geek of the week: February 2006 Archives

I’ve known about The Elephant Sanctuary in rural western Tennessee for some time, though it’s not open to the public: it’s near where some friends of mine live, and in fact they helped build the fence around the huge site. But I was reminded about the important work the organization is doing by a piece that was running on CNN over this past weekend (you can see the online version of the story here): Sanctuary founders Carol Buckley and Scott Blais have just finished a rescue of a group of pachyderms from the Hawthorn Corporation, which had abused and mistreated creatures in its supposed care.

It’s best just to let the Sanctuary explain its mission:

Because his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, blew my mind the way science fiction used to, back when I was a kid and it was all fresh and new.

Because the alternate economy he created for Down and Out -- based on reputation and represented by a “currency” called Whuffie -- goddamn might actually work.

Major geeky kudos to John Aravosis, master and commander of AmericaBlog.org, who has been riding cell-phone companies hard lately over their complete willingness to treat their customers like dirt.

It started last month, when John discovered a nasty open secret about the cell phone records of you and me and everyone we know:

Sprint joins growing list of wireless companies whose customers' phone records are available to anyone for $89.95
by John in DC - 1/13/2006 02:19:00 PM

Sprint today joined Cingular Wirless and T-Mobile as cell phone companies whose customers' private cell phone records are available online for anyone to buy for as little as $89.95.

A friend earlier today bought the cell phone records of AMERICAblog writer Joe Sudbay (Joe in DC) from CellTolls.com. These included the dates and numbers of 91 calls made to and from Sudbay's Sprint cell phone in November and December 2005. CellTolls is the same company AMERICAblog used yesterday to buy the T-Mobile phone records of former presidential candidate General Wesley Clark. And last Friday, I used LocateCell.com to easily buy my private Cingular Wireless cell phone records. (It appears that LocateCell and CellTolls are operated by the same company.)

No word yet from any of these companies as to why their customers' allegedly private cell phone records are readily available to anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card.

John has stayed on the story like a bulldog even as the mainstream press has started to pick it up. Which is a vital and necessary service, particularly for those of us who have come to depend upon the Net and remember the days when things like phone services were considered public utilities, not a way for corporate executives to fatten their own personal coffers. As we hear more about the greed and cravenness of these corps -- as they bend over for the Feds’ illegal eavesdropping programs and plot to turn the Internet into private shopping malls that we peons will have to pay through the nose to use -- work like John’s is ever more important.