To finish off my account of how to forge your paycheck, increase your net worth, make the cover of a national business magazine and have an interesting discussion with the federal authorities ….
I left off with my editor, Bill Baldwin at Forbes, challenging me to deposit a check I forged on a Mac. If it cleared then it was a story. If it didn’t clear … We really didn’t think through those consequences.
So, I took the bogus piece of paper, walked it across Huntington Ave. to the ATM in the plaza of Boston’s Prudential Center, sealed it in a deposit envelope, and sent it on its merry way, feeling a little guilty that I hadn’t taken the full criminal route, ala Frank Abagnale (Mr. Catch Me If You Can) and tried to persuade a real human bank teller to cash it. Whatever. It was done, and with some guilt I went back to my home office and started reporting another story on mainframe software vendors or some far less exciting topic.
Two days later I started calling the bank’s automated balance line (this was pre-online banking) to see if my balance had ballooned. On the third day I was a much wealthier man. I phoned Baldwin.
“It cleared,” I told him. “My balance is way up.”
There was some silence. Neither one of us knew what to do next. Finally Baldwin suggested I catch the shuttle to NYC and be prepared to return the money to accounting.
The next day I was waiting outside of the Forbes accounting department, personal check in hand, ready to tell the poor treasurer that I had committed a felony in the interest of service journalism.
“You did what?”
“Well, I was researching a story about digital forgery and I forged a Forbes check and deposited it and …”
“Oh my god.” He picked up the phone and called Baldwin to confirm my misdeed. I was dismissed. I went back to Baldwin’s office.
“I guess we should have told accounting first. They’re on the phone with the bank now.” Forbes’ bank was not pleased. They were very unhappy. Their chief of security was not having a good day. And I was told I had committed a serious felony. The check was still in the system somewhere, flying to Honolulu, and they had no idea how to deal with a customer who ripped themselves off. I took out my checkbook and wrote a check back to Forbes.
I was sent back to Boston with orders to forge onwards (sorry) with the completition of the story. The Forbes research department went into overdrive, searching court dockets for more evidence of digital forgery, a photographer was hired to come into my home office and chronicle the process of cutting the check. The Mac and scanner and laser printer were re-rented. The photographers came and wreaked havoc on my small apartment. My wife made it into the photos.
The story was published in the fall, right before Comdex, and the cover was a picture of the actual check, with my name and a bogus address on it, with the headline “This Check is a Fake.” My ego was most gratified to see my name on the cover — Forbes didn’t publish reporter’s names on the cover, but there it was. The story spanned six pages and had a sequence of step-by-step photos on how I pulled off the hack.
I got on an airplane and went to Comdex just as the issue hit the newsstands. All hell broke loose. The Forbes PR department started booking me on television and radio shows. All of my PC Week buddies were very congratulatory. Even the cool guys at Mondo 2000 were impressed by the hack.
When I returned to New York, Tennyson Schad, Forbes’ attorney, asked me if I had a problem speaking with the New York office of the FBI. They had made an inquiry through him to discuss the prank, so off we went, Baldwin, Schad, and I, to a little out of the way restaurant near New York City Hall. I didn’t know what to expect. A grilling?
A couple plastic evidence bags were produced. Inside were some checks. I was asked if I knew how they were produced.
“Looks like dye-sublimation transfer technology,” I said. It appeared I wasn’t the first person to discover the utility of desktop publishing for desktop forgery. A lot of the bogus checks the FBI were holding were drawn on German banks. Made sense, the Germans and Swiss are the masters of printing technology, and someone was doing a pretty good job (but not as good as mine) of cutting bogus paper.
It was a pleasant lunch. I was a little pissed the FBI hadn’t been forthcoming when I was reporting the piece, but it was a nice coda to a long story.
Upshot of the whole affar — Nova came to my house on Cape Cod and filmed me forging a check in a special on digital risks. RiskDigests — the USENET group that detailed computer crime picked it up. The FBI’s site even gives me credit. The National Association of Science Writers awarded me the story of the year, and I picked up two other big prizes for the piece. Nothing I’ve written before or since has received so much attention.
To this day, maybe once every other month, I get an email from someone who has found the story and has questions, many questions, about inks and paper and passing techniques.
They all go unanswered.
The best part of the whole story though, in the end, was seeing Frank Abagnale make the big screen. He is, without question, the most colorful person I’ve ever interviewed.
Why do those words make me feel creepy? My emotional attachment to blogging is hard to explain. Caoecethes Scribendi — the itch to write — is my primary motivation. Thirty years of professional writing, one bad unpublished novel, a nonfiction book still in print, magazines, newspapers — I figure I need to expend 500 words a day or go insane. Still, when someone remarks — “I read your blog” — for the first time in a long writing career I feel weird about it. There is definitely some exhibitionism involved in throwing words onto the Net, but I never approach blogging the way I approach other writing — with an ideal reader in mind or a high degree of perfectionism. Some people dig the maritime history stuff in the Chatfield Project, others like it when I turn goofy and take pictures of holes in my socks, others leap onto the pedantic discussions of metrics and community theory.
I dunno, it’s all a dog’s breakfast and that’s why I like it. No theme. No mission. Just me and the “Write Post” window on wordpress bloviating on whatever, whenever. It’s the fact that strangers are reading it that gets creepy. The fact that there’s no way to delete a bad statement, etc. Looking through the server logs is especially weird. Who at Raytheon is reading this? At Pfizer? I know my circle of buddies — the one’s who comment — but still, parsing through the logs reveals all sorts of mysteries.
In the department of “how can I miss you if you won’t go away?” Bloglines is spazzing today and reinforcing how essential the service is to me for blog monitoring. I would estimate I spend more time in front of Bloglines than any other single screen.
In all your browsing, searching, clicking, and meandering through the thickets of online advertising — be it a piece of spam to a blog ad to a big honking banner on ESPN — can you recall a single web ad?
Other than Punch the Monkey?
Just curious.
For the past three months I’ve been spending a half-hour a day as an autodidact trying to learn Mandarin. It has always been a point of shame for me not to know another language (with the exception of the very deceased Latin), so I have poured myself in a seemingly doomed attempt to learn the language of my colleagues.
My step-sister has lived in Beijing for over twenty years and speaks Chinese as well as the Queen speaks English. Hearing the tones come pouring out of her very western visage is so incongrous that it makes me want to laugh. I taught myself some German while working Zurich, but the Swiss speak a weird dialect called Swyzerdeutsch and that project ended at the level of what I call “Railroad Station” where I could order things, say “excuse me” and ask people if they spoke English.
Two weeks ago a Chinese colleague gave a presentation in English. He kept apologizing for his poor command of the language. Later, as we were standing next to each other at the men’s room sink, he apologized for his lack of fluency. I looked him in the eyes and said, sincerely, “Your English is a hell of a lot better than my Chinese.” I need to finish this life with at least one language under my belt, and Chinese is the current goal.
I am using the Pimsleur series of CDs for Mandarin and making some progress. Retaining the lessons isn’t hard, I am sure my pronounciation sucks, but the killer for me is listening and deciphering what is spoke to me. I think I need to focus on the phrase, “Slow down.”
I read recently, with great amusement in the New Yorker, the story of a hedge fund manager who memorized this single phrase so he could fool his colleagues into thinking he was fluent in Chinese. When he addressed a Chinese speaker he would say, “This is the only thing I know how to say in Chinese. Please nod your head and laugh and pretend I know the language.”
Less than two weeks until my first Asia trip. Tamiflu and sleeping pills are packed, visa ordered, and language lessons proceed.
Two years ago I worked with a Gartner VP and Research Fellow, Ken McGee, on a book he wrote for Harvard Business School Press: Head’s Up, which I have blogged about in the past, but which I feel is essential reading for any analyst or manager concerned with the concept of dashboards for the presentation and reporting of quantifiable performance measures.
I won’t delve into the theory of dashboard design, but McGee offers some salient points for anyone attempting to reduce the information flood generated by an organization into the essential key points that a senior executive needs, as soon as possible, to anticipate surprises or inflection points and react. The purpose of a dashboard, as McGee emphasizes, is not to predict the future, but to predict the present, giving insights to actions occurring in as close to real time as possible. The sooner management is aware of an opportunity or threat, the sooner they can react, and the wider the window of reaction time, the better the chance of seizing the opportunity or thwarting the problem.
One blog, Dashboard Spy, is a wonderful collection of screenshots of working dashboards and offers some great design tips. I strongly recommend it. It too emphasizes McGee’s point that less is more, and that there is not canonical approach to dashboard design that can be templated from one organization to another. The issue is not having enough information, it’s finding the few essential indicators and presenting them in a format compelling enough to drive action. Let me repeat the last point: drive action. Analysis for the sake of analysis without a channel for action or correction is academic information only. The creator and collector of the dashboard and the receipient must constantly be tuning the dashboard to insure it remains a valid tool. Let it rot, unopened in an inbox, and the dashboard is useless.
This is the time of year when we sun-starved New Englanders begin to celebrate the harbingers of spring. Here on Cape Cod there are several indicators that are cherished. They are:
I just love ticking off the return of all these indicators of better weather to come. As I get older, my sense of timing is getting better, and more nostalgic. I’m totally scrambled swapping back and forth between Cape Cod and North Carolina. Azaleas in Georgia, nothing in Cotuit. Pear trees in Durham, daffodils here.
» Apple’s Boot Camp Lollapalooza | Jeffrey Young’s Technicon | ZDNet.com
A good commentary by Jeff Young at ZDNET on the implications of Apple’s Bootcamp on the PC industry.