Fred Flare, Inc, has received the not-so-coveted rating of F from the Better Business Bureau.

Readers may recall my entry of 12 August on how Flare had allowed some of the information that I'd provided to them to be used by spammers. (I had creäted an e.mail address exactly for business with Fred Flare and provided it uniquely to them.) Not long after I'd posted that entry, I contacted the BBB; Flare should have been responding to the issue of a hacked customer dB with a sense of urgency, but there was no evidence of such a sense.

On 6 September, a representative from Flare commented to the 'blog, and also sent e.mail:

Please forgive our late response to customer complaint #8703538 from Daniel Kian M cKiernan.
We are investigating whether our email service provider iContact might have been hacked.
We haven't found any evidence confirming this as of yet but are being extra thorough.
Rest assured, no credit card information has been compromised. We DO NOT save cc details for that very reason.
I will update you as I learn more. Thank you for your patience.

Now, as I implied in reply to the 'blog comment, the theory in that comment casting suspicion on UPS is a poor one. There's no particularly good reason for the spammer to spoof the name of their source (indeed, there is good reason for them not to do this), other spam from this breach spoofs other senders, and UPS (along with FedEx and DHL) has for many years routinely been spoofed by spammers.

The second theory (that in the e.mail) has some plausibility, but was, at that point, just a theory.

The promise (in the 'blog comment) of More soon! went simply unfulfilled. Meanwhile, spam continued to be sent to the address, at least one piece using my full name.

When the BBB dead-line for communication from Flare was imminent, they sent no more than a copy of that original 'blog comment and of that theorizing e.mail. The BBB, following SOP, asked me if this resolved my complaint, and I explained why it didn't.

What that communication did was reset the clock. But this time it just ticked-down to zero with no further communication from Flare, and the BBB regards such silence as unacceptable; hence the F

I don't know how the NYC BBB handles attempts at a ratings change; the San Diego BBB has been known to allow merchants to revive cases after many months (and known then to completely discard the rating if the customer does not respond). (If Fred Flare does not act on this case, it will eventually be considered sufficiently ancient as not to be used in rating.)

For my part, I guess that my next step is to file a complaint with the FTC. I don't know that a lot will come of that, though.

I'm really saddened by this whole course of events. There is no question that Fred Flare offers some cool and whimsical stuff that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere; I think that they should be rewarded for that much even setting aside whatever desire I might have for any of that stuff, and ceteris paribus I would want such an enterprise to prosper.

But it's imperative, in these days where information once loosed flows so freely, to take responsibility for the databases that we keep of information on other people (including the addressbooks of our e.mail handlers). Mistakes will happen, but we need to own any mistakes that we make, and to off-set their effects.

I had hoped that I'd get a reply within hours after I'd first contacted Flare. I should have been quickly told (as I was eventually told) that no credit-card information had been released. And Flare still needs to do something for those victims who, unlike me, provided addresses that are not easily discarded.

As I was looking for a holder for the Esterbrook Nº 356 nibs that I got, I ran across dip pens being produced by Steven P. Engen of Cottonwood, AZ. While these could hold a Nº 356 nib, they're not particularly well suited for that particular purpose.

None-the-less, I was especially attracted by this pen made of African blackwood and alabaster (here with an Esterbrook Nº 048 nib):

It arrived yester-day and was as nice as it had looked in its pictures. I then ordered this pen made of olivewood and ironwood:

Honestly, I'm not sure how much I'll use them for writing (now-a-days, my every-day pen is a Lamy cp 1 black fountain pen), but I figured that I'd later think back with regret if I failed to get these two pens.

Having read that the Esterbrook Nº 356 was Carl Barks' pen nib of choice for inking his work, I got some to try. The Esterbrook Steel Pen Mfg. Co. itself has essentially been gone for decades, so one looks for NOS; the nibs that I got are ostensibly from the 1940s.

Having got nibs, I wanted an Esterbrook Nº 35 holder for them. Again, it would be some decades old. I found one in a set with 12 nibs of varying size.

Well, it arrived on Friday, with the paper seal still intact on the box. I cannot open the box without committing some crime against antiquarian preservation!

I am defeated. I will look for another holder for my nibs.

When I'm required to provide a working e.mail address for a relationship with an institution, I usually creäte a new address, specific to my account with that institution. The address itself is typically that of a forwarder, and that forwarder is almost always to an address whose sole purpose is to receive the e.mails from these various forwarders.

One benefit of this arrangement is that, if I want to disconnect from that institution, I can delete the forwarder. But my real concern has been control of spam. If I receive spam, then from the address of the forwarder I can determine which institution provided my address to the spammers; and I can cut-off the spammers by deleting the forwarder.

This morning, I received three pieces of spam, each with the title UPS notification, each ostensibly from UPS, and each with a body

Dear customer.


The parcel was sent your home address.
And it will arrive within 3 business day.

More information and the tracking number are attached in document below.

Thank you.

Copyright © 1994-2011 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. All rights reserved.

(Anti-spam software on the mail-server removed any attachment.) Many of you will have got e.mail similar or identical to this; it's a trick that has been employed now for years.

But what is of particular interest is that each of these three messages came to the address that I'd provided exactly and only to Fred Flare .com. So Fred Flare has allowed some or all of my account information to be leaked to some party who tried then to hijack my computer.

Upon discovering the first two, I quickly tried to contact Fred Flare. My first attempt failed because their own filters prevent the delivery of attachments, and I'd attached copies of the spam. My second attempt therefore omitted these, which potentially compounds the problem for Flare.

In my case, I can just delete the forwarder once I'm done communicating with Fred Flare, but other, more trusting people provided their principal e.mail addresses. It would be no small task for Fred Flare to make it right for those people, but it is the responsibility of Fred Flare to do so.

After the fiasco with Theory and Decision (see my entry of 28 March and that of 18 April), I submitted my paper on indecision to yet another journal on 23 April.

To my surprise, that journal gave my paper for review to someone whom I regard as having a markèd conflict-of-interest. I know to whom they gave it because the rejecting review that I received on 16 Jun was, also to my surprise, attributed rather than anonymous.

Some of the criticism was legitimate, but would best have been handled by directing me to revise-and-resubmit. Some of the important criticism was absurd.

For example, the reviewer declared

this is not how one writes proofs in general (except may be in logic)

Considering that the propositions are almost exclusively formal logic (there not being much arithmetic to the structure), it's rather to be expected that the proofs will look as proofs (in or out of quotation marks) do in logic.

And, in defending the attempt to distinguish indecision from indifference found in Indifference or Indecision? by Eliaz and Ok, the reviewer wrote that Mrs Watson (a hypothetical agent presented in that paper)

is indecisive whenever she deems multiple choices as choosable

But she also deems multiple choices as choosable when she is indifferent, and in both cases (according to Eliaz and Ok) makes her decision by flipping a coin.

(In fact, Eliaz and Ok claim something more interesting about what distinguishes indecision from indifference, but an observable distinction does not result from it.)

I stared for a bit, and then sent to the reviewer a simple request for permission to cite the review in future versions of the paper. (I offered no argument or evaluation; I just requested permission to cite.) The review is plainly not itself a publication; it seems closer to being a personal communication. And one is supposed to secure permission before citing personal communications.

I waited for some days, and got no reply. I concluded that none would be forth-coming. I therefore effected what changes I felt should be made given that I could not cite the review, both to make straight-forward improvements, and to preëmptively meet repetition of what I regarded as illegitimate criticisms.

Then I went over my big spread-sheet o' econ journals, and selected the next journal to which to submit the paper. As with previous submissions, I read the author guidelines, and did some further rewriting and reformatting to tailor a version specific to that journal. I made the new submission on 28 July. Its reported status when I checked this morning was the same as that when I completed the submission process, so I presume that no editor has accepted assignment to it.

The recent relative quiescence of this 'blog has obtained from a confluence of things. I have rival demands of my time or of my energy, have not always been in the best of moods, and have not known quite how I want to formulate some of the entries upon which I have been working.

With respect to the last, one problem has been that I've wanted to present the entries in a certain order (or at least a certain preörder), which has allowed bottle-necks to develop. I think, now, that I'd better loosen-up on some of these considerations of the order of entries.

Sometimes ethics stick one in odd corners.

A while back, I queried an artist about commissioning a sketch to be given to my sister-in-law. He turned-down the commission as such, but offered to send to her a drawing containing the major element, without charge, if I provided a SASE. I accepted the offer, and he sent her the drawing. By reports, my sister-in-law was thrilled. (I have insisted to all parties that the principal thanks are owed to the artist.)

I'd like to be able to thank him here by name for his generosity, but won't do so without his permission, as it might cause him to be beseiged by similar requests. And he just passes in silence over my request for that permission.

So, well, he did something really sweet. I'm sorry that I cannot tell you who he is.

Since some time in April, a bug in the software at LiveJournal.com has kept me from logging into it, and from logging into other sites using that same software, with my OpenID. To-day I received an admission that the problem hasn't been worked and is not likely to be worked any time soon. If you're an LJ friend who posts nothing but Friends-only or otherwise filtered entries, then you might as well write me off.

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More generally, my experience filing bug reports has not been very happy. I've recently reported my problems with the formula editor of OpenOffice.

Rather longer ago than that, I noted how WordPress, after letting two dead-lines slip, had just un-scheduled a bug-fix by setting a milestone of Future Release. This morning, I discovered that a spurious claim that the bug was not manifest had caused the report to be closed about three weeks ago. After I was compelled to jump through some otherwise superfluous hoops, it was plainly established that WordPress indeed had exactly the bug that I'd reported (on 29 April 2008), and that, from my initial description, the point of failure could have been quickly found and fixed. A patch was filed, and I thought that the fix would be scheduled for the next bug-fixing release (3.1.4 or 3.2.0, whichever came first), but then the milestone was instead re-set for Future Release. It might still be fixed in the next release, but there is simply no assurance of that. (I can hack my own installation, of course.)

I was sufficiently perturbed by the typographical error in the version that I most recently submitted of my paper on indecision that I decided that, were it not bounced back to me before the first mensiversary of its submission, I would offer a correction. (My thought in waiting a month was that I should limit the frequency with which I pestered them.) I did so, and the journal accepted that with perfect helpfulness.

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I am still wrestling with Sprint over charges to my account for mobile broadband service.

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On 11 May, I opted to switch my principal operating system to Fedora. (I had been considering Scientific Linux as well.) I've since had some problems with installing fonts for all users, and the system has been a little bit flakier, but on the whole the new operating system has been a satisfying choice.

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I am scheduled for some non-trivial dental work on the mornings of 26 and 27 May. Two fillings that I have had since childhood have eroded to the point that they should be replaced, and there is to be a deep cleaning below my gum-line.

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The Woman of Interest and I will be visiting my parents for a few days at the end of the month. (I plan to stay-on for some time after she has flown away.)

A previous entry quotes a foot-note from Austrian Marginalism and Mathematical Economics by Karl Menger; that foot-note is tied to a sentence that I found particularly striking.

(musings on the relationship of mathematics to economics)