The French paper Le Figaro has been quick to announce that Airbus is not at fault for the crash of Air France flight 447. Only a few weeks ago the black boxes were discovered 13,000 ft under the surface of the ocean after a two year hunt. The paper says it is very unexpected to find usable data under those conditions:

Un dénouement aussi rapide était assez inespéré il y a quelques mois encore. L’épave de l’AF 447 a été découverte il y a tout juste six semaines. «Tout ce qui se passe depuis la découverte de l’épave : la localisation des boites noires, leur remontée et le fait qu’elles soient encore totalement lisibles après avoir passé deux ans par 4000 mètres de fond, est totalement extraordinaire », rappelait lundi soir une source gouvernementale.

They seem less surprised that Airbus has been so quickly found not at fault (était hors de cause):

Les enquêteurs du Bureau d’enquêtes et d’analyses (BEA) ont pu exploiter dès ce week-end les données du Data Flight Recorder (DFDR), l’une des deux boites noires, qui a enregistré les paramètres du vol et en conclure assez rapidement que l’Airbus A 330 était hors de cause.

The investigation will, of course, continue and expand to include operator data from le Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and controls (les actions de l’équipage dans le cockpit).

This American Life on Public Radio International (PRI) ran a show in 2010 called “Contents Unknown”. Act One, starting at minute 7:34, says it will present the truth about what’s inside 2.4 billion mini storage lockers in America. A contributor to the New York Times Magazine goes to an auction an hour north of San Francisco and reports:

It’s an interesting look at how an auction process works for speculators who try and capitalise on unclaimed and repossessed storage lockers.

A much more in-depth look, and very similar story, ran in 2009 on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), with more interesting results. It gives a profile of motives and means from a single professional storage locker speculator and scavenger.

MP3 Preview: "Addicted to Junk"

The full version can be found starting at minute 15:00 of “Found” on B-Side Radio:

Prompt payment of debt can build trust with financial institutions. A pair of men, in coordination with a third, managed to use this trust model to build profiles for fictitious identities and achieve $500,000 in credit in just one year. They then spent all the credit without any intention of paying it back. They almost got away with it for longer.

It started with a Dentist’s office employee who extended the two men loans and then reported their payments to Experian. He was the inside connection — the tip of this trust iceberg.

According to the government complaint filed in California federal court, which summarized the investigation, the brothers, along with Hyde, made up hundreds of fake social security numbers to establish false identities. The men then began reporting loan information and on-time payments for fictitious dental services to Experian.

Once the fake credit profiles had high credit scores, the men opened credit cards and took out loans, fooling issuers like Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Capital One (COF, Fortune 500), Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), US Bank (USB, Fortune 500), Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) and Discover (DFS, Fortune 500). In all, the government estimated that the men duped at least 21 financial institutions.

They were caught because their fictitious identities became too hard to believe (loans too large for dental work were not geographically dispersed), which led someone at Experian to investigate and notify the FBI. Hindsight is 20/20 but the article suggests that if they had asked for smaller loans over a longer period they would have gone unnoticed. We also could probably guess that if they had pulled $500K in a year and skipped town instead of buying fancy, flashy cars they also would not have been caught.

The case illustrates that while some basic controls you might expect (SSN verification) seem to not be in place, other more sophisticated controls are working (e.g. geographic visualisation by loan amount and industry). Maybe it looked something like this, but in 3D and controlled by waving hands in the air at a bank of large flat screens.

It also shows how an industry’s chain of trust can suffer from numerous weak links and unclear responsibilities.

This has been coming up a lot lately, so here are some notes for future reference. GOpenVPN is basically a Linux rendition of the Tunnelblick app for OpenVPN. Here are steps to install it on a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 Maverick Meerkat workstation.

0) Install OpenVPN package (10.04 is the current latest version)

1) Review prerequisites for GOpenVPN

• subversion
• autoconf
• glib-2.0
• gtk+-2.0
• glade-2.0
• gnome-keyring
• gksu
• gedit
• intltool

2) Install prerequisites

sudo apt-get install subversion autoconf libglib2.0-dev libglib2.0-data libgtk2.0-dev libglade2-dev libgnome-keyring-dev gksu gedit intltool

3) Download source

svn co https://gopenvpn.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gopenvpn gopenvpn

4) Build

cd gopenvpn/trunk/gopenvpn/

./autogen.sh

intltoolize

./configure

make

5) Install

sudo make install

6) Run

/usr/local/bin/gopenvpn

…and you should see an icon appear in the top panel. Right click to configure and watch the log.

Alternatively, the network manager OpenVPN plugin also does the job:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome