This morning I received an email from American Airlines’ AAdvantage Reward Program:

Welcome to the American Airlines AAdvantage(R) program, the first and largest loyalty program in the world! We are proud to inform you that today, American Airlines launch a new reward program. Please take the 5 questions survey. For your effort you will be rewarded with $50 & 25,000 miles.

The sentences sound funny, don’t they? The phrasing is off. That should raise a red flag. Unfortunately, for many who received the email it might be too late. The message contained a link to an American Airlines phishing scam. Phishing, in this context, isn’t what most people think it is.

Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

This particular scam is a web page that looks like an authentic American Airlines web page, complete with a Login section designed to capture the AAdvantage number and Password.

The site looks legitimate, doesn’t it? Caveat emptor. Beware of what seems too good to be true.

Is Google making us stupid? Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

You feel it, too, right? The cause? Google.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

Nate Anderson in Ars:

Andreas Kluth, of The Economist, agrees that “people will read more in terms of quantity, but more promiscuously and at shorter intervals and with less dedication. As these habits take root, they corrupt our willingness to commit to long texts, as found in books or essays… This will result in a resurgence of short-form texts and storytelling, in ‘haiku culture’ replacing ‘book culture.’”

The internet may be a watershed moment in human history, the event which triggered the death of literature and ushered in the haiku century.

Shameless self promotion:

The Mac brought massive change to the world of computers. The iPod brought change to how we listen to and manage music. The iPhone changed how we use cell phones. If this trend continues, Apple’s iPad may signal another era of dramatic change. Should we begin to prepare for the day when our Macs and Windows PCs are no longer the center of our computing universe? Yes.

Some people recommend that your computer be restarted every day. Derek Kessler in Pre | Central recommends daily restarts for both Windows PCs and Palm Pre smart phone users. Why?

As I’ve often recommended for my friends sporting Windows-running machines, rebooting every day or so is good for the soul. Well, it’s good for the stability of the operating system, and the same can be said for webOS.

Kessler points to Reboot Scheduler, a Palm Pre app which automatically restarts the Pre according to a schedule.

My MacBook and iPhone run 24/7 and are restarted only when the operating system is updated (every few months). No sluggishness. No slowdown. No problem. Whatever disease Windows has, maybe Palm has it, too.

Quick. Name a few fast foods and desserts that are bad for you. Pizza, cheeseburgers, chocolate ice cream. Guess what? They’re actually good for you. Science to the rescue from Prevention:

Science really has rescued some of our naughtiest foods from the taboo list. New studies suggest that former no-no’s like red meat, ice cream, and cheese may add to better health and longer life. This isn’t an excuse to go out and binge on every burger you see—overdoing calories and saturated fat is an invitation to obesity, clogged arteries, cancer, and diabetes. But indulging in these once-forbidden treats once in a while (and in waistline-friendly 400-calorie portions) may actually boost the health of your diet.

Pizza, beef, cheese, ice cream, and chocolate. Today is a good day.

Frédéric Filloux in The Washington Post worries that the iPad could be used to censor bad news (at least, in France).

Imagine this scenario in a coming iPad era. An iPad newsmagazine publishes an investigative piece that triggers a legal injunction: Remove that from the publication or face a $10,000 penalty per day. No, says the publisher, who has guts and money (proof that this is a fiction): We want to fight in court. The plaintiff then turns to Apple. Same threat: Face a huge fine or remove the offending content. Furthermore, says the plaintiff’s attorney, thanks to the permanent and unique electronic link to your proprietary devices and the fact that the electronic kiosk now resides on the device, you must extend the deletion to each user’s tablet. Just as you keep pushing updates and various content bits to these gizmos, you can push a delete instruction code.

Far fetched? Maybe not.

With the iPad structure, Apple is creating absolute control for product, delivery and even ownership that can be revoked at will. Apple allows or rejects the application (the container); it can remove all or part of any content from its servers; and it can even remotely delete the stuff you purchased. Imagine: You go to a bookstore and spend $25 on a book that a court later finds illicit; a bookstore employee then goes to your place, takes the book from the shelf and leaves some money on your kitchen table. Wouldn’t you be slightly uncomfortable with this?

Interesting, no?

From the National Weather Service and AP:

Forty-nine states have snow now, from the Gulf Coast’s Redneck Riviera to the skyscrapers of Dallas. The lone holdout? Hawaii.

That works for me.

Tonight is Conan O’Brien’s last night on The Tonight Show and he exits with a $45-million parachute. Meanwhile, Jay Leno and David Letterman have renewed their long quiet feud. Letterman:

I’m telling jokes and making fun of Jay Leno over and over and over, relentlessly, mercilessly simply for one reason. I’m really enjoying it.

Leno:

Letterman has been hammering me every night. You know the best way to get Letterman to ignore you? Marry him. He will not bother you. He won’t look you in the eye.

The real losers? NBC. They screwed up late night on NBC back in 1992 when they bypassed Letterman for Leno as host of The Tonight Show. Letterman skipped to CBS but Leno won the subsequent ratings war. This time, NBC loses O’Brien and $45-million.

From Charlie’s Diary (Charlie Stross):

There are several good arguments for not using Apple’s computers. For one thing, they’re expensive; no cheap netbooks here. If money was all there was to it, I’d stick to generic cheap PCs — and indeed, I have run PCs in the past.

Are Mac’s more expensive? No. But Mac’s are not cheap devices, either.

The reason I choose to pay through the nose for my computers is very simple: unlike just about every other manufacturer in the business, Apple appreciate the importance of good industrial design.