When I originally created those Yahoo stories you could still obfuscate the URL's using http://news.yahoo.com@206.67.47.69/schwartzdeath.h tm which made it look even more impressive.:-)
Virtual reverse-scams are safest...I convinced one of these guys that I (in the guise of Sam Walton) was traveling to Abidjan to meet him. I even tied up all the loose ends by creating a fake news story about Sam's adventures.
Part of the appeal of RvB was the absurdity of seeing a soap opera/sitcom set in a battle ground. Instead of seeing people blow each other up, we watched them deal with real-life issues like personal relationships. The Sims is already a soap opera/sitcom, so what is gained by lipsyncing the characters? My daughters both play Sims2 and they are constantly showing me the world they created, explaining the characters, and forcing me to watch scenes play out. That's what watching Strangerhood felt like.
Now if Rooster Teeth could get those Sims2 characters to load up with gear and go out fragging their neighborhoods they might have a hit.
Google has also recently added a gmail email notification client that sits in the tray and notifies you when new gmail messages are received. Quoting from their description of the program:
"The Gmail Notifier is a downloadable Windows application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages. It displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser."
They won't redo the Indiana Jones films because Spielberg and others would have to be involved. Lucas doesn't have 100% control of that series so he needs get approval and signed contracts from too many folks to make changes.
I agree that a catchall can cause problems down the road as you've described, but in this case the mail server (and bandwidth) are being maintained by someone else. Not to be cruel, but if the system admins allow catchall mailboxes to be hosted on their servers then they deserve all the traffic they get.
Of course if the user is pulling all the email down via POP3 then the bandwidth issue will hit home, and hit the hosting company twice.
LOL...we were merely pointing out the obvious flaws in the P2P networks, getting a bit of free publicity, promoting Stefanie's music, and having a bit of fun. And, we put our names out there rather than being an anonymous coward.
Found the patent online and they filed it in August 2000. That's after we got plenty of press including a Slashdot article that brought our server to it's knees and attracted a fair number of DDOS attacks.:-)
I'd be real interested in seeing exactly when they filed, considering that my brother and I came up with the Cuckoo's Egg Project. IMHO it's not a patentable idea, but try telling that to the US Patent Office.
This story reminds me of an "urban legend" from my days at MIT (late 70's). The main entrance to MIT was through building 7 which faced Massachusetts Avenue. There was a pedestrian crosswalk with a "Press to walk" button, and that button may or may not have actually worked. The intersection was a very busy thoroughfare, and cars would quite often run the red light which inspired two students to do a traffic study as part of a statistics course.
After observing the crosswalk for several days and analyzing the pedestrian count, the traffic count, the timing of the lights, and the number of times cars "ran the light", the students determined that your odds of getting hit by a car were less if you crossed at random than if you waited for a "walk" sign.
As with most urban legends, I doubt the validity of the story but it did make for entertaining conversation while waiting for the light.
In my county (Westchester County, metro NY area) ALL stores must item price everything. Even supermarkets must tag every single item. Both Wal*Mart and Home Depot have paid fines rather than bring their stores into compliance...it's cheaper to pay a $50,000 fine once per year than it is to hire people to maintain item pricing. Michigan has also fined HD and W*M due to a similar law. Massachusetts also has an item pricing law, but it is rarely enforced.
Is anyone surprised that the 10 million promised addresses boils down to less than 7 million after removing duplicates? The article is interesting in terms of statistical analysis of the data (especially the fact that a number of abuse and postmaster addresses are in the email database), but I don't think anyone expected quality email lists from spammers.
On the other hand, why would someone sending spam care too much about the integrity of the data? You're still getting over 6 million email addresses. So several million messages bounce...does the spammer care?
People (including myself) have tried engaging the scammers in conversation to have some fun and possibly steer them down a dead end. However, these folks have far more time to devote than we do at creating these bogus stories.
I've also heard of people replying and attaching image files so that they're mailbox quota gets used up. Most of the scammers are using free email services so it doesn't take much to fill their quota. I;ve done this a few times, choosing suitably bizarre images (nothing pornographic, just bizarre).
But it is a funny site. I tried my hand at corresponding with the scammers for a while but it took way too much time. I thought these scams would die out, but maybe I should jump back into the fray.
His program delivers the first relay attempt to fool the spammer. That means that an open relay test might identify your machine as a spam source.
That may not be a big deal since you wouldn't run this on your actual email server anyway. Most blackholes only list specific IP's and not entire blocks (at least the reliable blackholes don't list entire blocks) just because one IP in the range runs an open relay.
Blame for what? In Canada people don't even lock their front doors (at least the one's interviewed by Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine"), so I wouldn't expect them to lock their WiFi. Maybe the homeowner is stupid for allowing someone to eat up his bandwidth and access his network, but no way you can "blame" him for any of the criminal activity.
"Pathetic" is a bit over the top. Each of those machines exerted some major influence and made a mark on the industry.
The TI 99/4 was definitely saddled with a weird "expansion box" which was essentially an empty PC case designed to hold expansion cards (memory, floppy drive, etc.). However, the 99/4 became the darling of early education since it ran LOGO, a programming language that was taught to kindergarten and elementary school children. There's a generation whose first classroom PC was a TI 99/4 running LOGO. TI also spent a lot of money advertising the 99/4 (Bill Cosby was the spokesman) which raised consumer awareness of the existence of PC's for the home.
The Timex/Sinclair was a novelty but also showed the possibilies for cheap and small PC's that could be used by hobbyists on a budget. There are a lot of programmers that cut their teeth on BASIC on the Sinclair
The Adam from Coleco was nearly "pathetic" as far as a PC, but it was a pretty cool gaming console and it had great packaging. It was compatable with nothing, but Coleco bundled it with a lot of stuff. However, if I recall correctly it was a major disaster in terms of sales and took Coleco down with it.
They don't censor stuff, they just refuse to carry it. Works fine for me, because I can get it cheaper at my local used music store, without dealing with the parking situation at Wally-World, and to boot, I'm supporting a local business.
Bravo to supporting the local business (seriously), but don't pooh-pooh Wal*Mart's selective music racks. Wal*Mart is the largest music retailer in the world, and if a label knows in advance that a CD won't get sold at Wal*Mart then it reduces the likeliehood of the CD being released at all. Sure there are independent labels and local shops, but there are fewer and fewer of those around. The local CD shop I frequented recently went out of business after nearly 20 years selling CD's. When he started he was the only game in town...nobody was carrying CD's. When he folded he was being squeezed on all sides...Wal*Mart, Borders, Tower, Amazon.com, you name it. So support your local shop AND protest Wal*Mart's CD selection policy. Economic censorship is often more dangerous than government censorship.
I replied to these guys for a while and actually took a virtual trip to Abidjan to meet one of these scam artists. It took way too much time (doing the fake Yahoo newsstories), but was fun while it lasted.
They're like the storefront glass company that drives through town at night throwing rocks through windows and then shows up the next day to fix the problem.
The complete list is here, but the ones that jumped out are:
blockmessenger.com
defeatpopupspam.com
easypopupblocker.com
endads.com
fightpopups.com
I guess it's like the big corporate guys trying to buy up all the yourcorporatenameheresucks.com domains. On the other hand, maybe selling pop-up blockers to defeat their own spam tool was their way of making money from both sides of the equation>
Sell pop-up spam tools to the marketing firms, and sell blockers to the consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
This one is also funny...so you've been warned. :-)
h tm which made it look even more impressive. :-)
I got an email about the estate of a Mr. Gerrand Schwartz so I decided to claim that I was his son, Frank Albert Oral Schwartz. I provided a link to the Yahoo article about my "dad's" death.
When I originally created those Yahoo stories you could still obfuscate the URL's using http://news.yahoo.com@206.67.47.69/schwartzdeath.
Virtual reverse-scams are safest...I convinced one of these guys that I (in the guise of Sam Walton) was traveling to Abidjan to meet him. I even tied up all the loose ends by creating a fake news story about Sam's adventures.
Part of the appeal of RvB was the absurdity of seeing a soap opera/sitcom set in a battle ground. Instead of seeing people blow each other up, we watched them deal with real-life issues like personal relationships. The Sims is already a soap opera/sitcom, so what is gained by lipsyncing the characters? My daughters both play Sims2 and they are constantly showing me the world they created, explaining the characters, and forcing me to watch scenes play out. That's what watching Strangerhood felt like.
Now if Rooster Teeth could get those Sims2 characters to load up with gear and go out fragging their neighborhoods they might have a hit.
The memory footprint is for all the hidden IM code they're testing. :-)
Google has also recently added a gmail email notification client that sits in the tray and notifies you when new gmail messages are received. Quoting from their description of the program:
"The Gmail Notifier is a downloadable Windows application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages. It displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser."
Sure sounds like a potential IM client.
They won't redo the Indiana Jones films because Spielberg and others would have to be involved. Lucas doesn't have 100% control of that series so he needs get approval and signed contracts from too many folks to make changes.
I agree that a catchall can cause problems down the road as you've described, but in this case the mail server (and bandwidth) are being maintained by someone else. Not to be cruel, but if the system admins allow catchall mailboxes to be hosted on their servers then they deserve all the traffic they get.
Of course if the user is pulling all the email down via POP3 then the bandwidth issue will hit home, and hit the hosting company twice.
LOL...we were merely pointing out the obvious flaws in the P2P networks, getting a bit of free publicity, promoting Stefanie's music, and having a bit of fun. And, we put our names out there rather than being an anonymous coward.
Found the patent online and they filed it in August 2000. That's after we got plenty of press including a Slashdot article that brought our server to it's knees and attracted a fair number of DDOS attacks. :-)
I'd be real interested in seeing exactly when they filed, considering that my brother and I came up with the Cuckoo's Egg Project. IMHO it's not a patentable idea, but try telling that to the US Patent Office.
I saw this stuff on Think Geek earlier today and was going to order the shirt. Now the site is slashdotted. :-(
And we'll drink and dance with one hand free.
After observing the crosswalk for several days and analyzing the pedestrian count, the traffic count, the timing of the lights, and the number of times cars "ran the light", the students determined that your odds of getting hit by a car were less if you crossed at random than if you waited for a "walk" sign.
As with most urban legends, I doubt the validity of the story but it did make for entertaining conversation while waiting for the light.
In my county (Westchester County, metro NY area) ALL stores must item price everything. Even supermarkets must tag every single item. Both Wal*Mart and Home Depot have paid fines rather than bring their stores into compliance...it's cheaper to pay a $50,000 fine once per year than it is to hire people to maintain item pricing. Michigan has also fined HD and W*M due to a similar law. Massachusetts also has an item pricing law, but it is rarely enforced.
Is anyone surprised that the 10 million promised addresses boils down to less than 7 million after removing duplicates? The article is interesting in terms of statistical analysis of the data (especially the fact that a number of abuse and postmaster addresses are in the email database), but I don't think anyone expected quality email lists from spammers.
On the other hand, why would someone sending spam care too much about the integrity of the data? You're still getting over 6 million email addresses. So several million messages bounce...does the spammer care?
People (including myself) have tried engaging the scammers in conversation to have some fun and possibly steer them down a dead end. However, these folks have far more time to devote than we do at creating these bogus stories.
I've also heard of people replying and attaching image files so that they're mailbox quota gets used up. Most of the scammers are using free email services so it doesn't take much to fill their quota. I;ve done this a few times, choosing suitably bizarre images (nothing pornographic, just bizarre).
But it is a funny site. I tried my hand at corresponding with the scammers for a while but it took way too much time. I thought these scams would die out, but maybe I should jump back into the fray.
His program delivers the first relay attempt to fool the spammer. That means that an open relay test might identify your machine as a spam source.
That may not be a big deal since you wouldn't run this on your actual email server anyway. Most blackholes only list specific IP's and not entire blocks (at least the reliable blackholes don't list entire blocks) just because one IP in the range runs an open relay.
Blame for what? In Canada people don't even lock their front doors (at least the one's interviewed by Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine"), so I wouldn't expect them to lock their WiFi.
Maybe the homeowner is stupid for allowing someone to eat up his bandwidth and access his network, but no way you can "blame" him for any of the criminal activity.
"Pathetic" is a bit over the top. Each of those machines exerted some major influence and made a mark on the industry.
The TI 99/4 was definitely saddled with a weird "expansion box" which was essentially an empty PC case designed to hold expansion cards (memory, floppy drive, etc.). However, the 99/4 became the darling of early education since it ran LOGO, a programming language that was taught to kindergarten and elementary school children. There's a generation whose first classroom PC was a TI 99/4 running LOGO. TI also spent a lot of money advertising the 99/4 (Bill Cosby was the spokesman) which raised consumer awareness of the existence of PC's for the home.
The Timex/Sinclair was a novelty but also showed the possibilies for cheap and small PC's that could be used by hobbyists on a budget. There are a lot of programmers that cut their teeth on BASIC on the Sinclair
The Adam from Coleco was nearly "pathetic" as far as a PC, but it was a pretty cool gaming console and it had great packaging. It was compatable with nothing, but Coleco bundled it with a lot of stuff. However, if I recall correctly it was a major disaster in terms of sales and took Coleco down with it.
They don't censor stuff, they just refuse to carry it. Works fine for me, because I can get it cheaper at my local used music store, without dealing with the parking situation at Wally-World, and to boot, I'm supporting a local business.
Bravo to supporting the local business (seriously), but don't pooh-pooh Wal*Mart's selective music racks. Wal*Mart is the largest music retailer in the world, and if a label knows in advance that a CD won't get sold at Wal*Mart then it reduces the likeliehood of the CD being released at all. Sure there are independent labels and local shops, but there are fewer and fewer of those around. The local CD shop I frequented recently went out of business after nearly 20 years selling CD's. When he started he was the only game in town...nobody was carrying CD's. When he folded he was being squeezed on all sides...Wal*Mart, Borders, Tower, Amazon.com, you name it.
So support your local shop AND protest Wal*Mart's CD selection policy. Economic censorship is often more dangerous than government censorship.
I replied to these guys for a while and actually took a virtual trip to Abidjan to meet one of these scam artists. It took way too much time (doing the fake Yahoo news stories), but was fun while it lasted.
They're like the storefront glass company that drives through town at night throwing rocks through windows and then shows up the next day to fix the problem.
Doh...sorry, but the direct link to the list of domain names was incorrect on the prior message.
Here is the PDF file of the Square D domain names.
blockmessenger.com
defeatpopupspam.com
easypopupblocker.com
endads.com
fightpopups.com
I guess it's like the big corporate guys trying to buy up all the yourcorporatenameheresucks.com domains. On the other hand, maybe selling pop-up blockers to defeat their own spam tool was their way of making money from both sides of the equation>
Sell pop-up spam tools to the marketing firms, and sell blockers to the consumers.