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College Student Receives Email of the Lost
dots and loops wrote to mention an eWeek article that's something of a life lesson: Don't be too smart for your own good. The article tells the tale of a college student who cleverly chose null@vtext.com as his cellphone email address. He's been getting thousands of wayward emails and text messages since 2001. From the article: "Initially, the content of the messages was innocuous, he said. It was things like don't forget to drop the car off at baker's and to call mom at 781-XXX-XXXX, stuff like that, Bubrouski wrote. The problem worsened in mid-2002, when Bubrouski's phone began channeling what he claims were dozens of messages from an e-mail address used by General Motors' then-new "OnStar" system. The messages quickly filled up the memory on his cell phone and contained diagnostic response to tests on a beta version of OnStar. 'Basically, peoples' cars were sending messages to my phone, Bubrouski wrote. "
Some smart *ss decided to get a vanity plate that read "NONE". It seems that whenever a police officer or parking commisionair issued a ticket for a vehicle without a license plate, they would write in "NONE" where it said plate.
Then the clear entering the ticket info, would (of course) enter the same thing into their system.
The result was hundreds of tickets being issued to him, for various offenses (parking, speeding, etc.).
Slashdot just put your email address on their home page. Unscrambled.
This is actually quite serious. I have had one story posted on Slashdot, and because I didn't have a homepage, the editors put in my unscrambled email address. The story was copied and pasted verbatum by countless sites all over the next.
That address was almost rendered unusable. Only the bayesian span fliters in thunderbird salvaged it. Still, it was pretty irritating to see an address I had been quite careful with destroyed because the Slashdot editors didn't consider carefully what they were doing.
May the Maths Be with you!
Like the guy who got "unknown" or some such for his licence plate. Got several thousand tickets in the mail each year.
-nB
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I don't know why people bother with these 'obfuscation' / garble techniques on Slashdot comment threads. I wrote a mIRC script that unscrambles practically all of them with ease. The only ones it doesn't are the ones the user scrambled themselves - but all the automated slashdot stuff is a piece of cake.
If I can do it with a mIRC script, you bet an e-mail harvest is already doing it with a more dedicated tool.