Feb. 28 and March 6 to the phony American Greetings account at HSBC Bank in Miami Beach. The company also sent nearly $3.6 million during the same period to the phony Frito-Lay account in Arkansas. -- Associated Press report at StarTribune.com

Fortunately for Supervalu, somebody there spotted the scam and called in the FBI.  The feds were able to block the accounts before the money could be withdrawn.

The real head-scratcher is how this could even happen in the first place.

Via: Captain Ed, who says it demonstrates how Sarbaines-Oxley is no match for fraud, stupidity, or naivete.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:06:28 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Don't you just hate it when that happens?

Fake terror exercise interrupted by, um, real fake terror alert

Lesson learned (?):

If you have bomb squads and EOD units converging on an area to locate and defuse WMDs, and they and their cars all smell like explosives, the bomb-sniffing dogs are going to have a time of it.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 01:42:20 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Bullseye of doom

Click, if only for the Photoshop.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 01:21:57 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Alan Coren 1938-2007

I first ran across Alan Coren 40-some years ago when he was writing for (and later editing) Punch.  (Somewhere in the archives, IIRC, I have one of his books (I think it's the Idi Amin one), received as a premium for renewing my subscription.)  In those days I was making my acquaintance with the British humorous style, and it took a while to "tune in" on just where he was coming from.  Fortunately for me, I persisted, as did he.

Robbie Millen, at TimesOnline's Comment Central, has linked some of his best Times columns.

London Times obituary.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 00:59:21 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Da-bum Bing!

Chef Mojo posts a question:

Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be a nationwide general strike the other day?

and "genes" comes right back

Well, you know how it is. You can’t tell the when the generals go on strike ’cause the sergeants do all the work.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 00:14:58 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Serving "the public" versus serving "the customer"

"Squander Two," while railway blogging, nails the distinction (but do read the whole post):

The very phrase "customer service" has it built in: serve your customer so that they will give you money. And there's rarely any doubt about who your customer is: it's the guy offering you money. But then there's public service. The trouble with public service is that the public are a bit of an anonymous blob. While the customer standing in front of you, wanting to give you money, might be a member of the public, he ain't "the public." If you work in public service, your job is not to serve him.

I think I'd extend this to include private companies in pseudo-monopoly positions.  If your patrons have little choice, there's little incentive to please them.

Via Tim Worstall

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 23:54:20 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Good advice, but still disturbing

Comment appended to a post titled “Man Commits Suicide By Firing Flare Gun Into Mouth”

“If you can only be smart Once in your entire life ... Make sure it's when you are selecting how you will die.” -- “Electric Ferret”

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 23:10:38 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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If J.Random Hacker was doing this, he'd wind up in jail

Comcast has been caught running "Man-in-the-Middle Attacks" on its internet service:

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye." -- Associated Press story via msnbc

It's not just BitTorrent. How about Lotus Notes:

I finally have an end-to-end trace to share which shows that Comcast is filtering the port 1352 traffic. The images... [see linked post] show that Comcast is impersonating and using man-in-the-middle tactics to filter the traffic as stated in the CNet post.
...
...the Notes client saw the RST packets coming from the Domino server IP and the Domino server saw the RST packets coming from the Notes client PC. However the trace doesn't show either one of them sending the RST packets which means something on the network in between was sending them. The Sandvine appliance (or whatever Comcast is using) sends the RST packets to both systems while imitating the other. -- Kevin Kanarski

This warrants far more fuss then the AT&T terms-of-service flap. The AT&T thing was just potential: No one's service had ever been cut off for saying something AT&T didn't like.

Comcast's spoofing is going on right now.

more...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:38:27 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Making money off of media bias

Mickey Kaus:

The moderate lib bias of the MSM is a huge irrational, distorting force on the information flow to the American elite, prompting them to not infrequently make colossal misjudgments (like thinking John Kerry would be a solid presidential pick for the Dems). To the extent this organic MSM bias actually distorts the market, it should create opportunites for stock-picking. Why not start an investment fund --call it the Cocoon Fund or the Pinch Portfolio-- that would 1) search the papers for bogus liberal memes (like the subprime-dooms-the-economy story line, or the perennial UAW-to-organize-Nissan's-Smyrna-factory line); 2) figure out which stocks are underpriced because people actually believe this bogus meme; and 3) invest in those stocks. ...

Or you could just short New York Times.

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 14:50:32 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Shooting ourselves in the foot

Here we go!

A utility company and state lawmakers are vowing to challenge the rejection of a permit for two coal-fired power plants in Kansas where the state's top environmental regulator cited emissions of carbon dioxide.

The ruling could have an impact across the country and was hailed as a victory by environmental groups that warn the plants contribute dangerously to global warming.
...
[Ron] Bremby [Kansas secretary of healty and environment] said he denied the permit over concerns about the plants' potential carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists say that CO2 is a major contributor to climate change, but Kansas doesn't regulate it. -- AP Report via Houston Chronicle

"What's the matter with Kansas?" indeed.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:24:27 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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