And more from American Express with no way to notify them…

And more private financial information from American Express with no way to notify them – email doesn’t work and calling Bahrain is not in my calling plan.

Dear Merchant Partner,

Please find attached your latest Settlement and Payment Advice Report for SE No: 9740108691.

Should you have any queries, please contact us in Bahrain on (+973) 17 557799.

Regards,

Establishment Services Operations
AMEX (Middle East) B.S.C. (c)
P. O. Box 5990
Manama, Bahrain


Verizon keeps sending someone else’s account information

Verizon keeps sending someone else’s account information and still pays only lip service to privacy and providing a method to letting them know they are doing so.  Perhaps they should have a coverage map that shows where they are leaking private information.  “Can you see my account information now?”  “Can you see it now?”
And Verizon won’t discuss removing our email address from their database and said they didn’t care what we did with information sent to it. [Which fits with our terms of service – anything sent to us may be published.]

Your Verizon Wireless Account Number ending with 1772-00001
Your current Verizon Wireless bill statement is now available for online viewing. The current balance due is $193.79.You can conveniently view your bill statement atwww.verizonwireless.com. The online bill is a restatement of your paper bill.

It’s easy to pay your Verizon Wireless bill. On the web, go to My Verizon at www.verizonwireless.com. On your cellular phone, you can access account information by dialing #PMT (airtime free).

Auto Bill Pay is Available!

  • Automatically pay your bill, in full, each month by signing up for Auto Bill Pay using your checking account or debit/credit card. For more information or to change your current payment method, go to My Verizon atwww.verizonwireless.com and select Auto Bill Pay.
  • Or, call us at 1-866-868-3882 to enroll.

Thank you for using Verizon Wireless.

…To review our Privacy Policy, click here.


If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. Google CEO Eric Schmidt

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” – Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, December 7, 2009.

Google’s New Privacy Policy:

At Google, we are keenly aware of the trust you place in us and our responsibility to protect your privacy IF you have nothing to hide.  Otherwise, too bad, use Bing.

I guess Schmidt won’t mind:

1. Cameras stationed outside his house.

2. Providing his credit card statements to the public.

3. Responding to ValleyWag and others who reported on his many girlfriends, despite being married.

4. Publishing his health records.

5. Publishing his tax returns.

If Google’s Schmidt does not immediately publish those records, it is obvious he has something to hide.

It is the height of stupidity to say that everyone’s private life should be open to the public view.  Just because you don’t share your credit card statements doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong.

Al Gore claimed he created the internet and Snopes tries to cover it up.

There are people out there (including one on the CBS News website today) that claim Al Gore never said “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”  The facts say otherwise and Snopes.com tries to massage the issue by saying it is false.  Snopes confuses the issue by saying “Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed he ‘invented’ the Internet.”  They respond with it as “Status: False.”  Now, we have never seen a claim that Al Gore says he “invented” the internet, but it is clear that Al Gore does say that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

Let’s look at the facts:

1. CNN’s own transcript of the discussion on March 9, 1999’s “Late Edition” with Wolf Blitzer (see

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/index.html) says  “I’ve traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”

Clearly he does not say he “invented” the internet, but he does claim he created it and Snopes.com is clearly being disingenuous when they change the claim to something it is not.  This is called a straw man, and while one should expect better from Snopes, it is not surprising.

2. ARPANET, the first packet switching network, first went active October 29, 1969 (recently there were articles about the 40th anniversary of the Internet, commemorating that event). But ideas for such a network had been circulating as early as August 1962.  In October 1963, ARPA began to believe that such a network was an important concept.  So, who “created” the internet?  Scientists in the 1960s.  If any politician can claim to have “taken the initiative in creating the internet” it would be the two Presidents were involved in funding it – President Kennedy and President Johnson with President Nixon continuing to fund it more in the early 1970s.  President Johnson’s tenure coincides closest with the initial groundwork and initial operation.  The Congresses at the time should also deserve some credit if any politician could be said to have “created” the internet.  In reality though, it was the researches and the people at ARPA would took the initiative to create the internet.

Gore began serving in Congress in 1977 and the Internet was approximately 9 years old.

ClimateGate source code more damning than emails

Check out this link to an article that shows that the ClimateGate computer source code (e.g. the program that processes the data) has more issues than the emails do.

Part of the summary:

For those who can’t follow what is being stated here is that data after 1960 will be “artificially adjusted” to “hide the decline”. In other words they were hardcoding in the program ways to manipulate the data to hide the decline in temperatures.

But then the scientific (???) journal, Nature finds nothing out of the ordinary in previous papers relying on the data.  At least we know Nature is on the global warming without scientific inquiry bandwagon.

Individual Rights and Today's Issue