Getting the Brush-off

Hardly anyone gets by online these days without being "phished" by scammers. A growing number of online shoppers are now being hit by another, newer, scam: "brushing". This one works in connection with Amazon. It's not a brand new scam, possibly around 3 years old in fact, but an increased amount shopping online recently might have encouraged more of this type of scamming.

I was hit by, what I now know is, the brushing scam on Friday. A big box, from Amazon, lay on our porch, along with a couple of smaller packages which I was expecting. Maybe this is something I've forgotten about, pre-ordered, or whatever, thought I. Inside the box were two humidifiers.

"Did you order two humidifiers in my name?" I yelled to husband.

"No - why would I? We bought some in Walmart a few months ago."

Hmmm.

Eventually, after considering various possibilities, I Googled a relevant question, then all became clear. There's much online about the scam of "brushing". Here are a few lines from one (linked) article explaining how it works - with Amazon.com:

Free box-loads of merchandise from Amazon right on your doorstep! What could possibly be bad about getting the Santa treatment all year long? Plenty! Better Business Bureau (BBB) is warning consumers that there is a scary downside to this recent scam. You are not the one who hit the jackpot. A scam company is the real winner.

This scam is known as brushing, and it has been popping up all over the country. Suddenly boxes of unordered (by the recipient) merchandise from Amazon begin arriving. There is no return address except that of Amazon. The receiver has no idea who ordered the items. They are varied. For example, in one case a humidifier, a hand warmer, a flashlight, a Bluetooth speaker and a computer vacuum cleaner arrived unordered.

Why would such merchandise be sent to you if you didn’t request it? The companies, usually foreign, third-party sellers that are sending the items are simply using your address and your Amazon information. Their intention is to make it appear as though you wrote a glowing online review of their merchandise, and that you are a verified buyer of that merchandise. They then post a fake, positive review to improve their products’ ratings, which means more sales for them. The payoff is highly profitable from their perspective.

Why it’s bad news for you..........(read on at the link above)

I've taken advice given: notified Amazon's Customer Service, by e-mail, changed my password at Amazon, and elsewhere. I have not been charged for the humidifiers (yet!) We'll see what, if anything, happens next. I sincerely hope this will be a one-off brush-off for me. According to others reporting online, though, the scam can go on for weeks and months, with regular deliveries of scammed Amazon parcels.

Facing F-Book

"The inexorable growth of Google, Facebook, and Amazon has raised fears these giants are becoming too powerful. Here's everything you need to know":

THE NEW MONOPOLIES

The piece is reasonably brief yet informative on issues which are only recently starting to be addressed.

With reference to just one of the three entities discussed in the piece linked above, Facebook, and its burgeoning power, this problem has more, and even more dangerous, tentacles than simply making outside competition difficult or impossible. Below is a single paragraph from another piece, long but well worth the time:
You Are the Product by John Lanchester at London Review of Books.
(My highlighting)

....What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does – ‘connect’, ‘build communities’ – and the commercial reality. Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads but to shape the flow of news to them. Since there is so much content posted on the site, the algorithms used to filter and direct that content are the thing that determines what you see: people think their news feed is largely to do with their friends and interests, and it sort of is, with the crucial proviso that it is their friends and interests as mediated by the commercial interests of Facebook. Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.

That highlighted phrase is, or should be, chilling. It doesn't take much imagination to understand what could be possible, stemming from it, at some time in the near future. It's also not too comforting to read that Facebook's creator, Mark Zuckerberg has further aspirations - of becoming US President, there's some evidence that he is considering becoming a candidate in 2020's presidential campaign.

TV Maturing Well ?

When we started watching Grace and Frankie, Netflix's own new series, without having read any reviews I was expecting a comedy - mainly due to Lily Tomlin's inclusion in the cast. Husband did laugh out loud a few times during the first couple of episodes - I didn't. I really disliked the show's pilot and second episode. Maybe it's due to my non-American background. Maybe due to ....oh, I don't know...my aversion to certain sitcoms about a certain "class" of Americans. They always live in big houses with pools and a view of the ocean, they are lawyers, surgeons, always wealthy, clever, successful etc. etc. Such situations might have been just the thing to attract an audience a few decades back. TV viewers in the USA, then, might have been anticipating their own rise to such opulence. Now - not so much!

Basic storyline of Grace and Frankie is that "Grace" and "Frankie" (Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, respectively) women in their 70s, have been long married to lawyers who are business partners, Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterston). The husbands announce to their wives, over a communal dinner, that they've been in love with each other for 20 years, and intend leaving their wives to set up home together and marry. The guys hope to live out the rest of their lives in tune with their natural instincts. Both couples have grown-up families, bringing in four more regular cast members.

Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are probably the only two actresses, of the right age group, who could have carried off the parts of Grace and Frankie. They're a classic "odd couple" thrown together by circumstance. There are other, lesser known TV faces who could have played the parts of the husbands to much better effect though. Martin Sheen remains Jed Bartlett (West Wing) to me for all time. Sam Waterston's Law and Order character loomed large for me over his characterisation of an ultra-sensitive, soft and gentle gay guy.

The show did grow on me some during the 13 episodes of its first season. It still isn't, for me, what it ought to be, and could be. Maybe Season 2 will improve it still further. In any case, it is good to see another show with its focus on characters of an older generation, and not portraying them like doddering old fools. In tandem with its more mature characters the show approaches what had been "a sensitive subject": being married to a heterosexual partner while gay. For those factors alone I should give Grace and Frankie a gold star!

Another show we saw early on in our Roku-owning time, was Amazon's Transparent, starring Jeffrey Tambor as a guy who dared to came out as transgender in later life. I much preferred the general tenor of that series to that of Grace and Frankie. The humour was less forced, more natural; the characters warmer, and far more believable.







An excellent British TV drama series we found, I think also on Amazon Prime during our free month's trial a while back: Last Tango in Halifax. It's another drama mixing love stories of an elderly couple (played by Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi), with an interwoven theme of a lesbian relationship of one of their daughters (played by Sarah Lancashire). Characters in this series were totally believable; there was humour and pain mixed with delicate deftness, skilled writing and acting. Maybe I'm a wee bit prejudiced because the action took place in my native county of Yorkshire!




Thank goodness some writers and producers are at last cottoning on to the fact that there is an audience out here made up of more than teens, twenties, thirties and forty-somethings! We have time to watch too, and we have been starved of decent drama and comedy to which we can easily relate. I don't want to watch nothing but "oldie" stories, I enjoy films and shows featuring younger people, as long as their themes are interesting, funny, witty, clever or science-fiction related - so few of them are though. Writers of such shows will often throw in a token "oldie" to keep things, as Fox News puts it "fair and balanced", but those token characters are usually portrayed in such a way that is anything but fair and balanced - just like Fox News!

ROBBER-BARONITIS

A robber baron, originally, was an unscrupulous and despotic nobleman of medieval Europe. The term is also used to describe wealthy and powerful unscrupulous industrialists of the 19th century who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. They would exert control over national resources, gain a high level of government influence, pay extremely low wages to their unfortunate employees, quash competition by buying out competitors in order to create monopolies and eventually raise prices and limit services, and devise schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors in a manner which would eventually destroy the company for which the stock was issued and impoverish investors. (Wikipedia)

I did a bit of light research on Google's two entrepreneurs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then went on to look into that other internet giant, Amazon, and its CEO and founder Jeff Bezos (below). Are these three individuals some of the 21st century's equivalents of 19th century robber barons? They are now certainly among the wealthiest individuals in the USA, multi-billionaires, (allegedly more than 20 billion each, and # 11 and 13 on the Forbes 400 list). All three experienced meteoric rise from the mid 1990s onward, in tandem with mushrooming of the internet.

I am becoming frustrated and annoyed with Google's ongoing shenanigans. Having forced me into using their Chrome browser because Blogger's (now owned by Google) new interface is incompatible with the most up to date version of Internet Explorer my XP pro operating system is compatible with, there then arose an issue with the e mail address associated with my Blogger/Google account. I am to be forced to provide a second e mail address. I don't want to do so. Chrome will not function without my doing so. Firefox to the rescue. What'll happen when Google buys out Firefox?

Google has become way, way too big for its boots with too many tentacles! Much as I admire the skills and talent involved, and the wondrous search engine, I can't help thinking that the interests of users have, latterly, been well and truly sidelined. I don't know how Google treats its staff, but they tend to treat users of their services with deep disdain.

Amazon, on the instruction of their CEO, do put the interests of their customers first at all times, but often to the detriment of their staff members. Staff are badly paid and in some cases expected to work excessive hours in poor conditions with no sick pay should they fall ill. Amazon's undeniable efficiency is achieved at the expense of its workers - in conditions loosely comparable to Walmart's staff treatment.

Admittedly, these examples of 21st century robber baronitis are not nearly as nasty as 19th century counterparts, they are not the worst 21st century examples either, but they are two very familiar to all who spend time online every day. There is, though, potential for even worse to come. Google has access to information on everyone who uses the internet, and on what we do online. If such information were to be only slightly expanded, maybe released to government by mandate, results could prove to have unpleasant consequences - doesn't take much imagination to see that!

Google and Amazon: two examples of how excellent innovative ideas from brilliant minds, with initially good intention, can become corrupted by intoxication of success and then morph, like some unwieldy drunk, into an entity the men may not have originally envisaged. They are now blinded by the size and power of the behemoths they created.