It seems that the “family member” spam that I’d talked about a couple days ago was a malware attempt, as well as (probably) a probe to confirm e-mail addresses.
“The United States National Medical Association”
More spam today, with a very similar modus operandi as yesterday’s bogus greeting card message. If you want to see the message itself, you can find a two-year-old copy here, word for word. The only difference is that my copy actually linked to a different .COM site with a nonsense name, though the visible text still said us-nma.com (which apparently doesn’t exist anymore).
And this time, I got two of them, from different accounts. One in the morning, one in the afternoon. Presumably from different spam-bots on the same botnet. But strangely enough, the URL contained exactly the same identifier — obviously either a way to identify the e-mail address that the message was delivered to, or more likely an encoded version of the address itself. This one was still running when I used a fake identifier to go there, and it ended up at a fake pharmacy site. Firekeeper didn’t notice any malware infiltration attempts, but that could well be because I’m not allowing the site to run any kind of scripting.
Add to that this article on what’s going on in the malware scene, and you’ve got every right to be paranoid.
At this point, anyone who’s not using Firefox with NoScript is just asking for trouble. And even those of us who are have good reason for paranoia. I think I’m going to set up a second VMware Linux machine just to do my browsing in, so my main machine can’t easily be compromised even if someone does come up with a Linux-targeted attack.
“You’ve received a postcard from a family member!” Yeah, right!
What I actually received was the message below, with the above-quoted subject line.
It smelled fishy. I’ve gotten these greeting-card messages before, but they’ve always included the name of the person sending the message. If the site didn’t have the person’s name, then how would it know that it was a family member? And what’s with the Hong Kong URL — the same place that a lot of the “MyCanadianPharmacy” spam has been registered to? Continue reading ‘“You’ve received a postcard from a family member!” Yeah, right!’ »
Linux Is Outpacing Windows
Microsoft has really been spinning it’s wheels for the last six or seven years. With the exception of improving security, nearly everything it has done since Windows 2000 has been focused on sizzle rather than steak. The same operating system with prettier pictures. You can see it in the whole user interface, and you can see it even more clearly in the API, because they’ve been making ever-more-minor modifications to it. Continue reading ‘Linux Is Outpacing Windows’ »
“Vietnam vet strangles rabid bobcat”
And I thought it was just Israelis who had interesting sports.
“Blackboard paint makes kitchen scribbly”
“Icebergs collect mini ecosystems, lock up carbon”
I’ve long suspected that the Earth must have some kind of system to keep it’s temperatures stable. This may be it.
“Quick-charging electric cars could be round the corner”
If the claims of this particular company are true, the last technical hurdle to the true electric vehicle may be on it’s way out.
I don’t know whether this is a good thing or not, since we’re having problems generating cost-effective electricity already. But it might at least help further with the smog problems in some cities.
The OS Wars II: The Next Generation
I’ve hired you to help me start a war. It’s an prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition. — Vizzini, from The Princess Bride
VMware is a great program, and I like it a lot. But there are some things you just can’t do in it… full 3D graphics in Linux, for instance. I was curious about the advanced desktop features, the ability to run a real Windows version under Xen (with my notebook computer’s hardware virtualization features), and various other interesting things. After examining the stuff on my hard drive, I realized that there were at least 30GB of stuff that I could offload to an external drive, or do without until I get one of the new (and much more capacious) perpendicular-recording hard drives for it. The time had come, at last, to reformat the drive and reinstall everything from scratch. Continue reading ‘The OS Wars II: The Next Generation’ »
Geek’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law
I just saw this on Groklaw (from commenter “PSaltyDS”) and had to grab it:
Geek’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”
Perfect. 🙂