Our young cousin has apparently had her Yahoo e-mail account hacked. We’ve been getting several spam messages a day purporting to be from her through it. The funniest part is the text auto-appended to the bottom of each spam message: Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com …
Without even noticing, I made Geek Drivel’s one-thousandth post yesterday. My only stated goal in starting Geek Drivel was to give interested friends and family, and anyone who stumbled onto it, the questionable benefit of my experience. My unstated goal was to give myself an outlet for expression. I think I’ve achieved both, and I …
Haven’t seen one of these in a while, but this one appeared recently in my spam folder: Congratulations! You have won money in our annual e-mail lottery! You may find the gift check in attachment to this e-mail. Please print the check, to get your money prize. E-mail lottery. USA Mega Millions. [URL removed] The …
Continue reading ‘“You have won [RANDOM_AMOUNT] USD. Annual e-mail lottery.”’ »
I’ve talked about ThunderBayes (the Thunderbird front-end for the SpamBayes anti-spam engine) here before, several times. It’s great. Unfortunately it’s no longer supported, and I don’t have the time to properly learn Javascript so I can fix it myself. So when an SSL update broke my customized version of it a couple days ago, I …
Continue reading ‘ThunderBayes: So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish’ »
I needed a new side-project, something to keep me occupied when I just couldn’t work on Project X any longer for the day. So on the spur of the moment, I decided to learn Python. (Why Python? I’ve heard good things about it. I can use it as a scripting language, which is something that …
There are three parts to this article. The first two are sensible and productivity-enhancing. The third one is simply fun, in an evil sort of way. 🙂 Here are some selected items from it: 5. Voodoo. Display voodoo replicas of your boss and co-workers on your desk, labeled with their names. Whenever you overhear someone …
Interesting idea. I can see how this would be a lot harder for hackers to work around, at least for the moment. But it won’t do anything against spambots that use other people to get around the problem, directly or by trickery.
All that fear and hype, and it turns out to be nothing more than a spam-generator and password stealer? The author(s) really ought to be ashamed of themselves. An amusing bit from the end of the article: I’m personally grateful that it brought to mind a moment from the original Die Hard film. “You want …
Continue reading ‘“Conficker Doomsday Worm Sells Out For $49.95”’ »
I find it curious that, ever since I installed the Yawasp module on this blog, my weekly hits are down 50%. Apparently spambots were responsible for fully half of Geek Drivel’s traffic. No great loss.
Although interesting (to me) in and of itself, I’m mentioning this article because of this bit from the last paragraph: In other developments, spammers have abandoned the use of image-based spam, file attachment spam and other such frippery by going back to basics. Nine in ten spam messages now contain little more beyond a few …
Continue reading ‘“Cybercrooks get faster, further and sneakier”’ »