Today’s news brings some chum-worthy items:
- From the “To The Dogs” Department: Never question a person’s intent. Especially if it was Leona Helmsley. According to the New York Times, Ms. Helmsley left a two-page mission statement for her trust that the entire trust, valued at $5 billion to $8 billion and amounting to virtually all her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs. This is a modified version of the mission statement. Originally, there were two goals: The first goal was to help indigent people, the second to provide for the care and welfare of dogs. A year after writing it, she deleted the first goal. Of course, these weren’t her only quirks. In her will, she ordered that her tomb, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., be “acid-washed or steam-cleaned” once a year. She also made two of her grandchildren’s $10 million inheritance contingent on their visiting their father’s grave, requiring that a registration book be placed in the mausoleum to prove that they had shown up.
- From the “Watch What You Say” Department: According to the NY Times, a production of “Ragtime” in suburban Chicago has been cancelled by the Wilmette Park District because passerby might hear the production use the word “Nigger”. What does the lyricist think of this? “I find this sad and also hilarious. It seems to sum up the blind ignorance of people who sit busily cherry-picking bad words, while not even bothering to read the script they are producing to understand its ideas or the context in which these words are spoken.”
- From the “Pin the Tail on the Criminal” Department: Lastly, the NY Times is also reporting that computer criminals broke into Citibank’s network of ATMs inside 7-Eleven stores and stole customers’ PIN codes. The scam netted the alleged identity thieves millions of dollars. But it indicates criminals were able to access PINs by attacking the back-end computers responsible for approving the cash withdrawals. Scared yet? There’s worse. These criminals are targeting the ATM system’s infrastructure, which is increasingly built on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system and allows machines to be remotely diagnosed and repaired over the Internet. And despite industry standards that call for protecting PINs with strong encryption — which means encoding them to cloak them to outsiders — some ATM operators apparently aren’t properly doing that. The PINs seem to be leaking while in transit between the automated teller machines and the computers that process the transactions.
