I got an e-mail this morning supposedly summoning me to a ‘pre-trial hearing’ on a software copyright suit. The court papers were in an attachment.

OK, where to begin? As a programmer who has been dealing with software copyright issues on my own behalf for years the entire body of the e-mail was bogus. The court was wrong, the titles for court officials were wrong, everything was just wrong. There wasn’t a chance in hell of my opening the attachment.

These e-mails are part of the ‘social engineering’ used by spammers and hackers to suck people in and ignore common sense. I knew it was a scam just looking at the e-mail address of the sender, but I opened it to see how bad it was.

They might catch some people who don’t take minimum precautions, but anyone paying attention will just delete it. I’m not aware of any jurisdiction that permits service of a summons by e-mail.

In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

I provide more detail on my other site.