Booking.Com and the Death of Customer Service

I had a wonderful trip to NYC at the last minute thanks in large part to my friends at the American Museum of Natural History.  In another post I will talk about all the wonderful parts of the trip but this post is about warning you off of an internet scam called Booking.com.

I make the plane reservation with Google who sent me to Booking.com.  I thought nothing of it.  I made my hotel reservation with Priceline.  This worked perfectly.

But when I got to LAX I discovered that booking had put my trip in July and the return trip to Ontario, not LAX.  I dont know how they did this.  I always said June, that was the whole point.  I never said Ontario, why would I want to go there.  So Jetblue, at the gate, puts me the plane I wanted at a very reasonable price on top of what I had paid Booking, of course.

Then started the nightmare of trying to reach booking to see what could be done.  The short version is that you can not reach customer support.  It is obviously deliberate, they just found another sucker, me, stole the money and that was that.

Jetblue was able to recover some of the money and I could fly home at a reduced rate, no thanks to Booking.com or to Google.

Caveat Emptor, I suppose.

What Everyone Who Studies Intelligence Knows about Wikileaks

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Many Americans don't like what they think is the "intelligence" business.  There are good and bad reasons why this might be, but its sufficiently important that I think that people should know more about it so that they can make more accurate or possibly nuanced judgments about it.  It is, after all, *their* intelligence community and is genuinely working, for the most part, in what they believe is the nation's interest as ordered by the POTUS and the relevant committees of Congress.

Even though there is a lot we can not and will not know about the world of intelligence there are lots and lots of things that we can know by paying attention and knowing the history of these things.

And so, in light of this, here is one comment on current events.

It has been obvious for years, certainly at least a decade and possibly more, that whatever else Wikileaks may be, it is probably also a tool of foreign Intelligence.  From the material released and the timing of that release it is likely that Wikileaks has been chosen as the "public mouthpiece" of materials collected by foreign intelligence agencies that have collected the material from one source or another, and are looking for a way to get this material into the world at a time of their choosing to influence some political process ongoing in the West.  This has been completely obvious, and if it is not true, a lot of people will be surprised. But what does it mean?  What should we do about it? And what does it not mean?

It does not mean that the people running Wikileaks are insincere or believe that they are doing anything but what a freedom loving person of the world should be doing. They may be completely uncompromised in their goals.  Nor does it mean that they have necessarily committed any crimes, although they may have.  But even so, be aware that a crime in one country may not be a crime in another.   On the other hand, I think it is likely from what little I know that they very well may have knowingly committed some crimes that are in fact illegal in this country, but that is to be seen.

All I am really saying here is that you should not be so naive as to think that Wikileaks is a completly independent, do-good-for-the-world, totally disinterested organization.  They serve a very useful purpose for people who are not friendly to this country.  That said, they may provide a useful service for the rest of us, that would depend on your point of view on many other issues.

Stealing Money on the Internet

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What is sad about this is that one day I really will have a friend in need but I wont believe him or her because of these criminals.

I blame #45 for this.

And yes, Karen Fox has contacted me and confirmed that she is OK and that this is a spam.

Countermeasures Once You Have Been Spoofed

Several months ago, my friend Ken Cope reported that my name was being used on Facebook to sell some horrible weight reduction product. That was weird but I did nothing about it. I now think I know how it happened and I am writing it up so that you can possibly avoid these things.

For a variety of reasons, I run Windows on one of my laptops. This is the device I use to read books in bed and on the train so it needs to have a Kindle reader which means it can not be Linux/Unix but must be Windows or Mac OS. It came installed with Windows 8 which is, IMHO, a disaster but I installed classic menu and tried using some apps from the Microsoft store including a world clock. Well, one of these apps had a virus.

Or possibly the virus came with a plugin for Google Chrome.

In any case, Google Chrome started behaving obnoxiously bring up billions of advertisements, so I reverted to Firefox and the problems mostly went away.

But then all of a sudden when I tried to edit my Kindle parameters, it brought up a window to Amazon but unbeknownst to me it was really a hacked non-Amazon window with a questionnaire. I foolishly filled it out and it contained no information of value. I have no idea what the point of that was. But it was clear to me that somehow my browser had been hacked and that it had whatever my browser knew, which included passwords.

I brainwiped the computer and went and changed all sites that had passwords that the browser on the computer knew. You must never use these passwords again because it now has it in its database and it will make use of them on another account of yours should you reuse it.

Probably you should not have your browser ever remember a password. Once a program is infected, delete it. Once a password is compromised, never use it again. Never load applications from the Microsoft store.