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Spammer Gets Spam Mailed
ssblood noted a story about a spammer getting what he deserves as well as a related story
from the Register.
Essentially the virtual spammer is capable of sending a billion emails a day, and is getting sacks of physical junk mail from irritable folks. Apparently part of this plot was hatched on familiar turf too.
Tracking a package to Santa
South Haven photojournalist David McCreery uses Federal Express a lot and is fascinated with the tracking feature on the FedEx Web site (www.federalexpress.com) that lets you watch as your package makes its way to its destination.
"I send FedEx packages every few weeks," he says. "Once, I sent a package to Bowling Green and watched it leave Michigan via Flint for Memphis, come back to Flint and then drive to Ohio."
So, this being the holiday season, he decided to FedEx a letter to Santa, wondering: "How far would a package to the North Pole go? How would it get there? Where would it end up? Who would sign for it?"
You can follow the progress of his letter on his personal Web site (www.davidm.net), where he posted his letter and the FedEx tracking number.
Read the results, linked from here, over here.
Considering that /. listed the lawyer's address as well, what is happening to the lawyer and the law firm?
www.eFax.com are spammers
There's quite a lot of duplicate news stories here, most often citing the same URL as the previous story. I'm wondering, how much work would it be to adapt the "enter new story" script the editors use to do a search for similar urls or stories in say the past month? Given the article posting rate and the amount of readers /. has, the server won't even notice, and with a search engine already in place I doubt it would be hard to implement. So what's keeping them from adopting a simple technological measure to improve the quality of their site?
Lourens
I guess you're all interested in this, ok, more or less :) Yes, the Jaguar actually followed the spotter and he got threaten on his voice mailbox. Mirrors here.
I was always impressed by Steve Job's comment to the guy who was writing the Mac bootstrap code. The guy was complaining that it wasn't worth optimising the bootstrap loader any more because it was fast enough already. I don't Steve's exact words - but it was something like: We will sell 100 million of these machines - if each of those people boots their machine once a day for five years - then that's 15 billion reboots. If you can save just one second from the reboot time of the Mac then that's 480 YEARS saved.
So shaving one second of the boot time is like saving the lives of 50 people. What
could be a more noble activity than saving human lives like this.
So - applying that math to this spammer: If he sends out ten million spams a day and it takes 1 second to delete each one - and if this guy does that every day for five years - then that's morally equivelent to murdering 50 people.
Just because the damage he does to each individual is small, the cumulative damage is huge.
There is another story (probably apochryphal) about the guy writing the banking system software who changed the code to take the roundoff error (less than a half cent) from every interest calculation and direct it into his personal account. The story goes that he made tens of thousands of dollars a week. This story probably isn't true - but should such a person be considered any less a criminal because the money he stole was spread so thinly? Obviously not - he stole those thousands of dollars and that's that.
This spammer deprived the people of the world of 50 human lives - he should be considered a mass murderer and treated accordingly.
www.sjbaker.org