I wrote Cory Doctorow the other day "complaining" that I would have random interesting ideas flit through my head and realized they were all snippets from his intriguing fiction (and sometimes non-fiction). His response: "pwned!"

I was almost "pwned" last Sunday and yesterday when a flaw in awstats 6.2 and earlier, the program I started using partly because of Cory et al. at BoingBoing to perform traffic analysis, allowed a bunch of Brazilians to pwn sites all over the Internet. Luckily, the root kit--a prefab package for taking over a Web server when you have local user access--disabled all access to my computer when it ran rather than allowing access. A later check using rkhunter found no rootkits or replaced binaries. But I'll be watching.

By the way, I don't believe there's a connection between the theft of my credit card number and the attempt to take over my

Somebody managed to steal the Amazon.com credit card number my wife and I use. Was it YOU?

I'm pretty careful about online purchases, but it's possible it was a real-world copying down. The credit card company noticed strange charges and an attempt to change the address to Brooklyn.

Also interesting: on Feb. 1, the card was charged by AOL and eFax for $1 each. The fradulent charges showed up on Feb. 9. I'm guessing that this is a common technique to ensure a valid card number. But it makes it easier to pinpoint the thieves, and I imagine the credit card companies use that information pretty well. And there's an address in Brooklyn where merchandise was going to be sent to that will be full of cops (or credit card private detectives) soon.

Because of the flurry of interest, here's more detail on our family telecom bill and how it will be transformed.

This doesn't include incidental savings using SkypeOut

My wife and I try to be frugal, and one way to accomplish thrift is by getting the same thing for less. She's a thrift store shopper--Ben has almost nothing that wasn't given, bought on sale, or bought at a thrift store and he looks great--and I'm a telecom thrift shopper. I like the cutting edge, but generally when it cuts a fee elsewhere.

Several months ago, I found that using a Vonage line at my office plus a Cingular plan with rollover minutes and their FastForward service would reduce my cell bill overages. FastForward costs a flat $2.99 per month to forward calls when the phone is placed in a special cradle to any number you determine at no per-minute cost. This offloads minutes from the cell network, and Cingular appreciates the reduced cost.

But I hit some speedbumps. Vonage's service wouldn't work on my office DSL