Of course, it turns out the be a check cashing scam and my wife and I can see it coming a mile away, plenty of time to avoid the scam. Of course, not everyone will be able to sniff out the rat. If people had gotten wind of how it works then the scammers around the world, including the notorious Nigerian gangs, wouldn’t still be at it. In case you don’t quite get it yet, this is organized crime, dear readers. Here’s the ad itself:

tutor/teacher

Reply to: xxxxxxxxxxxxx@rocketmail.com ^[?]
Date: 2008-12-12, 1:20PM PST

I posted it here since it will likely be removed sometime very soon. Sadly, removal isn’t enough. There are so many scammers and so many scams that it may be impossible to ever stop it. Of course, there is one way to stop it. Tell your friends and family. Don’t be cordial or kind. Lay it on heavy. If you know someone who is unwilling to educate themselves about who to protect themselves from such scams or are susceptible to coersion, inform them of the level of idiot they are. Bluntly.

If this looks innocent to you, take a look at the reply which my wife received:

Hello,
Thanks for replying back to my online job posting, requiring your tutorial service for my Daughter, I would like to make a tutoring arrangement between you and my Daughter for the month of January 2009, I would like you to tutor him within a period of 1 month, on a schedule basis of 1 hr Daily, 3 times weekly, totaling 12 times in a month. I am willing to pay $50/hr. I would like to use these medium to inform you that my Daughter don’t live in the US, she would be flying from the Philippine to the US, I want you to teach her during her 8 month stay in the US, if there is need to extend your services, an amendment would be made to your salary. she would be dropped off/picked up by his nanny during the hours of teaching at any location you want the Tutoring to take place in your area.
You would be receiving a check drawn from a Bank in the US, from my business associates in the US, since i am from Philippine and right now am in Cuba for a business trip the  payments wont be honored in any bank there in Philippine or here in Cuba , These check would be made out for the cost of the tutorial services you are rendering, and also for the living expense, nanny fees of my Daughter . Regarding this- I hope i can trust you with these payments, as the payment would be made out in excess, so all you have to do is Deposit and cash the payment  at your bank, deduct your tutorial service fee, which should be $50 per hour X 12 Times a Month = $600 i would include an additional $100 for run around fee and any additional text book you might be needing- so $700 is what you deduct from the check you receive , whatever the remaining balance is after deduction of the $700 go ahead and deduct Money Gram or Western union  transfer sending charges for sending out the remainder to the Nanny who would be contacting you with further arrangements and instructions regarding pickup/drop off of my Daughter to the library where you would always teach her. So i hope i can trust you that you will teach my Daughter good academics and some moral respects so that they can be good to their self in the future, i hope i can count on you for the tutorial and the money to be sent to the Nanny. I look forward to read a detailed message from you containing the following information, if you are OK with my arrangements.
Full Name.
Mailing Address including Zip Codes ( no PO Box pls ).
Cell No ( If Available ).
Home No.
Gender.
Best Time to Call.
Email.
N.B  My Daughter  Name is Christine Miller, She is actually coming to the US for sight seeing, but while she is here i want her to study at the same time, she understand English, can write and read fluently i just need her French and English Upgraded.
Thanks for your Understanding.
Collins

Note how there was no mention of the daughter travelling internationally. Miraculously the offer has risen from $45 to $50 and it will be provided in the form of advance payment in check form. Oh! And if there’s extra left over you can have that, too. Just deposit the check and wire the remainder of the money to the “Nanny”. If there’s something inside you which says this could be plausible, you need help. There are so many holes in this story its not even vaguely funny.

This, then, is why Craig’s List is now completely and officially useless. It can’t stop these scams and the system is designed to count on the smarts of strangers to report pages which are questionable. This is what people traded in for local print paper ads?

I’m not going to press for the usual in what to be thankful for. I’m far too jaded for that and I believe that there is way too much hypocrisy in the US to make being thankful even vaguely valid. What I will say, and I apologize to you Republicans who read me, is that I’m thankful to President-Elect Barack Obama who isn’t sitting on his ass waiting to get into office. He’s working now to save all of our asses. I hope and I pray that our choice was right and that he really can fix this broken country. I have faith in him and feel that he can.

If he does, that’s something I can honestly be thankful for.

What set me off is my freezer chest. I have a freezer chest which has sit in my house for the past year not getting used. The wife had been drilling me to get one for years saying that she’d use it and that it would be great. So, I get one and what happens? Nothing. Sure, we have some stuff in there, but it consumes maybe 10% of the overall space, which doesn’t seem a good ratio to me. So, I put it up on CL today. One person queried about it and I never heard back, then some dude sends this (I’ve not edited it aside from removing the regional details):

When is a good time to show it? I live on [REDACTED] near [REDACTED], so I wouldn’t mind going in the morning or at some other time to take a look. I am seriously interested and really do want it, but I will bargain on the price because I could get one new for less than 200.

Wow! Dude! So why not go get one for less? I’m asking $150? Isn’t that $50 less? I don’t know, as I’m not a math genius! This is the kind of thing I’m starting to see everywhere, but I’ll focus on IT. My wife is endlessly combing the gigs in CL hoping to find me something to do “on the side” to make some extra money. All I’m seeing is one person wants to have all of their data recovered from their crashed hard drive and expects all nerds to have “cleanrooms” in their apartments! Oh, and the guy can only pay a few hundred. Um. If you didn’t check, which is clear, these kinds of jobs require extremely expensive equipment and time and can cost in the thousands.

How about the lady who needs to have everything plugged in for her and can only pay $20, or the dude who wants all viruses cleaned off his computer for $5 an hour, or the company that wants to hire an IT guy slash mailroom dork for $10 an hour. How about the people on eBay who are warranty obsessed! If you want a warranty that badly GO BUY IT NEW! I’d put up one of my old Mac laptops and I’d get 15 queries about warranty! Did any one of them pay attention on the note I had in there about how it didn’t have warranty coverage or even bother to notice that it was 7 years old? No!

People’s emails are getting bad, too. Its like the whole idea of foreshortened communications has grabbed hold of America’s unified intelligence quotient and ripped it out wholesale. Some guy on a website asked about how he could improve his position since he’s been on the helpdesk team for over 7 years and still lives at home. It was no wonder that he wrote in anonymously, since it appeared to be penned by an 8 year old, and he claimed to have a BS in biology! Shocking, people! Where is the pride? Where is the belief that we’re the greatest country in the world? What happened to the idea that you have to earn it to get it?!

Apparently it got flushed down the toilet with the guy who was able to trade a red paperclip all the way up to a house. Expectations, people!! Apparently its all about free these days. If you can get it free and its mostly as good why should you ever pay for it again, yes? Its sad because, as a country, we’re losing out way. We’ve lost most of our manufacturing jobs because people don’t see building cars or computers as a skill. No! That’s akin to digging ditches! We can’t build things or perform labor intensive tasks, no! We’re all in Hollywood or advertising or we work in some office in front of a computer and sit at a nice desk.

We get cappuccino’s in the office and lunch handed over cost free. We get paid well enough not to care how much gas costs and other, stinkier people from other places do the hard things. Its amazing, because the people whom we crap on, those who do the hard work and get their hands dirty? Yeah. They’re happy to have the work and to earn the money, and a lot of them… I know, this will shock you… A lot of them actually take pride in their work! They are pleased they could build a house which doesn’t fall over in an earthquake or create a beautiful garden full of flowers or make your Mercedes work again after you rammed it into an SUV while tailgating and chatting on the phone.

That nice salad you paid $20 for at Spago? Picked by someone who makes a lot less than you, and yet they have a family to feed and a car to put gas into and bills to pay and family back in their home country to send money to. They likely even have more responsibilities than we do, and yet they scrape and scrimp every last thin dime and probably don’t spend much time watching TV, much less even having to worry about their digital cable, HD TV, DVR, and big ass leather couch.

So, what about the decline of man in the modern age? We’re too advanced, aren’t we. We’ve worked hard and our ancestors died for us to have what we have today, right? We earned those SUVs and McMansions and flights to Aruba, right? We earned the right to not have to actually build or maintain what we earned, right? What we are earning is the right not to choose where our goods come from. We’ve earned the right to have our financial power taken away from us by someone who is hungrier than we are. We’ve earned the right to lose our political status in the world. We’ve earned the right to select the president we don’t want because we’re not willing to get up and vote.

We’ve earned the right to wallow in our losses and pain. We’ve earned the right to watch an entire city be destroyed by the sea and not be able to rebuild it. We’ve earned the right to watch thousands of our young men die at the hands of others because of a lie. That’s all that we’ve earned. So, next time you go looking to buy something on Craig’s List, take a moment to see where the other person might be at. Think about why they’re asking for the amount they are asking for and maybe NOT chisel them down because it all about you.

Think about someone else and someone else might just take the moment to think about you back.

Some people just move the cable to the printer from one machine to the other. Others delve into the periodically annoying and frusterating world of network-based device sharing. Others who care not to engage in such tomfoolery just duplicate some things. This is where the new Kensington ShareCentral line of device management products comes in. Kensington shipped me a ShareCentral 5 the other day, and I’ve been putting it throught the paces to see what its made of.

RIght off, I’d say its made of some pretty nifty technology. When I first received it I made the almost immediate discovery that what amounts to a 5-port USB hub is first and foremost an ingenious USB device aggregator. Here’s how it works. On the back, as you can see in the illustration, there are two USB Type-B sockets, one for each computer. There are then 5 USB ports and a power socket for the powersupply. Install tiny little drivers on the two Macintosh or Windows systems (or mix of the two) and plug them in.

My assumption would be that the driver sets up a number of virtual device ports on the host computer so that they can all talk at the same time. This is fantastic because then all you need to do is plug in a single USB cable to access all of your devices, something which could possibly allow for cleaner cable management. Of course, its a little too expensive to just use as a device aggregator, but as a device sharing tool, it strikes a fair bargain.

To test the ShareCentral 5, I set it up on my desk where I have an HP 7800 Small Form Factor PC running Windows XP SP3 and an older PowerPC-based Mac Mini running Leopard. I removed the keyboard and mouse from the Mac and installed the drivers for both Mac OS X and Windows. I was a little disappointed at the poor quality of the CD-ROM supplied. It seemed rather poorly created, but it worked well. I would have preferred a dual format CD for users who may not be as well equipped to work with technical issues as I am.

I then plugged in each of the supplied USB to Computer cables (one is shorter than the other for what I would assume to be an effort to reduce entanglement) into each of the machines and connected the wireless dongle for the Logitech LX710 keyboard and mouse combo. It popped up in Windows first. I then clicked the button with the keyboard and mouse icon on it, it flashed a few times, and jumped to the other side. Now the Mac was using it. It was seamless, though it took a few seconds.

I tested a printer and a USB hard drive formatted in FAT32 and each worked flawlessly. I even tested switching with a hard drive from the Mac to Windows without first ejecting the drive and it apparently doesn’t complain, which means that the driver must add that functionality. I can’t confirm that just yet because I haven’t tested it to my satisfaction, though, so don’t take my word for it. Otherwise, everything works as advertised.

The box comes with everything you’ll need inside, including a little rubber gromet thing which can attach to either side and act as a cable guide in case you want to plug in a laptop in front of the device. Another nice touch are the four buttons which are magnetic. If you mount the device on a wall, you can rotate the images. If you want to put on custom buttons, it comes with three numbered blanks. Very well thought out, aside from the CD, of course.

Its solid, well built, and very functional. I appreciate the Mac OS X support, as well as the seamless operation between systems. It would be nice if Kensington got really platform happy and developed a set of Linux drivers, but we can’t get everything we wish for, do we. It is now available for US$79.99 direct from Kensington and, I would presume, from their retail partners.

Sincerely,

Tyler Regas
Editor-in-Chief