I’ve lamented the scourge of spam on numerous occasions. I do not like spam. I do not like it, damn, damn, damn. You must admit that things are getting worse, not better, though. Take poor ol’ AT&T as an example. They sent out an email notice to their customers notifying them of a change in the terms of service (ToS). Yep, AT&T’s own spam filters deleted many of the emails because it thought they were spam.
Preparations for wetness on the Gulf Coast continue apace.
If you have an email box the chances are nearly 100% that you are receiving spam. And if you are receiving spam, you are undoubtedly receiving 419 “offers”, aka Nigerian scams, or advanced fee fraud. Follow the Wiki link to read more on the history of the con, but realize that all of those lotto notifications, Microsoft drawings, passionate please to help get a jazillion bucks out of corrupt leader’s account or whatever are scams. And most people know they are scams and hit the delete button. Some people do try to turn the tables on the scammers by active flogging. It’s kind of fun. But then I read on TechDirt that according to a Nigerian diplomat in Australia, he’s just as amazed, and thus thinks the victims are equally to blame and deserve jailtime. Interesting take.
At the very foundation of advance fee scams is the notion that the person about to be conned is greedy and has no problem receiving or taking something that they know does not belong to them. Let’s face it, the odds of the existence of some random do-gooder coming into millions of dollars of a dead war lord’s loot and finding you clear out of the blue to help smuggle the booty into a safe haven are, ah, remote. But the enticement of receiving something for nothing overrides your common sense. To add to your greed and sense of “morality” the notion that you are somehow taking the money of a “bad man” is harped upon. Next thing you know, you’ve given up all of your precious details and get strung out like a speckled trout in green water as you get played and your funds vanish. Most folks are aware of the scam, but there are enough dolts who let their greed get in the way that… your email boxes stay full of this crap. If you can send out a couple hundred thousand of these emails a day (easy), and you can get two interested replies per thousand (good scammers do), that equates to twenty “marks” a day. If one of those marks plays out and loses just a $1,000 that works out to quite the tidy living. So do not expect an end to the deluge.
If it seems to good to be true… it is.
I have a pretty decent working knowledge of hand tools. Hand held power tools are not beyond me. However, the vagaries of life have revealed that I must become one with machine tools. CNC machine tools to be exact. All of this happened because I can make a computer behave. Nobody believed me when I said that there is a big difference between keeping a computer between the lines and making one do what I want with very sharp, very dangerous tools connected to them that spin at high speed. I predict a big mess, a lot of mistakes and blood.
I’m never too sure about how people wind up on this blog. Actually, I’m amazed that anybody actually reads it! Every now and then I will take a look at some of the search terms that lead people here. What does this say about the casual Internet surfer?
| Search | Views |
|---|---|
| celebrity porn | 20 |
| douchebag | 14 |
| cute cats | 12 |
| gangs | 12 |
| cute cat | 8 |
| wd-40 | 6 |
| belly rings | 5 |
| women in bikinis | 3 |
| sadness | 3 |
| cat | 3 |
There are two primary types of vacationers: those who want to do absolutely nothing and those who want to see and do it all. If you are part of group number two, then you probably have a jam-packed agenda and have a camera ready to go with extra memory cards (film?). You absolutely must have a visual memento of seeing Trevi Fountain in Rome. Be prepared to bring home more in those photos than you thought was there.
How would you feel if, when you got back home to check out your pictures, there was a giant brand logo of Nike, Gatorade, Prada, IBM, or whatever, plastered over your perfectly composed image of the fountain? What if there was a giant package of Velveeta cheese as a backdrop on your shot of the Eiffel Tower? It wasn’t there when you snapped the picture. But every standard tourist picture that you grabbed is now a marketing vehicle. Yep, there’s technology to do this right now. And Julius von Bismarck’s ‘Image Fulgurator’ is directly to blame.
Essentially, the device waits until it senses a flash. Don’t think that a flash means that only night shots will be affected. Most of you use a flash all the time for all the wrong reasons. Just think of all the flashes going off in a football stadium… When that flash is sensed, the device fires off a flash of it’s own right back at the camera trying to take a picture. The would be Ansel Adams never sees it happen because it happens so fast.
The device is a modified camera — in this case, an old manual Minolta SLR. A flashgun fires through the camera in reverse, from the back. The flash picks up the image of a slide inside and projects it out through the lens and onto any surface.
The trick is in the triggering. The Fulgurator lies in wait until an unsuspecting photographer takes a picture using a flash. When the device’s sensor sees this flash, it fires its own unit, throwing up an image which is captured by the hapless photographer’s camera while remaining unseen by the naked eye.
Now, imagine for a moment that an ad agency gets hold of this. You couldn’t take a photograph of a tourist attraction ever again without worrying that some marketing crap would be pushed into your camera. As Julius told me, “I see it as a piece of media art. It could be a dangerous attack on media. [But] if people do shit with it, I feel bad.”
What do you mean if? Shouldn’t that be when?
Confused by that title? Check out the email that I just got…
Date: SATURDAY MAY 2008 1:15 +0100
Subject: SCAM VICTIMS COMPENSATION FOR 2007.
CBN/ UNITED NATIONS 2007/2008 SCAM VICTIMS COMPENSATIONS PAYMENTS
DIRECTOR
My good friend how was your weekend? I hope you are having a good time
with your family, anyway for me I am good.
It is a very pity that you have lost so much money on internet and you
are not happy about it. but i want to ask you why do you have to do
online business with the person you don,t know see there are a lot of
scam in the internet and dou to that, it is not very safe this time to
do business with an unknown person is very risky unless you people know
each other very well and trust each other.
Meanwhile I have this question to ask you, my good friend I want you to
tell me how you got into scam victim, and how do you get to know them,
and how much did they collect from you. Please I want you to explain
everything to me because we need to tress them and we need a lot of
information to prove our evidence when the victim is been cut .
And please this information is needed for the tranfer of your fund
recomfirm it to me now so that i can able to forward it to the bank for
an immediate release of your compensation fund.
(1) FULL NAME AND ADDRESS:
(2) AGE AND MARITAL STATUS:
(3) OCCUPATION:
(4) TELEPHONE/FAX NUMBER:
(5) NATIONALITY:
(6) INT’L PASSPORT/DRIVER LICENSE:
BEST REGARDS.
CHIEF AWELE JOHNSON. (awelejohnson@rocketmail.com)
NIGERIA’S FOREIGN AFFAIRS MINISTER
I am part of exactly 187 households in the United States that does not have a gaming system. Let me clarify. I am one of the 187 households that doesn’t have one and never has. No Playstation, no Xbox, no original Nintendo, no Atari. I’ve never known the joys of obtaining the visual equivalent of an oral favor in a virtual back alley while playing Grand Theft Auto. Yes, there are more CPU’s in my house than there are mammals (4 humans, two cats). And a game can certainly be played on just about any of them. But no gaming system.
We visited Gramma over the Memorial Day weekend. She got a Wii. And my kids flipped out. There they were, hopping, swatting, swinging, punching… Not your average couch potato endeavor. And wifey has mentione the WiiFit thing that might help with my balance issues… Kids are clamoring. Should I give in?
According to Ars Technica, I may be sitting on a time bomb. You see, I have been a Dish Network customer for ages. And I have steadily upgraded my receivers. I now have 4 TV’s hooked up to my satellite and one of those receivers is a “DVR” or digital video recorder. The time shifting ability that this feature affords is wonderful… I can watch shows and events on MY schedule. Apparently, TiVO is a little upset because they think that Dish’s DVR feature infringes on TiVO patents. There’s an injunction that may or may not go off that could force Dish to either turn off the feature on all its receivers or pay TiVO a handsome royalty on an ongoing basis.
You know what? I’d be happy if the darned thing would just work for more than, say, a few continuous months. We bought a new uber HD TV. We upgraded to the HD DVR offering from Dish. It looked amazing and worked great for about a month. Then the receiver decided that it wanted to reboot and reprogram itself in the middle of the season finale of Gray’s Anatomy. My wife was less than thrilled. This rebooting never completed and a service tech had to come out and replace the receiver. A few days ago (less than a week since the service call), the new box started making a squeeking sound. It took us a good while to find that the annoying sound was coming from the receiver. An hour on hold with Dish tech support this morning and they are overnighting yet another receiver to me.
I want this crap fixed, I want it to stop crapping out, and I want all my features to stay.
I love my laser printer. And I hate Microsoft’s Vista operating system. The HP1100a is an ancient black and white laser printer. It doesn’t hold a massive amount of paper. But it holds enough. It also has an alternate feed for envelopes and such and a built in scanner that is great for making the occasional copy of a document. The toner cartridge lasts a good long time and the thing is relatively fast and very reliable. Oh, and I hate ink jet printers for a whole host of reasons. A long time ago, I had connected it to a now obsolete but still functioning Netgear network print server. Everyone in my house that connect to the network could print to their heart’s content. Fast forward to the point where both of my daughter’s computers have crapped out beyond the point where repair is economically reasonable. I got them laptops and the only choice for an operating system was Vista. Fast forward some more to the point where both of them are actually printing out their homework. Not on my current system.
The ancient print server doesn’t support Vista and updates for the drivers stopped about the time gas was still affordable. So I ordered a new print server from NewEgg that specifically supported Vista. The tricky part was finding one that supported old Centronics/parallel interfaces. Seems that USB is the connection of choice these days. Found one. Small problem. HP, in their infinite wisdom, decided to use a “mini Centronics” connector on this model. I needed to find a mini Centronics to Centronics adapter. Not something that Best Buy is gonna keep on hand since I am one of possibly 8 people in the world who might need one. Went to my favorite PC parts place to see if he could order one for me. Everything came up “no longer stocked”. Joy. I found one from Sewell. Everything is working and everyone can print. Hopefully, this will last at least a decade!
