New home

Yeah, it's been a total of one day but I was convinced to move my blog over to livejournal here:

http://cromulator.livejournal.com/

I'm fickle like that.

Ingenious

Well, someone was bound to try it someday. The great thing is that it nearly worked!

"The loophole involved the tiny payments that online payment services and brokerages send to new user accounts to verify that they're real. While getting four cents from PayPal might not seem like a big deal to you, Michael Largent decided to create a script to automatically open 58,000 of these accounts. Unfortunately for him, the companies caught on to his scheme and he's currently out on bail on charges of wire, bank and mail fraud."

http://gizmodo.com/393747/hacker-pulls-an-office-space-steals-50000-worth-of-pennies-from-google-paypal

If it worked for Richard Pryor and those guys in Office Space, it was only a matter of time before someone did something similar. Funny thing is he would have gotten away with it ("if it wasn't for you pesky kids"). They got him for using fake social security numbers to open the accounts. The taking of the money was perfectly legal!

What Americans Believe

Seems appropriate to start out my blog with a post that truly exemplifies some of the dumbening going on...

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0508/Things_Americans_believe.html

In order to put the fact that 10 percent of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, Ben Smith presents these wonderful facts about what Americans believe to be true:

22 percent believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.
30 percent believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
23 percent believe they've been in the presence of a ghost.
18 percent believe the sun revolves around the Earth.

So, yeah. Wow.