218/250: Fraudigy                                                               
Name: George J Marengo #199 @6974                                               
Date: Sun Feb 24 12:17:34 1991                                                  
From: The Gangs of Vista (Southern California) 619-758-5920                     
                                                                                
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        PLEASE PASS                     THIS ON:                                
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        The L. A. County District Attorney is formally investigating            
 PRODIGY for deceptive trade practices.  I have spoken with the                 
 investigator assigned (who called me just this morning, February               
 22, 1991).                                                                     
                                                                                
        We are free to announce the fact of the investigation.                  
        Anyone can file a complaint.  From anywhere.                            
                                                                                
        The address is:                                                         
                                                                                
        District Attorney's Office                                              
        Department of Consumer Protection                                       
        Attn: RICH GOLDSTEIN, Investigator                                      
        Hall of Records                                                         
        Room 540                                                                
        320 West Temple Street                                                  
        Los Angeles, CA 90012                                                   
                                                                                
        Rich doesn't want phone calls, he wants simple written                  
 statements and copies (no originals) of any relevant documents                 
 attached.  He will call the individuals as needed, he doesn't want             
 his phone ringing off the hook, but you may call him if it is                  
 urgent at 1-213-974-3981.                                                      
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PLEASE READ THIS SECTION EXTRA CAREFULLY.  YOU NEED NOT BE IN CALIF             
 TO FILE!!                                                                      
                                                                                
        If any of us "locals" want to discuss this, call me at the              
 Office Numbers: (818) 989-2434; (213) 874-4044.  Remember, the next            
 time you pay your property taxes, this is what you are supposed to             
 be getting ... service.  Flat rate?  [laugh]  BTW, THE COUNTY IS               
 REPRESENTING THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA.  This ISN'T limited to L. A.             
 County and complaints are welcome from ANYWHERE in the Country or              
 the world. The idea is investigation of specific Code Sections and             
 if a Nationwide Pattern is shown, all the better.                              
                                                                                
       LARRY ROSENBERG, ATTY                                                    
                                                                                
                                                                                
219/250: Fraudigy                                                               
Name: George J Marengo #199 @6974                                               
Date: Sun Feb 24 12:19:32 1991                                                  
From: The Gangs of Vista (Southern California) 619-758-5920                     
                                                                                
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Prodigy: More of a Prodigy Than We Think?                                       
By: Linda Houser Rohbough                                                       
                                                                                
     The stigma that haunts child prodigies is that they are                    
difficult to get along with, mischievous and occasionally, just                 
flat dangerous, using innocence to trick us. I wonder if that                   
label fits Prodigy, Sears and IBM's telecommunications network?                 
                                                                                
     Those of you who read my December article know that I was                  
tipped off at COMDEX to look at a Prodigy file, created when                    
Prodigy is loaded STAGE.DAT. I was told I would find in that file               
personal information form my hard disk unrelated to Prodigy.                    
As you know, I did find copies of the source code to our product                
FastTrack, in STAGE.DAT. The fact that they were there at all                   
gave me the same feeling of violation as the last time my home                  
was broken into by burglars.                                                    
                                                                          
     I invited you to  look at your own STAGE.DAT file, if you're         
a Prodigy user, and see if you found anything suspect. Since then         
I have had numerous calls with reports of similar finds,                  
everything from private patient medical information to classified         
government information.                                                   
                                                                          
     The danger is Prodigy is uploading STAGE.DAT and taking a            
look at your private business. Why? My guess is marketing                 
research, which is expensive through legitimate channels, and             
unwelcomed by you and I. The question now is: Is it on purpose,           
or a mistake?  One caller theorizes that it is a bug. He looked           
at STAGE.DAT with a piece of software he wrote to look at the             
physical location of data on the hard disk, and found that his            
STAGE.DAT file allocated 950,272 bytes of disk space for storage.         
                                                                          
     Prodigy stored information about the sections viewed                 
frequently and the data needed to draw those screens in                   
STAGE.DAT. Service would be faster with information stored on the         
PC rather then the same information being downloaded from Prodigy         
each time.                                                                
                                                                          
     That's a viable theory because ASCII evidence of those               
screens shots can be found in STAGE.DAT, along with AUTOEXEC.BAT          
and path information. I am led to belive that the path and system         
configuration (in RAM) are diddled with and then restored to               
previous settings upon exit. So the theory goes, in allocating             
that disk space, Prodigy accidently includes data left after an            
erasure (As you know, DOS does not wipe clean the space that               
deleted files took on the hard disk, but merely marked the space           
as vacant in the File Allocation Table.)                                   
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
     There are a couple of problems with this theory. One is that          
it assumes that the space was all allocated at once, meaning all           
950,272 bytes were absorbed at one time.  That simply isn't true.          
My STAGE.DAT was 250,000+ bytes after the first time I used                
Prodigy. The second assumption is that Prodigy didn't want the             
personal information; it was getting it accidently in uploading            
and downloading to and from STAGE.DAT. The E-mail controversy              
with Prodigy throws doubt upon that. The E-mail controversy                
started because people were finding mail they sent with comments           
about Prodigy or the E-mail, especially negative ones, didn't              
ever arrive. Now Prodigy is saying they don't actually read the            
mail, they just have the computer scan it for key terms, and               
delete those messages because they are responsible for what                
happens on Prodigy.                                                        
                                                                           
     I received a call from someone from another user group who        
read our newsletter and is very involved in telecommunications.        
He installed and ran Prodigy on a freshly formatted 3.5 inch 1.44      
meg disk. Sure enough, upon checking STAGE.DAT he discovered           
personal data from his hard disk that could not have been left         
there after an erasure. He had a very difficult time trying to         
get someone at Prodigy to talk to about this.                          
                                                                       
     John Lolis, Membership Services Supervisor, told him that         
they were just "stuffing STAGE.DAT full." When Lolis was asked if      
                                                                       
                                                                       
                                                                       
                                                                       
 Sub: IBM Info Center                                                  


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                          "Raw Data for Raw Nerves"
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