OH NOES!!!11 CREDIT FRAUD!!!

I got an email today from Bank of America saying they had detected fraudulent activity on a credit card I have with them. I deleted it. I got THREE MORE. I decided to check in to it. Being the paranoid android that I am, I didn't dare follow any of the links in the emails (all of which went to some subdomain at bankofamerica.com) and instead went directly to the BoA website, logged in, and was greeted with a message that my account couldn't be viewed because it was currently locked. They provided a number to call. I called...

They wanted my social security number, right off the bat. After considerable jockeying (because I wouldn't give them my account number or SSN), we authenticated one another and they informed me that someone had tried to place a $1500 order at mypolicestore.com using my card (the not so subtle irony of fraud at a store for cops is not lost on me.) Fortunately, BoA rejected the transaction, and triggered the current status.

Now, this incident -- alone -- wouldnt' typically be enough to scare me, but earlier today I had gotten a statement for my corporate AmEx card. The problem there is that I don't have a corporate AmEx card. TWO incidents in one day? Uh oh. SO, I promptly went to the Big Three and initiated credit freezes on my credit profile. I've also put a notice in with my other credit card vendors.

I'm worried that my ID may have been jacked. That would suck. This is the last thing I need to be dealing with right now.

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Karmic Koala

Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is only a couple of weeks old, and already I'm on to Karmic Koala (9.10). I upgraded, initially, because the goons rolling kernels in 9.04 managed to release TWO kernel packages within two weeks, both of which broke sound from when I was running 9.04-pre-release... so, I was hoping Karmic would have the new 2.6.30 kernel so I could have sound again. This morning, I saw that some kind soul had committed 2.6.30 to the Karmic tree, and my path was set. This has not been an effort for the faint of heart.

After accidentally interrupting an `apt-get dist-upgrade`, I had to hand-salvage my apt-get database by hand removing most of KDE (which is fine, it was there mostly as a novelty anyways). Once that was done, a quick reboot followed by an `apt-get dist-upgrade` brought the system back to a working state, including the new 2.6.30 kernel. w00t! And do you know what? Sound works. Holy crap.

Now, the real crux of my entry today is to document (for myself and others) how to prevent rouge kernel upgrades from fubaring their system. SO, what I've done is mangled /etc/apt/preferences to include the following lines:

Package: linux-image*
Pin: version 2.6.30-2.3
Pin-Priority: 1001

With those in place, no careless kernel commit is going to trash my box. Admittedly, upgrading my kernel will now be a much more manual process, but honestly, how often does that NEED to be done?

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