racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

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This was taken at Pia’s grandpa’s house in Sikatuna Village during a post-Christmas visit. I managed to pan the camera juuuust right! After all, it IS difficult to catch up with a very active toddler!

I.PH

This is one of the newest services being offered by dotPH. It’s basically a service by which individuals (Filipinos in particular) can avail themselves of their own “i.ph” domain name without the hassles of having to register for a regular domain name (such as the need to divulge one’s identity). In short, the i.ph service offers “domains for individuals.” In the past month, I had registered using jangelo.i.ph. I’m trying out the features, and if I like it, I’ll be migrating this weblog to i.ph.

The service uses the BLOG:CMS Personal Content Management System by Radek Hulán, which is, according to dotPH president Mr. Joel Disini, one of the better blogging softwares (i.e. compared to Blogger). I do agree, since you’d have to be a techie to be able to fully harness Blogger’s potentials. The barebones Blogger software is quite basic, and without third-party add-ons and some code/template tweaks, you’d end up with a blog that’s quite limited.

One note, though: it’s not free. dotPH charges a US$ 5.00 fee for three months or $15 a year for use of the i.ph domain name and service. But you do get a two-month free trial period to test the service(I’m halfway through this trial). Another thing: it’s not as simple and straightforward to use as blogger. With some more patience, I’ll get the hang of it.

Kudos to dotPH for the work put into i.ph.

I read (and have recently re-read) this article as published in the 9 Septmeber 2004 issue of The Economist (one of my preferred bathroom reading materials, =P ), and I can’t help but agree with the sense that UN seems to be making a lot of “declarations” but the results of its plans are not so good, or at least its activities in the grassroots are not quite evident.

Even in my line of work (which includes serving as administrator of the NEDA Public Investment Staff’s Project Proposal Monitoring System), I get to come across a number of UN project documents/proposals (not my direct responsibility, though), but I tend to wonder if these activities do, indeed, make a difference in this impoverished nation of ours. If the Philippine Government is a mess with all the bureaucratic intricacies (read: inefficient), what more with the UN, which is quite a large-scale multilateral organization?

The UN is, after all, a political organization. And it continues to enjoy an increasling level of political clout with the concept of globalization (rather, globalisation, as the Economist would spell it, the British publication that it is) gaining a hold on the world. Geographical boundaries are rendered moribund in this age of information, even by the very medium this text is currently being delivered (the Internet). Are we therefore coming close to becoming “One World United?” (Note: I do not categorically believe that the UN is evil, but hey, it might be. Anyway, I shall be posting here a copy of another article on the “new form” of evil, as published in TIME).

Quoting the article from the Economist (incidentally, you can also try typing ” www.economsit.com “–yes, SIT and not IST–in your browser’s address bar and you will be redirected to the correct website. Cool, huh?). Emphases are mine.

Ends without means
Sep 9th 2004
From The Economist print edition

The United Nations has set benchmarks for progress in poor countries. Are these any use?

THIS week the United Nations published its annual assessment of progress toward its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—targets established in 2000 for advancing welfare in the developing countries. The record, as you might expect, is mixed. Some things are improving, others are not. How far the MDG initiative is making a difference, one way or another, is unclear. It remains questionable, in fact, whether the MDG exercise, with its unimpeachably good intentions and its proliferating bureaucratic overhead, has done any good at all, on balance.

The targets cover eight areas, calling in most cases for specified improvements by 2015 measured from 1990: reduce the incidence of extreme poverty and hunger by half; provide universal access to primary education; promote the equality of women; reduce infant mortality by two-thirds (with a separate target for extending immunisation against measles); reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters; halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria; achieve “environmental sustainability†(reverse the loss of forests, improve access to clean water and sanitation); and form a “global partnership for developmentâ€.

The first six goals, at any rate, could hardly be questioned—nor the seventh, so far as drinking water and sanitation are concerned. One might ask, perhaps, why settle for reducing extreme poverty by only half? Why not aim for a cut of 80%, or 100% for that matter? The answer is that the UN did give some thought to what might feasibly be achieved, with increased effort by poor-country governments and donors, in the stated timescale. Fine. On the other hand, the weakness of the whole MDG concept is that it wills the ends without willing the means—something which the UN, perforce, has come to specialise in. A plan to spend an additional allocation of aid on specific interventions designed to reduce poverty, or combat AIDS, or whatever, could be judged for cost-effectiveness and ranked alongside alternative ways of expending resources on development. A statement of good intentions is unfortunately just that.

The UN seems especially proud of the progress made toward goal number eight, in which it has a vested interest—that of greater global co-operation on development. Certainly, discussion among governments about aid and development has been completely reordered by the MDG initiative. High-level conferences, working groups, declarations, strategies and programmes, all swearing allegiance to the MDG idea, are multiplying fantastically. In this sense, at least, the concept is a runaway success. However, what this is actually doing for the putative poor-country beneficiaries is harder to say. The UN observes that “many countries are in the process of retooling development programmes and strategies in line with the MDGs.†How odd. Were those governments hitherto unconcerned about poverty or AIDS? Then again, in the new assessment the UN is pleased to note that “at least 65 countries and five regions or sub-regions have issued reports geared to measuring progress on the MDGs.†Well, that’s something.

Let them eat reports

For the most part, again as you would expect, progress in the substantive indicators of improvements in welfare is highly correlated with economic growth. East and South-East Asia have met or are on track to meet nearly all of the MDGs by 2015. (East Asia has seen movement in the wrong direction for just one target: the proportion without clean drinking water in towns, partly owing to rural-urban migration. South-East Asia has seen a worsening in just one area too: forests.) At the other extreme, the moribund economies of sub-Saharan Africa, taken together, have met or are on track to meet not a single target—with the exception, presumably, of the global-partnership targets for retooling programmes and issuing reports. No progress at all, or less than no progress, on poverty and hunger; on secondary-school enrolment for girls; on infant mortality or immunisation against measles; on maternal mortality; on malaria; on forests, drinking water and sanitation.

The overriding importance of economic growth suggests that aid, in itself, is no cure-all. Yet there is no question that in sub-Saharan Africa and in other very poor places, certain kinds of aid—notably those aimed at specific health interventions—are well worth undertaking. Has the MDG process at least succeeded in directing more aid to the right uses?

Not really. Aid flows increased by $2.3 billion between 2002 and 2003, but American spending on reconstruction in Iraq is included in that total, and accounts for $2 billion. Contributions to multilateral concessional funds fell by $1.2 billion. Total official aid, at $68.5 billion, stood at 0.25% of the donor countries’ aggregated national incomes, up from 0.23% in 2002—but the UN’s agreed aid goal is 0.7% of national income.

Additional spending on treating and preventing AIDS is recognised by the MDG initiative as a key aim, and widely acknowledged (for instance by the Copenhagen Consensus project, described in this space earlier this year) as among the most cost-effective ways to spend money in poor countries. What is the record there? Spending to halt the spread of AIDS and other diseases (notably malaria and tuberculosis) was $4.7 billion last year, a substantial rise from $1.7 billion in 2002. But this is still far less than ought to be spent: the UN reckons that $12 billion will be needed next year and $20 billion in 2006.

Meanwhile, nearly 5m people became newly infected with AIDS in 2003, more than in any previous year. In Eastern Europe and South Asia the disease is spreading more rapidly than before. In sub-Saharan Africa the pandemic continues “unabatedâ€â€”partly for want of resources. As a result, MDGs or no, the region’s millennium development outlook is a worsening economic catastrophe.

Jeremy Wagstaff writes (again) on phishing. He cites some tips against phishing put together by Daniel McNamara of Code Fish Spam Watch, whom he considers the “Anti-Phisher King.”

Webopedia.com defines phishing as:

(fish´ing) (n.) The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The Web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information.
…
Phishing, also referred to as brand spoofing or carding, is a variation on “fishing,†the idea being that bait is thrown out with the hopes that while most will ignore the bait, some will be tempted into biting.

While Filipinos are not as likely to divulge sensitive information that may be useful to Phishers aside from passwords (i.e. bank details, or rather bank details to accounts that are well-funded), I have read about bad experiences of some Pinoys with Phishing emails. Okay, actually, I had been victim to such an attack myself (involving a Yahoo account), but that was eons ago.

In the end, it’s best to scrutinize such emails even if they look official or from the source they claim. There are obvious signs that an message intends to phish, such as the target URL, the sensitivity of the information required, and spelling/grammatical errors in the text.

Some tips I’d like to add:

• Turn on your browser’s status bar (click view–status bar). This way, if reading email via web, you can easily check the target URL of a link by hovering your mouse cursor over it. Hence, you can more or less determine if the page will lead you to an official website when you click a link. For instance, some phishing messages claim to have come from Citibank, but have “www.citibank.com.xxxxxxx (replace xxxxxxx with your favorite top-level domain), but the URL is clearly not that of Citibank’s website. Sometimes, the target is legit, but the codes will send your information somewhere else!
• Turn on your file manager/explorer’s extension-viewing capabilities. I don’t understand why, by default, newer versions of Windows (i.e. XP) have this feature turned off by default. With this, you can easily see the file type of an attachment, and thus you can pinpoint what types of files you should avoid (EXE, COM, CMD, BAT, PIF, SCR, and some document files that may contain malicious macro code).

Some tips to consider to avoid being victimized by such phishing expeditions as posted in Loose Wire:

User Tips

Standard Phishing Emails

1. Just remember that NO bank will ever, ever ask you to confirm details via email. If a bank seriously needs you to confirm information they will always require your physical presence or at the very least by phone.
2. Banks never need you to confirm your password or PIN. They run the systems and if they ever run into problems with these it’s much simpler for them to scrub the current records and replace them with new ones.
3. They tend to be pretty un-imaginative using the same wording over and over again. Have a read through some previous phisher emails and you’ll soon spot some common patterns.
4. There’s always the obvious clue that the bank that requires you to confirm your details is not one you actually bank with.
5. Ebay/Paypal Scams – Just like the banks these guys never need you to confirm your details. They do control the systems so it’s far easier for them to reset the information than to get the client to verify it.
6. Remember this simple fact. The emails claim that due to whatever issue you need to verify your details. A quick bit of common sense shows that if they’ve screwed up the data they have what exactly are they going to verify against?
7. The emails always threaten account closure if you don’t comply. If a bank was seriously considering closing your bank account that would almost certainly contact you in writing (via good old snail mail) or over the phone.

Job Scams

1. Remember these jobs scams don’t just arrive via email. There have been cases of the phishers inserting these jobs into real job sites. The job sites generally do a good job of scrubbing these fraudulent job listings but occasionally they will miss one or two.
2. Job scams are sometimes sent out via broadcast ICQ/MSN messages. If you receive an email from someone you do not know offering you a job, particularly if it offers large amount of income for very little work, treat it with extreme suspicion.
3. Any job that offers you to make thousands a week is automatically suspect. No legitimate job (other than that of a CEO) will ever pull that sort of cash.
4. The jobs scams almost always claim they are a European company have troubles doing overseas money transfer. This is ridiculous. Todays financial systems allow for businesses to transfer money anywhere they want in the world without resorting to wiring services such as Western Union.
5. A “job” that pays by percentage kept from a money transfer is not legal from a tax point of Remember in the real world the employer needs to pay the appropriate amount of payroll tax. The way the jobs scams operate falls outside of this area.

Trojan Lure Emails

1. These emails are almost always designed to get an emotional not rational response. As such the will claim things like your credit card has been charged, there is some form of huge natural disaster/terrorist attack or some of other story designed to make people click on the link out of fear or curosity.
2. Some lure pretend to be questsions from eBay or PayPal people. Most of the time these emails looking slightly out of place

General Tips

• By cynical. Seriously. The way the internet is today end users no longer have much of a choice but to approach anything they are presented with on the web/email as highly suspect until you feel you have enough hard evidence to prove it.
• Keep your windows machines up to date. Yes even if you are on dial up. The time you spend now could save you from a very expense headace down the road. Make sure you run Windows Update at least once a month.
• Use anti-virus. Doesn’t really matter which one you use as long as you actually keep it up to date. All current anti-virus systems are simply signature based checkers and can only check for trojans they actually know about.
• DON’T treat anti-virus and firewalls as the magic bullet for this problem. Despite what many companies will try and sell you there is NO all in one cure for this. There is always a way around firewalls, there is always some lag time between the time a new trojan is released and when the anti-virus companies update their signatures. Having said this you should still use these products because most of the time they will help save you.
• If you receive an email you’re unsure about ask the place is supposedly from. It’s worth it just to double check it now than pay the price in the future.
• If you come across an email you know to be fraudulent try and make steps to inform the bank/company involved. Most major ones these days have a facility to do this now.
• If you have become embroiled in one of the money laundering job scams you need to cease contact with the scammers. Don’t send them emails saying you’ve found them to be a scam and don’t respond to their inquiries. Then contact your bank’s anti-fraud department. Depending on the level of service of your bank’s helpdesk this may take a little work but once you get through to the anti-fraud department you should find it is staffed by competent and understanding people who will work with the police in order track the stolen money. Be aware this process may result in your account being frozen for a few days while this happens. Better this than potentially being charged with aiding and abetting fraud.
• If you have been involved in a job scam like the ones we’ve seen to date do not try and hold onto the money from the “job”. Remember some that money has been stolen from some other person’s account and you have no more right to it than that of the scum that stole it in the first place.

Finally, better rights for the taxi-riding public? As a frequent taxi rider myself, one way I address the problem of having one too many a choosy taxi driver is by being myself choosy with the cabs I ride. In fact, I believe that it’s more economical to ride the newer-model vehicles, in particular those post-year 2000 Toyota Corollas, since you get to enjoy a safer and more comfortable ride (i.e. cooler air conditioning, firmer and more ergonomical seats, and generally a cleaner feel), and with generally a faster travel time. Thus, I make it a point to refuse cabs that do not look or sound well-maintained, or whose drivers seem badly-groomed, unruly or disrespectful. And as much as possible, I make it a point to call for a cab (from several reputable taxi companies) instead of flagging one down, especially with more distant destinations. Some of my usually-called transpo companies (if calling from outside Metro Manila, use 02 as area code. Replace 0 with +63 if for some reason, you find the need to call a cab from outside the Philippines):

• MGE – 363-6096, 364-8260
• R&E – 330-1654, 362-1890
• Basic – 900-1447 to 48 (plus PhP 70)
• Taxi Dispatch – 373-TAXI (8294) (plus PhP 50)

Angelo

An excerpt from the media release:

VILLAR: TAXI DRIVERS SHOULD NOT CHOOSE OR REFUSE PASSENGERS

Commuters should not be inconvenienced by such practice of taxi drivers

…
Senator Manny Villar, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Order, says the common practice of taxi drivers who choose or refuse passengers should be stopped, since it unduly inconveniences commuters.
…
Senate Bill 782 upholds the promotion of the general welfare of the Filipinos, particularly equal access to public services and utilities such as transportation. It provides for penalties to taxi drivers who violate the law.

According to Villar, the concerned authorities such as the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the Land Transportation Office (LTO) and the Land Transportation, Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) have also been issuing warnings to taxi drivers and operators in being choosy in rendering services, but to no avail.

“Its about time, we issue stiffer penalties because it seems that mere warnings do not work in disciplining taxi drivers. I just don’t want commuters and passengers to be unduly inconvenienced by the unlawful behavior of taxi drivers. In fairness to them though, there are still a lot of fair and disciplined taxi drivers around,” further cites Villar.