Albums 6.0! It's time!

Stay tuned in the next week or so for a blog with an in-depth look at what's new, as well as some saccharine drivel about making this app for FIVE YEARS now.

Thanks for Albumsing. Hope you like the new stuff.

It has come to my attention that there are younger folks who haven’t heard of Five Geek Social Fallacies.

It was written in 2003 and the social dynamics stay real. Once you read it, you’ll see them everywhere.

https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/

Did you know that there's a thing called the "Automatic Billing Update" program (ABU), that enables merchants to get notified of your replacement payment card number before it even shows up in your mailbox?

https://globalnews.ca/news/9763295/little-known-credit-card-program-companies-information/

Yep, you can guess what the bad guys are doing. They're registering as a merchant and then involuntarily signing people up for nonexistent "subscriptions" ... that their support path mysteriously refuses to let you unsubscribe from:

https://malwaretips.com/blogs/vigor-vita-cbd-gummies/

But if you naively report these to your issuer as simply 'fraud', they will just ... issue you a new card. And then the "subscription" will be charged again.

Many issuer support teams seem be totally unaware of this fraud type. You have to explicitly tell them it's a subscription scam, and ask them block that merchant from using ABU to get your new card number. (That card is lost, but at least the evil merchant won't get the next one).

(I found this out the hard way, helping some elderly friends, whose cards kept getting mysteriously "compromised". When I realized that an unexpected charge happened before they had even received the new card ... I knew it wasn't just ordinary skimming or phishing.)

tl;dr When you detect unauthorized charges, ask your issuer to check for ABU and block the entire merchant. Otherwise, you'll be caught in an unending cycle of useless reissuance!

#ABU #fraud

It's finally happened! NEWAG IP Management just sued us for copyright infringement and unfair competition. This is a civil lawsuit in Warsaw, parallel to a criminal investigation that's happening in Cracow.

Of course, they got our postal addresses wrong (they could've just asked!) so we only just got a copy from the court, but hey, we now have 164 pages of content to dive into.

Scoop: I obtained the contract Samsung requires independent shops to sign to buy phone repair parts from them.

It requires:

- "Daily" dumps of customer data
- The "immediate destruction" of any phones a shop comes across that has third-party parts

https://www.404media.co/samsung-requires-independent-repair-shops-to-share-customer-data-snitch-on-people-who-use-aftermarket-parts-leaked-contract-shows/

Hi. Quick break from the posting for a serious PSA.

Please have a bottle of aspirin in your home. Make sure the tablets can be chewed as well as just swallowed. Make sure you remove any fiddly foil seal and such. Don't use this aspirin for regular pain relief, just keep it around and know where it is.

Hopefully, you'll never need it and will just feel silly for having it. But if a bad time comes for you someday, being able to chew aspirin when emergency services tells you may save your life.