Slashdot Mirror

1. you advertise an expensive item on line..car, piano etc.
2. an "agent" for an interested buyer responds, perhaps in an exchange of several emails to build your confidence...after all YOU initiated this transaction.
3. if scammer is in a big hurry, he offers an extra few thousand $ "for shipping" and , sight-unseen sends you a cashiers check with sometimes complex instructions that the check should be cashed immediately and the excess mailed or wired to some 4th party who is the "shipper" and requires payment before he will pick up the goods.
4. your bank honors the cashiers check
5. you wire the money
6. 3 days later the bank tells you the check was a forgery and debits its full amount from your account.
7. and of course, no shipper ever arrives

I wish it was BS.
Fedex Note about it

Most of the problems I've encountered are with Safari. The following sites all have similar problems and are entirely unusable with Safari after applying the patch:

http://www.fedex.com/
http://www.compusa.com/
http://www.bestbuy.com/

I'm sure there are many others. G5 systems do not appear to be affected. G4s are.

As noted on http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=617 98 :

Component: Safari
CVE-ID: CAN-2004-0361
Available for: Mac OS X 10.2.8, Mac OS X Server 10.2.8
Impact: A JavaScript array of negative size can cause Safari to access out of bounds memory resulting in an application crash.
Description: Storing objects into a JavaScript array allocated with negative size can overwrite memory. Safari now stops processing JavaScript programs if an array allocation fails.
This security enhancement was previously made available in Safari 1.0.3, and is being applied inside the Mac OS X 10.2.8 operating system as an extra layer of protection for customers who have not installed that version of Safari. This is a specific fix for Mac OS X 10.2.8 and the issue does not exist in Mac OS X 10.3 or later systems.
----

This particular fix is specific to 10.2.8 and NOT 10.3 or later, yet appears it may install with the 10.3.x update. This could well be the cause of the problems. This is further supported by the fact that all of the known sites that fail to render properly use JavaScript 1.2 extensively.

Word is the Safari team is aware of the problem and working on it.

Federal Express CEO Fred Smith made a huge investment in FAX over a private satellite network called Zapmail. The idea being they could do better than next day delivery by getting documents there in the next few hours.

Unfortunately for them high-speed FAX machines using dial-up phone lines became cheap and common and ZapMail was abandoned in a year.

You made me really curious, so while typing this up, I pulled up one of my old archives. My page was last updated on Aug 28 1995. The first link on it was to the GNA (Globalwide Network Academy) Project at MIT. I remember this project, because at the time I was responsible for going through schools request and accepting/denying them. You might consider contacting them about this issue, as I was receiving emails telling me to go on and check the status of this or that -- I am sure the schools did as well.

Hope that helps.

I presume that the pentagon was researching this to allow soldiers, DOD civilians, and contractors who are overseas to vote. All US soldiers, DOD Civilians, and DOD Contractors now have an ID card that contains a smart chip with a PKI key on it. You're telling me that the Pentagon could not come up with a secure, anonymous, yet auditable method of voting using that?? What a shame. I guess the DOD needs more geeks, or maybe just some geeks with real skills and not an MBA.

You could have supplied the link.

I'm glad the IAB took that position. Hopefully Verisign will do the right thing....but, given their history, they probably won't.

We started a petition on Tuesday, and it got more than 16,000 signatures, before the site apparently got Slashdotted or something. We had to move it to a new server, with backups of the first 10K signatures. The new link is:

Stop Verisign DNS Abuse Petition

We also made announcements here and here, including having sent a hardcopy of the first 10,000 signatures to ICANN via FedEx. Thanks for all the support!

Yeah, your right... thats funny as hell! ;-) You can see it here.

UPS, FedEx, and a few other delivery companies already do this. And its really nice. When I don't get a package on time, I just check the ID number on the website, and they tell me where it is, how long it stayed there, and so on. It is VERY convenient and saves a lot of worry.

This is just expanding an already good system to the regular mail. If it can be done reasonably fast and efficiently, I see no problems here.

The benefits are good and I'm not worried that any government thugs will be obscesssed with watching where my mail goes. (they could already do that anyway... each envelope I send has an address on it.)

I'm glad you came up with this idea. You should contact a patent lawyer -- after all, it has never been done before.

Tracking a package to Santa

South Haven photojournalist David McCreery uses Federal Express a lot and is fascinated with the tracking feature on the FedEx Web site (www.federalexpress.com) that lets you watch as your package makes its way to its destination.

"I send FedEx packages every few weeks," he says. "Once, I sent a package to Bowling Green and watched it leave Michigan via Flint for Memphis, come back to Flint and then drive to Ohio."

So, this being the holiday season, he decided to FedEx a letter to Santa, wondering: "How far would a package to the North Pole go? How would it get there? Where would it end up? Who would sign for it?"

You can follow the progress of his letter on his personal Web site (www.davidm.net), where he posted his letter and the FedEx tracking number.

Read the results, linked from here, over here.

No.

From FedEx's COD Policy (here)

quote

D. Checks (including cashier's, official, certified, business and personal checks) and money orders for the C.O.D. Amount will be collected at the shipper's sole risk, including, but not limited to, all risk of nonpayment, fraud and forgery. FedEx has no liability with respect to any such instrument.

end quote.

Also included in the article was a blurb about a guy sending a fedex package to Santa Claus, North Pole. Fedex actually delivered it... to Snowmass, CO. Signed for by: S CLAUS

is there some management software to help with this sort of thing?"

Sure. It's called Excel, part of a set of productivity tools made by a certain company based in Redmond, WA. Not only can you make a list of the things you're moving, you can actually make multiple lists with hyperlinks and cute pics in a SINGLE FILE!

Alternatively, you can search for "barcodes" on Google, find out about EAN/UPC error detection algorithms, assign each piece of luggage a unique barcode, incorporate XSL, somehow use this XSL barcode generator thing, print them all out, stick them to your whatever you're moving and move! When you reach your destination, and this very important, but remember to buy a barcode reader and to scan all your luggage before you unpack.

You might also want to set up a website where you can track your shipment exactly the same way this website does.

What about retraining everyone to use new software (I'd say roughly $750-$1000 a pop + lost productivity)? What about all the money thrown away on purchased software? The "downtime" that everyone seems to believe plagues Windows is almost unseen where I work. Once MacOS X is released on x86 hardware and you can cross-compile source code to x86 with with no changes (other than little/big endian changes), then you might have a competitor on the desktop.

I work for small shipping company, every webapp is Java besides tracking (that's C, of course). And there is a nice myth that Fortune 500 companies have huge amounts of cash to burn, which is... a myth. Everything is engineered be faster, cheaper, and better. Matter of fact, we have signs all of the place that say that :)

If I wanted to send somebody a bomb I'd use FedEx.

Maybe UPS if the bomb was too heavy.

Who needs all this gigabuck technology anyway?

I would advise you, though, not to put the postal employees through too much grief. Their job is tough enough as it is. When you want to send some critical and strangely sized package, just do us all a favor and use FedEx or UPS or one of the many other private carriers. And pack appropriately! The poor guy who had to figure out what to do with the moldy and stinky cheese deserves a medal. The person who was forced to break the brick into little pieces to check for drug content probably had better things to do. And the person who had to lug the snow ski to a mailbox probably does not get enough medical coverage by the USPS to make up for the dent in his back.

These are people, people! Give 'em a bit of respect, or at least think about what they have to put up with on those days when you want to shoot someone because of the quality of service you receive.

Fedex did not spend millions of dollars redesigning their logo in the 90s because they wanted it to be "prettier

I'm not a graphic designer, but I find it hard to believe that it took millions of dollars to create "FedEx" in purple and gray, with the left side of the E matching up with the right side of the d. Personally, I've seen the logo a hundred times but never even remembered what it looked like just now until I went to their web site (obviously http://www.fedex.com. This is one of the goals to creating a logo - to have people remember what it looks like (Nike did a great job). Basically if you are right about the money spent I believe it was a waste.

Digital Convergence

A quick look at their website doesn't reveal any sort of restrictions to Russia. Might be worth a try? Take a look at FedEx's international service restrictionsinfo.

Here are a couple more thoughts. I would love to hear some feedback on these:

1 - Government is slow, realy slow. They will have a very hard time adapting to these changes for several reasons - most are outlined in the article.

2 - In the past (a long time ago), there were issues with infrastructure, cost etc of setting up and maintaining a national post service. This is changing. Now there are fewer barriers and there is competition.

3 - There is still a need for the service they are providing. However, if the service s not used as much, we should cut the budget accordingly and be happy.

4 - The USPS should not try to enter areas that are currently being addressed with provate business, which will naturally be more efficent. I do not see any problems with the post office downsizing. It is a bastion of the US, but we should be able to move on and advance and not have to hold onto old, outdated services just because uncle sam wants to.


ok i did not want to but

5 - Lets make the USPS a public certificate authority and start getting competion (even artificial - ie government) in that area. The USPS would have a great image that they could market and leverage that could compete against Verisign and their high prices and questionable procedures, they are soooo quick....

If you send something via FedEx, do you expect to have it read?

You ought to maybe read the Terms and Conditions of shipping via FedEx:

Inspection of Shipments

Inspection of Shipments

We may, but are not obligated to, open and inspect any shipment at our
sole discretion and with or without notice.



Besides being on the web page, that's also verbatim from the back of the airbill you sign when you ship.

I'm assuming you didn't look here before making your "rubbish" comment, where it plainly states:

"Firearms must be shipped via FedEx Priority Overnight."

All of the carriers I am aware of now have such restrictions, or disallow firearms shipments outright.