The Times: Tech column - Scams/Googling/Number 10's website
By David Rowan
There have been plenty of warnings over the past week about the rise in identity theft, and the dangers of leaving bank statements in your bin-bags or your driving licence in your jacket pocket. But increasingly con artists are turning their attention to electronic means of securing our personal details, often using old-fashioned tricks of persuasion.
The latest internet-based identity scam targets users of online recruitment sites, using fake job ads to solicit personal data. Most of these sites are highly reputable and their databases excellent means of scouring hundreds of vacancies according to personal requirements. But, occasionally, rogues slip through, so be on your guard if you inquire about a post and receive an e-mail seeking rather too much information.
The problem is serious enough for Monster.com, which claims to be the world's biggest online careers network, to have e-mailed a warning to millions of its users last week: "Regrettably, from time to time, false job postings are listed online and used illegally to collect personal information from unsuspecting job seekers." In one case, reported last November, a US Navy lieutenant responded to an online ad that purported to be from a leading insurance broker. At the advertiser's request, he submitted his age, height, weight, Social Security number, bank account numbers, even his mother's maiden name - all before he realised that the recruiter did not exist. He was even asked to choose a four-digit code to access a special website - doubtless on the assumption that this number would also be his bank PIN code. You have been warned.
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HAVE YOU googled anyone lately? The verb - meaning to see what a web search, especially on Google, reveals about, say, a romantic suitor - has proved such a wonderfully serviceable neologism that the American Dialect Society recently voted it the most useful word of 2002.
But Google appears none too happy about being immortalised linguistically alongside such corporation-inspired verbs as "to hoover" and "to xerox". Last week, in fact, its lawyers wrote to the writer Paul McFedries, who runs the popular Word Spy language website, demanding that he delete his definition of the verb to "help us to protect our brand". But, says McFedries: "'Google' is an important new verb, so I certainly don't want to delete it."
As Google metamorphoses from a quirky outsider to an acquisitive corporate giant, such ill-judged legal demands do its PR image no favours. If the rest of us choose to turn a company's name into a verb, there is little that its lawyers can do to stop us - and certainly not by pursuing the lexicographers. Google should be flattered to have become a verb. Besides, it is far too late: there are already 34,000 web pages that mention "googled" or "googling", as you can verify by googling them.
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THE "new improved" 10 Downing Street website still lags behind its peers in Washington, Paris and, ahem, Baghdad, in omitting an e-mail feedback address for Tony Blair (though one is promised "very soon"). So what should we make of the "keyword" tags that the Prime Minister uses to direct web searchers to his official home page? The programming code, as the technology journal The Register has discovered, contains all the expected keywords that people might be typing, from "PMQs" to "war on terrorism", to bring them to the site.
Why. then, alongside a "Tony Blair" tag, has he added "Winston Churchill" and "Margaret Thatcher"? Tony, what are you trying to tell us?
(The Times, March 4 2003)
There have been plenty of warnings over the past week about the rise in identity theft, and the dangers of leaving bank statements in your bin-bags or your driving licence in your jacket pocket. But increasingly con artists are turning their attention to electronic means of securing our personal details, often using old-fashioned tricks of persuasion.
The latest internet-based identity scam targets users of online recruitment sites, using fake job ads to solicit personal data. Most of these sites are highly reputable and their databases excellent means of scouring hundreds of vacancies according to personal requirements. But, occasionally, rogues slip through, so be on your guard if you inquire about a post and receive an e-mail seeking rather too much information.
The problem is serious enough for Monster.com, which claims to be the world's biggest online careers network, to have e-mailed a warning to millions of its users last week: "Regrettably, from time to time, false job postings are listed online and used illegally to collect personal information from unsuspecting job seekers." In one case, reported last November, a US Navy lieutenant responded to an online ad that purported to be from a leading insurance broker. At the advertiser's request, he submitted his age, height, weight, Social Security number, bank account numbers, even his mother's maiden name - all before he realised that the recruiter did not exist. He was even asked to choose a four-digit code to access a special website - doubtless on the assumption that this number would also be his bank PIN code. You have been warned.
++++
HAVE YOU googled anyone lately? The verb - meaning to see what a web search, especially on Google, reveals about, say, a romantic suitor - has proved such a wonderfully serviceable neologism that the American Dialect Society recently voted it the most useful word of 2002.
But Google appears none too happy about being immortalised linguistically alongside such corporation-inspired verbs as "to hoover" and "to xerox". Last week, in fact, its lawyers wrote to the writer Paul McFedries, who runs the popular Word Spy language website, demanding that he delete his definition of the verb to "help us to protect our brand". But, says McFedries: "'Google' is an important new verb, so I certainly don't want to delete it."
As Google metamorphoses from a quirky outsider to an acquisitive corporate giant, such ill-judged legal demands do its PR image no favours. If the rest of us choose to turn a company's name into a verb, there is little that its lawyers can do to stop us - and certainly not by pursuing the lexicographers. Google should be flattered to have become a verb. Besides, it is far too late: there are already 34,000 web pages that mention "googled" or "googling", as you can verify by googling them.
++++
THE "new improved" 10 Downing Street website still lags behind its peers in Washington, Paris and, ahem, Baghdad, in omitting an e-mail feedback address for Tony Blair (though one is promised "very soon"). So what should we make of the "keyword" tags that the Prime Minister uses to direct web searchers to his official home page? The programming code, as the technology journal The Register has discovered, contains all the expected keywords that people might be typing, from "PMQs" to "war on terrorism", to bring them to the site.
Why. then, alongside a "Tony Blair" tag, has he added "Winston Churchill" and "Margaret Thatcher"? Tony, what are you trying to tell us?
(The Times, March 4 2003)
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