Author: Thaddeus Preston (Nick Waye)

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Sneaking Suspicions About the Facebook/Zynga Cabal

Lately I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that the Zynga/Facebook cabal is possibly engaged in some sort of  wide spread credit card fraud born from ignorance and malice.  There is no hard evidence to the contrary it’s just random ramblings, but I have had some recent experiences over the past couple months thats given me pause.  So I write this to ask, has anyone else been having these issues?  There is a modis operandi that seems to accompany this strange phenomena of mysterious “FACEBOOK ADVERTISING” charges that began showing up on banks statements. These charges seem to have happen months after the original authorized charge. It’s happen to my wife and now to my mother-in-law. The same algorithmic behavior was similar in both instances. Months earlier circa June/July my wife bought Facebook credits to purchase Farmvillie virtual currency and other things. It was a 60 buck purchase authorized and charged to our account. Never mind stupidity of this for a sec.  One charge authorized months ago started reoccurring instances of subsequent service charges not explicitly authorized.  At first I chastised my wife for doing so many purchases on bullshit. Then after a particularly nasty exchange I took away her card removing all doubt of purchases. A dick move, but I was mad.  However, the charges continued at a rate of$30 to $40 bucks a pop. After calling the bank to halt the charges we were informed that since we explicitly authorized previous charges it would be difficult to stop the reoccurring mysterious “FACEBOOK ADVERTISING” charges. Halting the card would stop the charges (all charges) but once the block was removed there would be no way to stop those particular charges. We had to figuratively execute the card and get another one re-issued with a new number.  I chalked it up to just a lack of due diligence on my part so I simply forgot about it. If your wondering why Facebook could potentially make $200 Billion in revenue, think credits and advertising is how.

As I have shared with my small flock of  followers this past week I had my debit card compromised and account nearly cleaned out.  We’re still working with USAA to get all the adjustments to the account.  This got me to looking very deeply at potentially other signs of fraud in my accounts.  By the way, Mint.com is an awesome statistical tool you should sign up for an account and download the app for your phone.  Looking over my finances I looked very closely at the nature and frequency of these mysterious “FACEBOOK ADVERTISING”charges. They seem algorithmic in nature starting first with micro-purchases $5.00 to $10.00 and then higher amounts.  All well and good you say, but what about my conspiratorial accusation of fraud and a secret cabal? Here is where my earlier forensic observation came to make me suspect something may be a foot. It happen to my wife’s mother-in-law. Same behavior, same mysterious “FACEBOOK ADVERTISING”charges. Months earlier she bought virtual currency for Farmvillie. It was a 10 buck purchase. Again never mind the stupidity of this too.  This one charge was authorized months ago, but this past week, numerous unauthorized charges at $20 a pop started showing up in her account also.

We may just be an edge case, but I wonder how many other folks has this happen to or is this happening to?  With 500+ million users of Facebook and a estimated 214 million Zynga users you can see how lucrative this type of strategy could be. Now I don’t have any proof of this just an observation and possibly an explanation into the Facebook/Zynga business model. Could it be that the revenue juggernaut that is Facebook/Zynga be based of on the ignorance of its user?  This wouldn’t be the first time. With one micro-purchase at a time it’s hard to notice every transaction of ones finances in the course of daily events. After my recent experience I now take a much more anal approach to eying my finances. We’re nickel and dimed all the time and it’s this strategy I feel that the Facebook/Zynga business model depends on.  How diligent is Facebook at vetting merchants of its ad and credit networks?  Is the Zynga/Facebook cabal engaged in or privy to wide spread credit card fraud either through malice or willful ignorance?  I’m just throwing it out there, again with little or no proof just a new found suspicion.

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Imagine I’m a Greedy Hedge Fund Manager…

Imagine I’m a greedy Hedge Fund manager. I’m sitting down with my army of tax attorney’s.  “The Bush-era tax rates are expiring, how can I minimize the tax bite so I can buy another 134 foot yacht”, I ask.

First, starting January 1st, I will only pay myself $150K for tax year 2011. That way when I get my fat-ass management fee check of $1 trillion dollars I’ll only have to pay an effective capital gains tax of 25%, better than 39.5% income tax, and by the way I live in Florida so state income tax need not apply.  Thanks carry interest.  I then systematically invest the remainder (after tax) in stocks and muni bonds. No tax on the interest on the munis and no capital gains tax on the stock because I’m a buy and hold type of guy. See I’m not going to sit by and pay anymore than I have to, especially to the government.  Oh and for those of you that think we’ll get it in an estate tax divestment, you know that non-profit charity I set up to feed starving African babies and give single mothers of Bangladesh a micro-finance loan (think Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)?  They’re the trustee to a trust I set up for my girls.  I will effectively be worth ~$0.00 (translation: jack-shit) when I pass. So, take that you pompous self-righteous, player-hating, liberal-asshole socialist!  You ain’t getting shit.

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Yahoo’s Only Hope, Dataspaces

We have all been reading the tweets and news about Yahoo! cutting between 4-6% of their workforce. A sad thing indeed, but not at all unexpected. What do you expect when your chief competitor is a verb namely Google. How can they possibly compete? They’ve given up on search, they handed that to Microsoft. I have an idea. Own the emerging user Dataspace. What the F…. is a user Dataspace?

Essentially it’s the personal cloud of data your presence on the web produces. It’s not simply your blog, Buzz and Twitter accounts, but the aggregation of them all across the web.  We have docs in the cloud, Pictures in the cloud, movies, YouTube videos, etc. There are Exabytes of conversions, blog post with multimedia, twitter musings, emails, IM chat sessions, SMS’s that exist across hundreds of services.  There is no homogeneous way to organize them. I have written of this before in previous blog posts specifically with data. If you mapped these data points across N-dimensions you would begin to fathom the concept of Dataspaces. Think of it as a nebulous cloud of digital information that surrounds ones self based on all the digital “bread crumbs” we leave across the web.  I currently have a presence across five email accounts, three IM accounts, three social network sites and three computing devices across three network domains (Corporate LANs, cellular, Home-based internet).  How do I control that? Archive that?  All these digital bread crumbs are data and we produce more of it than we have the capacity as human beings to make use of. We need a method that allows use (mankind) to collect, analyze, categorize, visualize and utilize that data – our data.  This is where the concepts of Dataspaces comes in. Yahoo! could be that service.  Google is there but not in a coherent way. Microsoft could have owned this emerging space 10 years ago!  Facebook is starting to put all the pieces together, but there is still an opening. Now there will require new was to think of, store, access and categorize data.  Users want ubiquitous services across devices and web properties and advertiser and data merchants want user data.

To make this a reality concepts such as Synopsis data structures, latent semantic analysis and probabilistic database will need to come along a lot more in their development, but Yahoo! still has remaining some pretty smart folks.  They still have a huge global user base with Yahoo! mail and it is still one of the most visited portal pages in the world.  To be exact lets call the new Yahoo! CloudSpace (trademarked Relative Progress LLC) service a Web 3.0 portal.  What’s old is new again I alway say.  Buck up remaining and soon-to-be former Yahoo! employees I may have just save your sorry asses from oblivion.  Your welcome.

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A Real Life Cyber War is Raging

Unless you have been living under a rock or have Verizon as you mobile provider or Comcast as your ISP, we are witnessing a true cyber war. Here is a recap of the battles raging at this moment.

We live in interesting and disturbing times. This new level of open hostility that could have unintended consequences with roving groups and anarchist and rogue government elements crippling the overall Internet is a cold-war like M.A.D.

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Data As Currency, Information As Commodity

What Wikileaks demonstrates to me is that information, like money will always seek the path of least restriction. Information is derived from data and more and more of it is available.  More of it will leak out, this is axiomatic. This got me to thinking about the larger implications of data and the commodity it produces, information.  It is as I have stated, its analogous to money. I have harped and shrilled to anyone who’d let me vent about what the future of the information age could be with the advent of ever larger and numerous data sets produced by all of us. I commonly call it an agent’s Dataspace, with us and our activities playing the agents.

There are huge social networks encompassing massive network graphs with dozens of tentacles of interconnections between sites, likes, links and media.   If you have a Facebook Page coupled with a Twitter account linked to You Tube with a blog site producing content and linking to insights you have yourself a nebulous dataspace already.  Not to mention the inclusion of mobile meta-data we create with every text, geo-location movements, App API calls and phone conversations. Like it or not this data is collected by someone whom later will utilize it to create value. So I have always asked as a user of all these services,  that we pump tremendous value into, don’t you have a right to that data or at least access to it? Many of the services we use for relatively little or free gain great value from our use it. It is in essence the currency they exchange for real dollars to advertisers and any other data merchants. Exabytes of conversions, blog posts with multimedia, Twitter musings, emails, IM chat sessions, SMS’s and etc. exist across hundreds of services.  If you mapped these data points across N-dimensions you would begin to fathom the concept of Dataspaces.

Now enter the growing importance of scientific and computing power available today that now allow keen insight to be extracted from large volumes of heterogeneous data (dataspace).  That data breeds meta-data which when analyzed farther begins to be shaped into information. The type of actionable intelligence moves commodity markets or bring efficiencies to retail supply chains. All these digital bread crumbs of data we produce become a raw material like iron ore and wood that when sold to practitioners capable of molding intermediate products, which are further processed through a digital supply chain.  More of it exists than we have the capacity as human beings to make use of. You could say it is an inexhaustible resource, but there is no such thing. We need a method that allows use (mankind) to collect, analyze, categorize, visualize and utilize that data – our data. That is the future of information as a commodity.  A commodity that derives its value from data. The true currency of the 21th century. The winners of this new future will be those that help us manage the Dataspaces constructs I’ve described.