My buddy Tom from MySpace (he’s probably your buddy, too) has a message for his users who have been subject to phishing scams: it’s your fault.

Phishing is the name given to the practice of making a web site that pretends to be another site in order to gain your credentials. For years thieves have been using this for serious damage, such as getting into bank accounts. It’s a big problem, one that browsers and sites themselves have been tackling.

Lately I’ve noticed a number of my MySpace friends sending me advertisements that I wouldn’t expect them to send. Likely, they had been phished. Tom decided to take action with a call to “protect yourself from phishing!” (color choice all his):

“Phishing is a trick people use to steal your email & password. It is not a “security” flaw, and you’re not getting “hacked.” It’s entirely preventable by you, if you know what to look for. “

I appreciate his position. It must be difficult to watch millions of his users fall prey to something that can, from his perspective, be so easily avoided. Lack of user education is definitely part of the problem (knowledge makes everything simpler, says the Laws of Simplicity). But he isn’t meeting users in the middle in this post. Even his “simple” solution sounds like a lot of work and is asking users to change their normal patterns:

“This all may sound complicated, but there’s a simple way to make sure you NEVER get phished. If you are ever clicking around MySpace and you are asked to login, don’t do it! STOP. Go to the URL bar in your browser, and type in ‘myspace.com’ and then login. If you always type in myspace.com yourself, you’ll be sure that you are on our real login page, and not some fake designed to steal your login credentials.”

Especially for a site as notoriously lacking in design as MySpace, they have to accept some of the blame. They have to come up with some sort of change on their end to become more phishing proof. They can’t expect a post so long most MySpacers won’t even skim it to make a significant impact. Most of all, there needs to be less “it’s not my fault” and more it’s all my fault.

via Marshall who may not agree

A couple years ago I found a really cool formula for determining how much an idea is worth. It proposed that ideas were just a multiplier for execution, which is where the real money is.

Seems right to me, but then I’ve also always suspected there was something else going on.

I think Elliot is on to something about finding a proper balance:

“Let your idea inspire you to start executing, then let your execution continue to inspire your ideas.”

It’s not as simple as hard work. It takes idea refinement, some of which can only come from executing on the idea.

I ran across this pretty great quote about simplicity:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

It’s a powerful truism, something to which any of us who believe in simplicity can relate.

It was attributed to a famous German physicist. Immediately, I wanted to share it, but something made me question the attribution.

When I discovered it might have instead been a quote from a less famous (but still German) economist, E.F. Schumacher, I was less interested in sharing it.

The words are no less powerful. Or are they?

The physicist was, of course, Albert Einstein. His name has become a shortcut to communicate importance. So, even if it was Schmacher’s words, Einstein seems to have played an integral role in making their meaning.

Via Etre

Are you lazy? You’d probably say no. You go to the gym, ride your bike, and sometimes get outdoors for a long walk. But when it comes to using the Web, we’re all lazy.

So, I can’t see why companies insist on treating us any other way. In a moment of weakness, I clicked “Live Help” on the US Airways website. That’s something I’ve been trained not to do, because the Web really doesn’t have real-time down yet. But I clicked it this time, and I was unsurprisingly disappointed.

Catch that? Close this window… Click the ‘Live Help!’ link again. I know they can’t have an agent at my beck and call, but the least they could do is retry for me automatically.

I followed their directions. I closed the window and clicked again. I did that exactly once. When I got the same window, the one that doesn’t acknowledge that I’m lazy, I gave up.

Bad service is as expected from an airline as it is from a credit card company. For that reason, I was surprised when Capital One gave me a lazy option the last time I logged in.

First, a little back story. I have two Capital One cards. They each have separate logins, which makes it sort of a pain. But dangit, I’m just happy to have access to them online, where I can avoid long hold times and pitches for payment protection. So, imagine my delight when I saw this:

The process took a couple of clicks. They did almost everything for me, and now I have access to both accounts from one place. How’s that for simple? And lazy.