Ryan's Weblog | Technology, web programming and internet

Southern Energy Association Scam

ryantxr — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 18:58:19 +0000

Have you received unsolicited calls from the Southern Energy Association? I got about 10 calls on my cell phone. Each time I pressed 2 to be removed. I still got calls. They pissed me off. I did some research and found almost zero online presence. A few little known scam sites had some complaints from some individuals.

So who is the Southern Energy Association? I have been unable to find out. I think some company hired a call center and is robocalling everyone in various parts of Florida.

This is what the Southern Energy Association claim to be offering. They want to send a technician to your house to offer energy saving tips. This is free to the homeowner. We all know that there is no such thing as free. It might be more palatable if they explained how they made money. They are so secretive about it that it raises suspicions.

How do they benefit from offering this free service? I don’t know for sure. I can only speculate. Here are some ideas.

They get federal money if they offer this advice.
They get inside information and knowledge on the homeowner and can sell this information to a/c companies or other energy related companies.

ryantxr — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:09:46 +0000

New Tech Community at Barcamp Sarasota http://ping.fm/4Lrog

ryantxr — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:15:32 +0000

Republican Tea Party http://ping.fm/qlRpx

ryantxr — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:48:54 +0000

Britain to decentralize health system http://ping.fm/TSkYv

ryantxr — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:15:08 +0000

British Rail joke – http://ping.fm/YuwSU

ryantxr — Fri, 28 May 2010 18:09:35 +0000

Facebook privacy http://ping.fm/MrKdw

ryantxr — Fri, 21 May 2010 21:29:05 +0000

Here are some examples on using PHP preg_match to do various types of pattern matching. http://bit.ly/d2ZcQm

ryantxr — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:37:21 +0000

http://ping.fm/VG4Ok

ryantxr — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:36:25 +0000

Small PHP example how to generate your own API keys.

Make your own API keys

ryantxr — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:22:38 +0000

You’ve probably seen API keys created by various systems. They act as login and passwords and they look like this:

OTQ3MTIxMTQ3
c6e0b90fa7c98dc812f5446155d876a88b8d9a87

Here is a small snippet of PHP to generate API keys for your own system.

php api key generator

The only requirement when creating is that they should be unique. Provide a means for your users to generate keys on your platform. Then use the keys to allow the users to access your API programatically.