Earl Bockenfeld: Internet

Top 10 Dumbest Online Business Ideas That Made It Big!

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 04:50:12 GMT

Top 10 Dumbest Online Business Ideas That Made It Big!

1,000,000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel that's perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2. SantaMail

Ok, how's that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer.

3. Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4. LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord.

5. AntennaBalls

You can't sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn't make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire.

6. FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that's big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie's company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. TruGamerz

Faux-suede padded covers for game controllers and gel thumb pads for analog joysticks? No one will buy that. Forget it. The product proved to be so popular, it got picked up by Target.com and Walmart.com and annual sales new exceed half a million dollars.

10. Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

11. To see other businesses that have not made the top 10 list but came pretty close, visit Uncommon Business Blog

Making A Life And A Living In Second Life

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 04:44:10 GMT

Making A Life And A Living In Second Life

Jennifer Grinnell, Michigan furniture delivery dispatcher turned fashion designer in cyber space, never imagined that she could make a living in a video game.

Grinnell's shop, Mischief, is in Second Life, a virtual world whose users are responsible for creating all content. Grinnell's digital clothing and "skins" allow users to change the appearance of their avatars -- their online representations -- beyond their wildest Barbie dress-up dreams.

Within a month, Grinnell was making more in Second Life than in her real-world job as a dispatcher. And after three months she realized she could quit her day job altogether.

Now Second Life is her primary source of income, and Grinnell, whose avatar answers to the name Janie Marlowe, claims she earns more than four times her previous salary.

Grinnell isn't alone. Artists and designers, landowners and currency speculators, are turning the virtual environment of Second Life into a real-world profit center.

"It's not just a game anymore," said online artisan Kimberly Rufer-Bach. "There are businesses, nonprofits and universities" taking advantage of the online world.

With users now numbering over 130,000, game-maker Linden Lab estimates that nearly $5 million dollars, or about $38 per person, was exchanged between players in January 2006 alone. Working in Second Life is "the same as working in London and sending money home to pay the rent for your spouse," said company CEO Philip Rosedale.

Just ask Rufer-Bach, known in Second Life as Kim Anubus, who works full time making virtual objects for real-life organizations. In a recent contract with the UC Davis Medical Center, Rufer-Bach created virtual clinics in Second Life to train emergency workers who might be called upon to rapidly set up medical facilities in a national crisis. The work is funded by the Centers for Disease Control. "In the event of a biological attack ? the CDC have to set up emergency 12-hour push sites, to distribute antibiotics," said Rufer-Bach.

To create the most realistic simulation possible, Rufer-Bach crafted about 80 distinct objects, "from chairs (to) a forklift, plumbing, wiring," she said. The end result is a training environment that's not only lifelike, but relatively inexpensive. "There are substantial advantages to doing this training in the virtual world," said UC Davis professor Peter Yellowlees. For one thing, it's "incredibly cheaper."

Of course, most of the business opportunities in Second Life don't involve anything as weighty as medical training. The game has a significant market in specialized avatars: People pay as much as 2,200 in-game "Linden dollars," or just over $8, for stock avatars -- with custom work commanding prices that can go much higher. Rufer-Bach ordered a special avatar for her mother, "a knee-high lavender warthog, with a tiara and wings and a big fat spleef with smoke effects."

The game world's mixture of fancy and serious business can lead to some incongruous scenes. "We joke that you just don't show up at a business meeting as a mermaid," said Rufer-Bach. "One guy is a furry, with an animal head. Another's a ball of glowing fuzz. There's a giant two-story robot transformer."

Wharton professor Dan Hunter, an expert on law and virtual worlds, said Second Life's relatively small size makes its economic future hard to predict. But virtual worlds are becoming spaces where "globalization of services can occur," he said. "In SL, services are valued. 'Hey, I can provide something that someone else wants! And I can make money from it!' The expansion of the economy is almost certainly going to be dependent on expanding the service opportunities."

With more and more people cashing in on Second Life, the most pressing question may be, how many can benefit before the boom times end?

Slut-O-Meter

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:47:44 GMT

Slut-O-Meter

How slutty is your blog, quantitatively speaking?

Slut-o-meter evaluates the promiscuity of the subject you enter by comparing the number of Google search results with and without "safe-search" enabled. A complete slut would return unsafe results and no safe results. Alternatively, a clean name should produce the same number of safe and unsafe results. The "promiscuity" percentage we give you is calculated as follows:

Negative Promiscuity? Huh?

If you're wondering why some subjects have a negative promiscuity, well, you're not alone. In general, this happens when the number of safe results is greater than the number of unsafe results (or if there are no unsafe results whatsoever). We're not quite sure why this is the case, but we believe that Google is not telling us the truth.

Results for "Earl Bockenfeld's Radio Weblog": Promiscuity: -38.11% (287 / 753)

Hat tip to Majikthise: Promiscuity: 6.02% (130000 / 2160000)

The Ten Internet Commandments

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 19:56:31 GMT

The Ten Internet Commandments

Just a little something to keep in mind, going into the new year.

Thou shalt not buy merchandise found in pop-up ads or spam.
Thou shalt not post thy email address, phone number, address or social security number to the internet, nor shalt thou post anyone else's.
Thou shalt not forget to update thy Windows every second Tuesday.
Thou shalt not connect to the internet without installing an antivirus, nor shalt thou begin a scan without checking for updates.
Thou shalt not connect to the internet without installing a firewall.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's credit card number, nor his bank routing number, nor his social security number.
Thou shalt not enter thy credit card number without seeing the tiny padlock icon on thy status bar.
Thou shalt not reply to the email from the Nigerian banker.
Thou shalt not forward chain letters to thy friends and family.
Thou shalt not use "password" as thy password, nor thy birthday, nor thy children's names.

Nigeria To Put Spammers In Slammer

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 02:02:40 GMT

Nigeria To Put Spammers In Slammer

Nigeria, home to some of the world's most notorious cyber crimes, has proposed a law making spamming a criminal offence for which senders of unsolicited e-mails could be jailed for at least three years.

Is this the end of an era? Nigeria is cracking down on its best-known export - email scams - by putting a law up for vote that would finally make these scams a criminal matter. The move is the latest by the government there to project a tough stance on the issue - back in August, the country even hosted a conference on how to crack down on spam.

According to this Reuters story, spammers who are caught could face up to five years in prison, and possibly have to give up the proceeds derived from their, uh, entrepreneurship. But sadly, if effective (although we kinda doubt the practice will entirely cease), it will deprive us of some of the best - if inadvertent - humor online. On the other hand, if the Nigerian spammer goes the way of the 20 gigabyte iPod, it could boost sales of Tuesdays with Mantu, Rich Siegel's book about his email correspondence with a Nigerian con artist, for nostalgia value alone.

The advance fee e-mail scam, known as "419" after the relevant section of the Nigerian Criminal Code, is a computer age version of a con game dating back hundreds of years and is sometimes called "The Spanish Prisoner."

Typically spammers send millions of unsolicited e-mails around the world promising recipients a share in a fortune in return for an advance fee. Those who pay wait in vain for the promised windfall.

President Olusegun Obasanjo has been keen to clean Nigeria's image as a country of spammers and one of the world's most corrupt nations since he was elected in 1999, ending 15 years of military rule in Africa's top oil producer. He set up the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in 2003 to crack down on e-mail fraudsters who had elevated scamming to one of the country's main foreign exchange earners after oil, natural gas and cocoa, according to campaigners.

The anti-fraud agency is investigating hundreds of suspects and prosecuting over 50 cases involving about 100 suspects.

The agency got its first major conviction in July when a court sentenced a woman whose late husband masterminded the swindling of $242 million from Brazilian Banco Noroeste S.A. between 1995 and 1998, one of the world's biggest e-mail scams.

This is a link to one of my favorite online videos, Ze Frank's request, in which he dramatizes a Nigerian scam e-mail, verbatim: http://www.zefrank.com/request/

JARGON WATCH

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 19:17:10 GMT

JARGON WATCH

-Gareth Branwyn

Narcipost - A shamelessly egocentric blog post that's of little interest to anyone besides the person who posted it.

Moantones - The recorded sighs and moans of porn stars, available for download as cell phone ring tones. As porn princess (and moantoner) Jenna Jameson said in a press release: "The technology is way beyond most of us, but the bottom line is, you'll be able to hear me ...moan when your phone rings."

Nouse - A peripheral device that tracks the movement of the tip of your nose to control a cursor.

Open Loops - The incomplete tasks and projects in your life that constantly cycle through your head, leading to anxiety, stress, and creative constipation. Popularized by David Allen's work-flow management book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Mobcasting - Mobile audio podcasting using a phone-in blogging service, such as audioLink.

Data Sponge - Silly slang for a handheld scanner.

eBay Effect - The rise in a company's stock after announcing the addition of auctioning to its online offerings. Ticketmaster and Sharper Image both enjoyed the eBay effect.

Generation Lap - The overtaking of baby boomers by their more technologically savvy offspring. The idea of a generation lap has been articulated by many who believe that the "Net generation" has an innate, magical relationship with information technologies.

Pic Post - A free porn supersite on which adult sites post banner ads and links to images each day. The pic post gets content, users get lots of free dirty pictures, and participating sites get, um, exposure.

Spendorphins - The pleasure proteins that seem to be released during a shopping frenzy. Coined by Martha Barnette in Allure magazine.

Y2.038K Bug - Another time/date bug - this one will cause counters on certain legacy systems to leap back 136 years when January 19, 2038, rolls around. The relevant code may no longer exist in 39 years, but then again, two-digit dates once seemed a harmless temporary fix.

Big Hat, No Cattle - Texas expression used to dismiss a cowboy wannabe. In Lone Star IT circles, it describes a technician with a certificate or degree in computer science, but little or no field experience.

Sneakers-up - A dotcom that's gone belly-up. Reminiscent of the older hacker slang "casters-up," meaning a broken-down or dead computer.

GNU Economy - The open source software marketplace, named after the GNU General Public License, which prevents corporations from acquiring public domain systems like Linux.

Cycle Brokering - The farming out of number-crunching tasks to a distributed network of consumer PCs.

Relevance Switching - P2P collaborative-searching technology being developed by OpenCola. Users can share their database-scouring results with other people who have similar search interests and behavior.

******

Gee, a couple of weeks ago, I didn't even know what a groantoners was, Now I R one!

04/14/05 UPDATE: We have word from Johnny & the Moan Ranger correcting what was published in Wired. It seems that moantones were invented four years ago, and that porn princess (and moantoner) Jenna Jameson is a late cummer (and not inventor) to the moantone scene. It amuses Johnny that bloggers will latch on to any media tit that is thrust into their gaping lips without checking to see if the nipple belongs to their mama. While thats true, Johnny, when did you ever get a correction like this in the NYT or LAT?

India's porn police bring their quarry to eBay

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 03:39:15 GMT

India's Porn Police Bring Their Quarry To eBay

NEW DELHI - What started off as an ordinary little scandal about youngsters and pornography has exploded in India's face, with the world's top auction website screaming blue murder as its India manager sits behind bars, questions being raised in parliament, and even US Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice getting involved.

But perhaps the real can of worms is the implication for Indian e-commerce in general, after a magistrate ruled that ink on paper was required, not the mere clicking of an "I agree to the terms of service" button.

Indian police are now conducting a massive hunt for porn in cyberspace, and its perpetrators. Into the dragnet have fallen the schoolboy who lit the fuse of outrage when he secretly filmed an oral sex act with his girlfriend (When sex gets out of the cupboard, Dec 9), and a former student of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) who, to help pay for his education, peddled the sex clip on Baazee.com, the Indian arm of eBay. They are both in jail, along with Avnish Bajaj, Baazee.com's manager and chief executive officer.

The fact that the offending blue movie was filmed with a camera-phone is apparently all-important: the saga has become known as the "MMS case" because of the technology used. Adding fuel to that particular fire - the misuse of technology and invasion of privacy - was the secret filming (using camera phones, what else) of top Bollywood actors Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapur getting passionate - French-kissing, no less - at a nightclub this month.

<snip>

But why is Condoleezza Rice involved? She is taking a personal interest in the welfare of Baazee.com's Bajaj, and has contacted David Mulford, the US ambassador in India, and asked him to impress upon the government to ensure Bajaj's safety. Bajaj, an IIT and Harvard graduate, is a US citizen and, if convicted, faces a prison term of several years. "The US Embassy is following this case very closely and there is high-level interest in Washington regarding it. Consistent with normal US consular practices, the [court] hearing was attended by a US consular official," said a spokesperson.

India-born Bajaj was arrested under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act (transmission of obscene material through electronic media), which can carry a jail term of up to five years. He was expected to have a bail hearing on Tuesday: meanwhile, the high-flyer was lodged in India's most infamous prison, Jail No 3 of Delhi's Tihar Prisons, sleeping on the floor in a room along with 70 other prisoners awaiting trial on charges ranging from pick-pocketing to rape and murder.

Bajaj's arrest came about courtesy of Ravi Raj, another IITian (they are the country's brand ambassadors as far as IT goes). Ravi, a final-year student of IIT, was the first person to be arrested in the case, as he was selling clips of the said sexual act - procured from a local area network as it rested on the desktops of many other students - on Baazee.com. Raj is a regular seller on the site to pay for his tuition and other expenses as he belongs to a poor family.

<snip>

Indeed, one of the biggest loopholes in the Indian laws against cyber-crime was the fact that no action could be taken against websites selling or promoting prurient matter as the servers could be located at any international location. However, over the past year Internet business models are stabilizing worldwide, with two Indian dotcoms - Baazee.com and Jobsahead.com - being bought by eBay.com and Monster.com respectively. Other major portals such as Yahoo.com and MSN.com too have their India operations well under way. By making Baazee.com accountable for material on its website, whatever may be the merits of arresting Bajaj, the Indian authorities have sent a powerful message that local laws and sentiments have to be abided.

The question is, what are the implications of the laws for Indian e-commerce in general? According to an online petition addressed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, authored by venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy and calling for the quick release of Bajaj, Raj allegedly put the film clip up for sale on Baazee.com after reading and agreeing to the website's terms of service, which expressly forbid trade in any pornographic items. He advertised the item as a "video of Delhi girls having fun" and said he would email it to anybody who sent him Rs125 (about US$3). In the next two days, eight people sent in their money and Raj allegedly emailed them the clip. None of this exchange happened on Baazee.com, and at no time was any pornographic material of any sort hosted on Baazee.com.

"When eBay India/Baazee's lawyers applied for bail [for Bajaj] on Saturday, December 18, by quoting, among other things the Terms of Service of Baazee that the merchant had to agree to before signing up, the magistrate apparently rejected the documentation by saying that there was no ink-on-paper signature on the agreement and hence she would not accept it as evidence."

And then comes the crux of the issue: "By rejecting the admissibility of the paper version of Terms of Service, and insisting on an ink-on-paper signature for legal status, the entire legality of the e-commerce business in India is called to question. This is ironic, for the largest e-commerce operation in not just India, but South Asia, is the Indian Railways online ticket-selling business - a government-owned and -run operation - which does business worth Rs18 crores [$4 million] a month. This magistrate's decision seems to imply a lack of legal standing for all ticket sales online by the railways. It also calls to question all other e-commerce sales in India ... "

EBay has predictably reacted angrily to the arrest, calling it "completely unwarranted". Acknowledging that the listing of the smut clip was against Baazee.com's policies and user agreement, it said in a statement that the video clip itself could not be played on the website and the illegal item was deleted from the site once it came to notice. Moreover, Bajaj had on his own flown down to New Delhi to assist the police, which helped to locate and arrest Raj. "It is unfortunate that local law enforcement has chosen to misdirect its energies towards Mr Bajaj. Baazee.com today is a part of eBay Inc, the world's online marketplace, which has a presence in 32 markets around the world. Never before has such an action been taken against the company. This position advocated by the police is shocking especially as Bajaj has been working closely with and fully cooperating with the Delhi police since they contacted us on December 9," the firm said in a statement.

<snip>

To conclude, while it does seem that the treatment meted out to Bajaj is harsh, it is apparent that the action against Raj and the schoolboy, who cannot be named under Indian juvenile laws, will surely be a deterrent to such future occurrences. Think about the girl for a moment - it is only her face that is visible in the clip and all she did was engage in an intimate act with her boyfriend, not the rest of the world.

IBM to Quit Making PCs

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 03:17:11 GMT

IBM to Quit Making PCs

NEW YORK -- IBM has reportedly put its personal computer business up for sale in a deal that could fetch as much as $2 billion and close an era for an industry pioneer that long ago shifted its focus to more lucrative segments of the computer business. Its stock rose 1.6 percent in early trading in the wake of the report.

The New York Times said in its Friday editions that IBM is in serious discussions with the Lenovo Group, China's biggest maker of personal computers, and at least one other unidentified buyer for the unit.

The newspaper cited people close to the negotiations that it did not further identify for the report.

IBM spokesman John Bukovinsky refused to comment Friday. Spokesmen at Lenovo's Beijing headquarters and Hong Kong offices did not return calls Friday.

Analysts have said a sale of the PC business would make sense for IBM.

Ben Reitzes, an analyst at UBS Investment Research, said in a July research note that the business would be sold. He noted the PC business, which accounts for about 10 percent of IBM's total sales, loses money.

For Asian computer makers, new competition from Dell is a big threat. "By linking up with a heavyweight like IBM, vendors would logically think they could fend off any threat better," Reitzes said.

IBM is increasing its focus on consulting services, analysts said.

"They've been very clear that they intend to streamline and prioritize around new growth opportunities," said Mark Stahlman, technology strategist at research firm Caris & Co. "PCs are not one of them."

IBM, based in Armonk, New York, has refocused on the corporate server and computer services businesses, but was a major force in driving personal computing into the mainstream with its introduction of the IBM PC in 1981.

IBM now ranks third behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard in the personal-computer business, according to Gartner Inc., an analyst in the information technology industry.

The Times said the business up for sale would include the entire range of desktop, laptop and notebook computers made by IBM. The sale would likely be in a range of $1 billion to $2 billion, the report said.

Other possible buyers could include Japan's Toshiba, analysts said.

Guo Tongyan, a Lenovo marketing manager in Beijing, said he had not heard of any discussions, but noted Lenovo was building up its personal-computer business.

Last month, China's state media said Lenovo and IBM were discussing teaming up to make desktop personal computers.

Asked about the Times report, Guo replied: "If Lenovo wanted to further expand its PC capacity, I wouldn't be very surprised."

"We decided on a strategy of 'reinforcing the PC business, focusing on the PC business' in a strategic meeting early this year," said Guo, who heads Lenovo's northern China marketing department.

Lenovo, formerly called Legend, had begun expanding into mobile phone manufacturing and information technology services when its computer manufacturing business faced intense competition from foreign rivals such as Dell.

But after reporting worse-than-expected results last year, Lenovo said it would return its focus to its core computer business. Lenovo is the world's ninth-biggest computer maker by size of shipments.

Photo May Land La. Marine In Trouble

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:02:48 GMT

Photo May Land La. Marine In Trouble

He's awaiting word on disciplinary action

By James Varney, Staff writer

A Louisiana Marine responsible for an offensive photograph made in Iraq last summer was awaiting word Wednesday on a disciplinary decision by the Marine Corps, a military spokesman said.

Lance Cpl. Ted J. Boudreaux, a reservist with the 3rd Battalion/23rd Marines who hails from Thibodaux, became the subject of a formal investigation last week after a photo in circulation on the Internet came to the attention of a Muslim public relations firm in Washington, D.C.

In the photo, Boudreaux is shown with two Iraqi boys. All three are smiling, and all three are flashing a "thumbs-up" sign. The middle boy is holding a handmade cardboard sign that reads in English, "Lcpl. Boudreaux killed my dad then he knocked up my sister."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which describes itself as "dedicated to presenting an Islamic perspective on issues of importance to the American public," but which also has been identified as "a radical Islamic group" by experts in congressional testimony, posted the photo on its Web site last week and demanded a Pentagon investigation. The results of that probe were expected Wednesday, but Capt. Jeff Pool, a local Marine reserves spokesman, said it would not be released until Boudreaux had been notified.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations' spokesman in Washington, Ibrahim Hooper, said Marine officials told him the investigation was of a "nonjudicial" nature, which could lead to Boudreaux's "separation from the corps."

Last week, the Marine Corps acknowledged the photo was real but said it wanted to make sure the lettering on the sign had not been doctored. It was unclear what military code Boudreaux violated if the sign was genuine, or whether the famous military catchall of "conduct unbecoming" covers enlistees as well as officers. Nevertheless, the sign's message was offensive, officers said.

"Let's just say that if it is true, it sure isn't the smartest thing I've ever seen a Marine do," Pool said.

During his deployment in Iraq last year, Boudreaux was stationed in Al Kut, the capital of Wassit Province, which runs southeast of Baghdad to the border with Iran. His duties there with a headquarters unit kept him largely confined to the big concrete hangars at an air base on the outskirts of the city, and he had little contact with locals. The photo, which shows the trio in front of a ramshackle hut, could have been taken at one of tens of thousands of locations in Iraq, including a shed outside the back entrance of the airfield where the Marines would buy soda, tobacco and trinkets such as prayer beads and head scarves from locals.

Boudreaux could not be reached for comment. His commander during the 3/23rd's Iraq mission, Lt. Col. David Couvillon, called the photo a sophomoric attempt at humor.

"Look, he didn't actually do what that sign says," Couvillon said. "This is stupid, lance corporal stuff that he thought was cute. But it's not, and I was informed the commandant of the Marine Corps had it and the Marine Corps will deal with this."

Couvillon noted that, as he is no longer the commanding officer of the 3/23rd, he is not involved in the investigation. He said he has not spoken to Boudreaux.

At the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hooper agreed with Couvillon that the picture was a lame attempt at humor.

"My assumption has always been these things didn't happen, and in fact I doubt there's any girl at all," he said. "How the military reacts to this case," he told the Associated Press, "I think will send a message to Muslims in the Middle East and worldwide as to how seriously the United States takes these issues."

[Via The Times - Picayune]

PayPal Spoofing

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 01:16:44 GMT

PayPal Spoofing

<Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>>
Sat, 10 Jan 2004 13:58:53 +0100

I received a message which is abbreviated below [and even more by PGN]:

> Received: from unknown (HELO reva) (81.196.161.141)
>    by 0 with SMTP; 6 Jan 2004 01:55:14 -0000
> Reply-To: "service@paypal.com" <spooff@paypal.com>
> From: "service@paypal.com" <service@paypal.com>
> To: <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
> Subject: Account issue
> Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 03:51:33 +0200
>
> Due to concerns, for the safety and integrity of the PayPal community we have issued this warning message.
>
> It has come to our attention that your account information needs to be renew due to inactive members and non-functioning >mailboxes.  If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and renew your records you will not run into
> any future problems with the online service.
>
> However, failure to update your records will result in account deletation [sic]. This notification expires on January 10, 2004.
>
> Once you have updated your account records your PayPal will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
>
> Please follow the link below and renew your account information.
>   http://https-ebay.com   PayPal Service Department

When I clicked on the link, I got to a form which requested a number of personal data, including my credit card number, its security code and its PIN code! I have put up a copy of the form they asked me to fill in at
http://dsv.su.se/jpalme/temp/domain-name-spam-2c.pdf

I got suspicious for several reasons:

(a) No company has ever before asked me for my credit card PIN code.

(b) This information was requested by http, not https. But with a domain name, http://https-ebay.com which might make some people believe it was actually using https.

(c) Looking up in whois indicates that the owner of the domain name https-ebay.com is a private person, not a company.

To be on the safe side, I immediately blocked my credit card, since I had entered some information before I understood this was a spoof. I also wrote to PayPal, who confirmed that the mail was not from them!

I have learnt to be more careful and suspicious in the future!

Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/

[This is increasingly becoming a problem! We desperately need some greater authentication and accountability. PGN]

[Via Risks Digest]

Google Whacking The Perfect Antidote To Spam Rage

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 02:50:13 GMT

Google Whacking The Perfect Antidote To Spam Rage

This was the year spam joined the axis of evil. Or at least the axis of the incredibly aggravating.

As exclusive offers of Paris Hilton sex-romp videos multiplied exponentially, pundits estimated that e-crap was costing Australian businesses at least $2 billion per annum. (And that didn't take into account all the productivity we lost worrying about how so many complete strangers knew we had such small penises in the first place.)

Then there was the growing problem of spam rage.

In the US late last month, a Silicon Valley computer programmer was arrested for threatening a company he believed was crippling his business with penis augmentation propaganda.

According to Reuters, Charles Booher threatened to send a "package full of anthrax spores" to the company, to disable an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate employees unless they removed him from their email list.

The object of Booher's ire - the advertisers for a product called the "Only Reliable, Medically Approved Penis Enhancement" - blamed a rival firm which they said was giving the penis enhancement business "a bad name".

Now there's a tough assignment.

While many of us share Booher's rage (I'd get into the ice-picking business myself if I wasn't so busy deleting all those emails for black-market Viagra), this is the season of goodwill so it's worth remembering there is some good spam.

The warning about the boob hoax I keep receiving, for example.

"I hate these hoax email warnings, but this one is important," it reads. "If a man comes to your front door and says he is conducting a survey and asks you to show him your boobs, do not show him your boobs. This is a scam; he only wants to see your boobs."

As one recipient lamented: "I wish I'd received this email earlier. I feel so stupid and cheap."

<skip>

While not strictly spam, "Google bombing" also deserves a mention for excellence in en masse internet usage.

Thanks to a weird algorithmic abnormality associated with Google, computer nerds are now able to manipulate the search engine for their own dastardly means.

This is why a search for "miserable failure" will still send you straight to the biography of George W. Bush.

Hunting for weapons of mass destruction?

Enter this phrase into Google and you'll be directed to a site explaining that the weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. It then suggests adjusting your weapons inspection mandate, pressing the regime change button or, if you are George W. Bush, checking your spelling of Iraq.

It's cyberspace at its anti-establishment, anarchistic best.

[Via The Australian]

Final Days in the Life At Jennicam

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 05:26:48 GMT

Final Days in the Life At Jennicam

After seven years, it looks like former Washington resident Jennifer Ringley is finally turning off the webcams.

Ringley, more famous as the woman behind Jennicam (www.jennicam.org), became an Internet curiosity and a quasi- celebrity in the early days of the Web by putting up cameras around her apartment and letting anyone with an Internet connection tune in at any hour for a $15 annual subscription.

An announcement on Ringley's site last week said that the Jennicam show will close at the end of the year. But so far, the woman who shared everything -- yes, everything -- about her daily life has not revealed at her site why she's pulling the shutters. She did not respond to an e-mail sent midafternoon Friday.

<snip>

Canadian Jennicam fan Paul Brown told The Post in an e-mail Friday that he was sad to see Jennicam close.

"In a sense I'd like to have maintained the surveillance for the rest of her life. . . . as a sociological experiment and a life-narrative art project," he said. "I wish we'd been able to see it out."

At the peak of Jennicam's popularity, around the turn of the millennium, Ringley told The Post that her site got an average of 100 million visitors a week.

[Via Washington Post]

Nigerian eMail Conmen Fall Into Their Targets' Net

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 02:03:17 GMT

Nigerian eMail Conmen Fall Into Their Targets' Net

Tony Thompson, crime correspondent, Sunday November 16, 2003
The Observer

It has been described as the internet's first blood sport and is fast becoming one of the web's favourite pastimes. Fed up with having their inboxes clogged with emails from Nigerian fraudsters promising untold riches, the victims are finally hitting back.

Scam-baiting - replying to the emails and stringing the con artists along with a view to humiliating them as much as possible - is becoming increasingly popular with more than 150 websites chronicling the often hilarious results.

Known as 419 fraud, after the section of the Nigerian penal code that it contravenes, the scam generates millions of pounds each year. According to the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the average loss in the UK stands at around £35,000.

Mike, a 41-year-old computer engineer from Manchester, runs the scam-baiting site 419eater.com, which started two months ago. 'Almost always the scammer will think you are a real victim and try their best to extract money. It started because I used to get a few emails, and although I knew it was a scam I never knew how it worked. I did some research, found out about scam baiting and decided to have a go. It's now almost a full-time hobby for me.'

Like most baiters, Mike replies in the names of made-up characters. His sites specialise in collecting pictures of the scammers in order to make it more difficult to find new victims. Using the pretext that in order to believe they are real people they need to take a photograph holding up signs with the name of Mike's character, he has succeeded in getting one fraudster to pose with a piece of paper stating: MI Semem Stains. Other sites feature similar pictures with signs reading 'Iama Dildo', 'Mr Bukakke' and 'Ben Dover'.

Taking a leaf out of the 419 gangs' book, most of the scam baiters keep their true identities secret. There have been at least 25 murders linked to the 419 gangs. Last February a retired Czech doctor who had lost more than £400,000 stormed into the Nigerian Embassy in Prague and shot dead the leading consul.

A scam-baiting site run by 'Alexander Kerensky' focuses its efforts on 419 gangs based in Amsterdam. Adopting the persona 'Lillith Cova', an attractive but desperately lonely 27- year-old advertising executive from London, Kerensky exchanged emails with a man by the name of James for more than a month. During this time he received authentic-looking documents, including a power of attorney, entitling him to a 20 per cent share of $18 million.

'The site started because I managed to lure James in front of an Amsterdam webcam and I wanted people to know what these scammers look like. I don't have anything against Nigerians. These people are, quite simply, outright criminals.'

The oldest anti-scammer site is Scamorama, which aims to educate the public about the latest trends as well as waste as much of the fraudsters' time as possible. The original emails often claim the author has suffered a personal tragedy, usually the loss of a parent. A typical Scamorama reply claimed the recipient has also lost a parent in shocking circumstances, having witnessed their own father being shot. The email was signed 'Alfredo Corleone'.

The ultimate aim of many anti-scammers is to turn the tables completely and get the 419 gangs to send them money. One of those who has succeeded is an Australian who baits under the name of J Cosmo Newbury and specialises in creating characters and situations that border on the surreal. After months of correspondence, one of his characters even received a marriage proposal.

'I have a long history of writing loopy letters, so this was just an extension of that,' says Newbury. 'I think I was as surprised as anyone when the Nigerians fell for my stories, but I guess they are as gullible and as greedy as their victims. I know my efforts won't stop the scammers, but I have had emails from people who were tempted to reply but searched the internet and found my site and they thanked me for "saving" them.'

Newbury has now published some of his favourite exchanges in the form of a book, Dancing with Thieves. It includes letters where he poses as a terrorist by the name of Princess Tikka Masala, a Chinese restaurateur called Hu Flung Dung and a retired mariner by the name of John Silver.

[Via Guardian Unlimited]

X10 Pop-Under Mongers Declare Bankruptcy

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 02:56:52 GMT

X10 Pop-Under Mongers Declare Bankruptcy

A year ago, if you had asked anyone what the biggest scourge of the internet was, chances are they would have spat out something unprintable about X-10. X-10 makes a small spy camera that supposedly is pretty good for its price. I wouldn't know because I certainly will never buy one.

In late 2001, X-10 rolled out an advertising campaign that buried virtually the entire Internet with pop-under ads. Within a month, X-10 was one of the most hated names on the internet.

There is such a thing as karma and, occasionally, it bites you right on the ass.

As it turns out, X-10 stole their business model from two brothers working out of their childhood home. X-10 contracted with the boys to run their advertising campaign, then didn't pay them. In fact, they stole the plan the boys originated and carried it out themselves!

The brothers sued X-10 and last week were awarded a judgement of 4.3 million dollars. X-10 has filed for bankruptcy protection and may well be heading for that big Pop-up blocker in the sky. Or, more likely, they are headed underground, with all the other scumbags.

Good riddance. Sayonara. Don't let the door hit ya on the way out.

http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-5095260.html :: X10 files for Chapter 11

[Via SpyWareInfo Newsletter]

These Are Definitely Not Scully's Breasts

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 04:57:24 GMT

These Are Definitely Not Scully's Breasts

Inside one man's crusade to save Gillian Anderson and the rest of the world from the plague of fake celebrity porn.

By David Kushner

The moment he boots up case file 371, the detective gets that twisted feeling in his gut. Ed Lake - blue button-down shirt, gray hair, hangdog jowls - studies the evidence alone in the musty dining room of his tiny apartment in Racine, Wisconsin, a small town southeast of Milwaukee. It's that blonde again. Elisha Cuthbert. He's seen her. The daughter on the TV show 24. And here she is now. Frozen on his computer screen - the smoky eyes, the parted lips. But something's wrong. The plunging neckline. The sheer black blouse. The exposed nipples. It's her, but it's not. It's a sham.

Lake, a 66-year-old retired Air Force weather observer, is the self-described Fake Detective, defender of Hollywood babes. Every day in this cramped hovel, he scours the alt.celebrity newsgroups for doctored photos of starlets in various stages of undress. The hoaxsters behind these operations: a breed of hackers known as fakers who pride themselves not on their ability to crack code but on their skill at creating a new kind of postmodern art.

Fakers are DJs of the pixel, manipulating pictures with Photoshop the way Moby tweaks sounds with a sampler. Bad fakes are obvious - Britney Spears' face clumsily grafted on a topless torso. The good ones seem sublimely genuine - a midstride shot of Ashley Judd sans panties at the Oscars, a doe-eyed Gwyneth Paltrow lying naked on a featherbed. If they're particularly well-done, they rise from the underground newsgroups and onto the hard drives of people who take them for the real thing.

So what's the harm in that? For the chivalrous Lake, it's an affront to the actresses. On his site, he bills his mission: Protecting the innocent, defending the truth, and recovering the sullied reputations of beautiful damsels in distress since 1996. "My favorite actresses are being betrayed," he says earnestly.

But for Lake, there's more to it. Fakers undermine the hard work of collectors of legitimate celebrity photos, like Lake himself. To understand why, he tells me, you need to understand the mind of a collector.

One look around his pad makes it obvious that Lake collects to the point of obsession. Stashed inside his closets and beneath the fantasy art posters that adorn his walls is a hoard of objects that many people would call junk: 4,000 miniature liquor bottles; 2,000 jazz tapes; 3,000 books, including more than 400 on World War II. "Collecting can't be explained," he says almost wearily as he cracks open a Diet Coke. "It's like a pack rat thing. I'll collect anything." Most of all, Lake collects photos of celebrities - a passion that dates back to his childhood and the double features he never missed at the local movie house.

Clearly, Lake has an appreciation for beautiful women, but he denies his motivations are prurient. He's on a crusade. He doesn't want anyone pulling the wool over the eyes of guys who are serious about their celeb collections.

Every self-appointed Batman needs a Joker, of course. And the Fake Detective has his. He goes by the name of Trillian.

"No good. The light's all wrong. She's looking in the wrong direction," says Trillian, in heavily accented English. We're standing in a bookshop in the red-light district of Amsterdam, flipping through a porno mag in search of shots suitable for faking. "This is better. See the hairline? See the angle? It's dead-on," he says, slapping the magazine with a grin. "This, this could be Sandra Bullock."

Along the canals, wobbly tourists window-shop hookers. Macy Gray's "Sexual Revolution" pulses from a Rastafarian café. The warm breeze smells like the inside of a bong. As we head out into the crowds, Trillian, a 37-year-old Hollander with a crooked nose, nicotine-stained teeth, and brainiac eyes, declares he's had enough of the Amsterdam scene.

It was a long time coming. After growing up in a German border town, he moved here to live the wild life. But eight years in a small flat on the far side of town got to him - the dopey crowds, the pushy prostitutes, the neo-hippie vagabonds. Now he lives in an industrial burg outside the city and works as a computer engineer at a local high school.

Trillian's not the most prolific of the few thousand online fakers, but many consider him the best. And for good reason. His necklines - the crease where a celebrity's head is pasted to a model's body - are imperceptible. His saturation and hue - the colorings that blend the skins of two different people - are subtle and convincing. He takes pride in his accomplishments but doesn't want his identity revealed. "You end up being a perv to some people," he says.

Fakes date back to the early days of bulletin-board systems, but they emerged as a distinct subculture in September 1996, when a Canadian computer engineer nicknamed Lux Lucre founded the alt.binaries.pictures.nude.celebrities.fake newsgroup. As the group's archivist, Lucre estimates there are roughly 300,000 fakes in existence, ranging from a black-light poster-style nude of Jennifer Aniston under a waterfall to a spread eagle of, yes, Bea Arthur.

The most popular fakee? Gillian Anderson. She has all the ingredients: girl-next-door accessibility, sci-fi geek cred, and, most important, a symmetrical face that's easy to manipulate. Britney Spears is not symmetrical, Trillian explains, making her difficult to flip. Sandra Bullock is almost perfect. Same for Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt. "Their heads glue on almost every body," he says.

Many fakers are in it for the cheap thrills. "I'm not really trying to create art, just good masturbation material," emails Yovo, an unemployed 38-year-old faker outside of Seattle. "It's pretty obvious that mine are fake. Anna Kournikova isn't known for doing double penetration shots, ya know."

Trillian professes different motives. "There's nothing erotic when you're working at the level of pixels," he says. He likes the simple nod to a task well-done - something missing from his daily life. "You can seek recognition at work, but you will be disappointed," he says, as we catch a train to his house. "That's part of faking: 'Look at what I've done.' You get cheers or boos. You get recognition."

<snip>

But I suspect there's something deeper at work: the thrill of the pursuit in a life that's slowing down. Without fakers like Trillian, there would be no chase. Without a chase, there would be no Fake Detective. Ed Lake would just be an old guy in a small apartment. Surfing the Internet. Alone.

[Via Wired]

Computer Worm Attacks Software Patch Server

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 15:40:47 GMT

Computer Worm Attacks Software Patch Server

14:21 12 August 03, Will Knight

A fast-spreading new computer worm tries to prevent vulnerable machines seeking protection by attacking a vital update server. The "Blaster" worm has already infected thousands of computers worldwide, security companies say.

The worm, also known as "Lovsan", exploits a software bug affecting most versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. The bug was revealed on 16 July and Microsoft also released a software fix on the same day.

After infecting a vulnerable computer, the worm is programmed to send a volley of bogus traffic to Microsoft's software update service, windowsupdate.com on 16 August. If enough machines are infected this will overwhelm the site, preventing system administrators from using it to download the software patches needed prevent other machines being infected.

"It's an extremely devious trick by Blaster's author," says Graham Cluley, of UK anti-virus company Sophos. "Blaster attempts to knock Microsoft's windowsupdate.com website off the internet."

<snip>

Buffer overrun

To exploit the Windows flaw on a vulnerable system, Blaster sends irregular network packets of data that
cause a "buffer overrun" error. This means the system's normal security controls can be bypassed, allowing remote commands to be carried out.

Blaster scans for vulnerable machines via the standard network protocols TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol). Once a susceptible machine has been located it gains control of the machine and downloads a full executable copy of itself, "msblaster.exe", which it starts running. The worm also installs a TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server so that it can pass more copies of itself to other hosts.

Some analysts say the worm may not spread as effectively as some other specimens because it relies on TFTP messages, which are automatically blocked by some firewalls.

Traffic spike

But US network security company TruSecure has already reported a fivefold increase in network traffic directed
at computer ports associated with the data sent by the worm. Other security companies have issued alerts about the worm, as has the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), an organisation funded by the US government.

US company Network Associates says the worm "is spreading quickly to thousands of machines around the globe," based on reports from the company's customers.

The SANS Institute, a network administrators training organisation in the US, recommends blocking incoming requests that could come from the worm at a network's firewall and physically disconnecting machines thought to have been infected.

The worm's code also includes a brief insult aimed at Bill Gates, founder and chief software architect at Microsoft. The offending message says: "billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!"

UPDATE: HELP with Removing the W32.Blaster.Worm

Thanks xStainDx for the following information posted in our Back Page News section of the forum.

1.- Patch Your System with the appropriate MS03-026 Patch
2.- After Installation of the Patch, Reboot your system.
3.- Download and run "FIXBLAST".exe to remove the MSBLAST.exe file, terminate the process and remove added registry keys by the worm.
4.- Reboot your pc one last time.
5.- Visit WindowsUpdate.com more often and take note of our repeated warnings to keep your system updated.

Result:
Your System will no longer shutdown after 60secs, please follow the steps above to remove the worm off your computer and return your system to UPDATED safe status.

[Via NewScientist

Flash mobs: a new social phenomenon?

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 01:53:49 GMT

Flash mobs: a new social phenomenon?

Giles Hewitt in New York, Agençe France-Presse

Is it performance art or the ultimate surprise party? A social phenomenon known as the 'flash mob', which began in New York and relies on e-mail, appears to be spreading worldwide.

Using mass e-mailing, the organisers bring together what their invitations describe as 'inexplicable mobs' - large crowds that materialise in public places and suddenly dissipate 10 minutes later.

Since the first flash mob was organised in Manhattan in May, by a mischievous underground group called the Mob Project, the practise has already spread to other U.S. cities, while plans are being drawn up for events in London, Rome and Vienna.

The concept's creator, a shadowy figure known only as Bill, started off by e-mailing 50 friends to gather at a retail store in downtown Manhattan. The plan was foiled after the store was tipped off, forcing Bill to introduce an element of subterfuge.

For mob number two, participants were asked to gather in advance in one of several bars and only then were handed a leaflet detailing the target - Macy's department store.

More than 100 people suddenly appeared on Macy's home furnishing floor and, as instructed by the leaflet, began discussing whether to purchase a 'love rug' for their fictitious commune. To the bewilderment of the sales staff, the crowd then melted away as quickly as it had formed.

As Bill's e-mail pool has expanded, so has the size of the gatherings. Mob number three saw nearly 200 people flood the lobby of the swanky Hyatt Hotel and erupt into synchronised applause in front of bemused guests, while number four involved the invasion of a shoe boutique in Soho with participants pretending to be hick tourists from the southern U.S. state of Maryland on a bus trip.

"It's a spectacle for spectacle's sake - which is silly, but is also, as I've discovered somewhat to my surprise, genuinely transgressive, which is part of its appeal, I think," said the mysterious Bill in an e-mail exchange. "People feel like there's nothing but order everywhere, and so they love to be a part of just one thing that nobody was expecting."

A spokesman for the New York police department was wary about commenting on the legality of the mobs, but said the police would intervene only if there was criminal intent. For the most recent event, on July 24, one group gathered in an Irish bar, trying vainly to act casual as they loitered around the jukebox mentioned in the invitation.

"Are you with the mob?" whispered one anxious first-timer, only to be shushed with a knowing nod and wink, followed by a nervous giggle. A Mob Project representative surreptitiously handed out instruction leaflets, guiding that group and others to a grassy knoll in Central Park, opposite the American Museum of Natural History.

The mob began at 7:18 pm precisely - the 300-plus participants having synchronised watches with a time zone website - and the surreal instructions were followed to the letter:
· For the first three minutes, make as little noise as possible. If you can make a realistic bird call, you may occasionally do so.
· By 7:21 pm, you may make all bird calls, unrealistic or no.
· By 7:23 pm, you may also mumble, 'bird noise'.
· By 7:25 pm, you may also call out, "Nature here! Come get some nature," to passers- by.
· At 7:26 pm, chant "Na-ture" for 20 seconds, cheer and disperse.

"It was over before I could work out whether it was really clever or really dumb. But either way I kind of enjoyed it," said Lorien Poole, 24, who was e-mailed by a friend.

Just a few hours later, the event was the subject of heated discussion on several website chatrooms devoted to the flash mob trend. "It seems to me that while this is all fun, harmless and interesting for now, that it is just a matter of time before a fight breaks out and the mob becomes a riot," wrote one pessimistic participant.

Bill has made it clear he intends to wind up the project before it gets out of hand, although the concept appears to be taking on a life of its own.

San Francisco, Minneapolis and Phoenix have all staged their own events, while the first European mob took place this week in Rome, when 300 people entered a music and bookstore and asked for non-existent titles. The idea has also been adopted and given a more political agenda by other groups.

In Detroit, a group of gays and lesbians organise the 'Detroit Guerrilla Queer Bar', which targets a local straight restaurant or bar for 'swarming' on a designated night. And in Boston, Reggie Cummings, a black software developer, coordinates 'friendly takeovers' by crowds of black yuppies of downtown bars with a traditionally white clientele.

[Via ABC Science Online]

US Senator Orrin Hatch Pauses On PC Destruct Button (Kinda)

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 02:27:49 GMT

US Senator Orrin Hatch Pauses On PC Destruct Button (Kinda)
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 19/06/2003 at 21:55 GMT

US Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican, Utah) backed down slightly from his bizarre remarks Tuesday advocating Hacking computers belonging to copyright scofflaws.

On Wednesday Hatch posted an announcement on his Web site saying, "I made my comments at yesterday's hearing because I think that industry is not doing enough to help us find effective ways to stop people from using computers to steal copyrighted, personal or sensitive materials. I do not favor extreme remedies - unless no moderate remedies can be found. I asked the interested industries to help us find those moderate remedies."

It would appear that Hatch is in favor of first exhausting peaceful means before resorting to violence, a code of self-restraint enshrined in American political culture from the early days of union labor struggles right up to the current conflict with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction.

On Tuesday, Hatch had mused about granting the media cartel an exemption from laws discouraging the destruction of property, and said flatly that he was "all for destroying [the] machines" of file traders and software pirates. He reckoned that a few hundred- thousand such incidents would send exactly the right message to the masses.

Now he's saying that he's 'all for it' as a last resort, in case the RIAA campaign of lawsuits, home invasions and other forms of quasi- legal intimidation should have less than the desired effect.

************************************************************************************

In other developments, Senator Hatch's Web site appears to be in violation of a software license requirement related to the javascript menus he's using, the irony of which has tickled the Internet's blogging community.

************************************************************************************

In another development, a sharp-eyed Reg reader has noticed that the Mormon Senator's Web site features a link to adult content at Bignaturals.com. Load this page and find the graphical link to 'myUTAH Search.com' about halfway down on the right-hand side, for some silicone-free Utah search action.

************************************************************************************

[What a two-faced, creepy, phony, SCUMBAG, who deserves his own special room-in-HELL!]

UPDATE: Wired: Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?

Milonic Solutions' JavaScript code used on Hatch's website costs $900 for a site-wide license. It is free for personal or nonprofit use, which the senator likely qualifies for.

However, the software's license stipulates that the user must register the software to receive a licensing code, and provide a link in the source code to Milonic's website.

On Wednesday, the senator's site met none of Milonic's licensing terms. The site's source code (which can be seen by selecting Source under the View menu in Internet Explorer) had neither a link to Milonic's site nor a registration code.

However, by Thursday afternoon Hatch's site had been updated to contain some of the requisite copyright information. An old version of the page can be seen by viewing Google's cache of the site.

[Via TheRegister]

Depressed Student Kills Herself With Help Of Online Group

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 02:39:28 GMT

Depressed Student Kills Herself With Help Of Online Group

Suzy Gonzales' death is the 14th confirmed suicide associated with the online discussion group, which the San Francisco Chronicle doesn't name. Its reporter writes: "On any given day, the Internet site is filled with hopeless rants about life's miseries, advertisements for suicide partners, and requests for feedback on self-murder plans."

Suzy sent six time-delayed e-mails to the Tallahassee police, telling them that she'd ingested cyanide and that they could find her at the Red Roof Inn.

When investigators entered her motel room, they discovered her corpse alongside the poison, which she'd carefully repackaged.

In her e-mail to her parents, Gonzales had a request for her memorial service: Please play "Fire and Rain," James Taylor's elegy to a friend who committed suicide.

That friend was named Suzanne, too.

[More..]

[Via San Francisco Chronicle]

'No school' E-mail hoax sent to 3,500 students

Thu, 15 May 2003 05:10:51 GMT

'No school' E-mail hoax sent to 3,500 students
By Rachael Jackson, Apr 14,2003
Staff writer

No school on Friday!

The news sounded too good to be true for 3,500 students who received an e-mail early Friday morning announcing classes had been canceled due to budget cuts.

One or more e-mail tricksters sent the message, which was signed "Colonel Cathcart," from a WAM lab just after midnight Friday morning. At about the same time, an e-mail infected with the Klez virus, a virus that exploits a weakness in Internet Explorer, was directed to the same group of students.

The Office of Information Technology is investigating both cases, which may be related.

Most people who received the e-mail figured out fairly quickly that it was a joke because of the ridiculousness of the information and several grammatical and spelling errors. President Dan Mote's office received some calls around 8 a.m. Friday, and campus information received about 40 phone calls related to the e-mail hoax.

"It didn't appear to be too disruptive," said Joan Martinez, spokeswoman for OIT.

After a busy week and little sleep, Paul Marcon, a junior finance major, opened the e- mail at 3 a.m. Friday.

"At first I questioned it, and then I closed all my books and I was like, 'All right, I'm done,'" he said. But after talking to a few friends and taking a closer look at the e-mail, he figured there was no way it could be true.

"It really made no sense," he said. Marcon said he also received about 75 e-mails from people on the e-mail reflector asking each other to stop propagating the Klez virus.

Despite attaching "Colonel" to university spokesman George Cathcart's name, Martinez said the perpetrators tried to use the standard format for official university e- mails, including a footnote saying the e-mail was authorized for distribution to the university community.

"The person who created it apparently went to some measure to make it look like an authentic e-mail from university relations," Martinez said.

Cathcart, who was an armed forces lieutenant in the '60s, was away when the e-mail hoax occurred and was insulted when he heard his name had been used with a rank as low as colonel.

"I would have been higher than colonel by now," he said.

After OIT officials figured out that the e-mail had been sent to the GoalsStudy e-mail reflector, a single address that directs e-mail to about 3,500 people, mostly students, they sent an e-mail out to the same group at around 10 a.m. Friday.

They also put a recorded message on the university phone line and Provost William Destler posted information about the hoax on the university home page.

Affected students who were contacted said they did not even realize their e-mail addresses were included in the e-mail reflector.

Martinez said OIT officials are fairly confident they will be able to track down the perpetrators. Once they are found, they will be turned over to university judicial programs, which will determine the appropriate disciplinary action.

Martinez could not reveal which of the eight OIT-managed WAM labs the e-mail was sent from or give any details of the ongoing investigation.

Part of the e-mail read: "As the deadline for the submission of the University's final budget to the state has approached, it has become clear that we are suffering from a large budget shortfall. Because of this, we are forced to shut down the entire campus for a full day. We apologize for the short notice of this cancellation."

This case, Martinez said, is a reminder of how easy it can be to forge e-mail.

"E-mail is one of the most easily forged or compromised mediums," she said. "Always verify anything that looks suspicious or strange."

[Via DiamondbackOnline]

Rise of the Spam Zombies

Fri, 02 May 2003 05:01:04 GMT

Rise of the Spam Zombies

By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Apr 25 2003 4:45PM

Pressed by increasingly effective anti-spam efforts, senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail are resorting to outright criminality in their efforts to conceal the source of their ill-sent missives, using Trojan horses to turn the computers of innocent netizens into secret spam zombies.

<snip>

One of those programs popped up last week. Named "Proxy-Guzu," when executed by an unwitting user the Trojan listens on a randomly-chosen port and uses its own built-in mail client to dash off a message to a Hotmail account, putting the port number and victim's IP address in the subject line. The spammer takes it from there, routing as much e-mail as he or she likes through the captured computer, knowing that any efforts to trace the source of the spam will end at the victim's Internet address.

Trojan horses generally rely on their wielder's ability to trick innocent people into executing them. Proxy-Guzu, naturally, arrives as spam -- in one sighting the program was offered as a naughty peek at an online webcam.

One early victim of the malware, posting to an anti-virus message board, says he detected it only when his desktop firewall program alerted him to large quantities of outgoing e-mail messages sent to unfamiliar addresses, with subject lines like "Don't tell your parents about this!" and "your bill."

'Untraceable'
Spammers are borrowing the trick from the method electronic vandals use to create computer armies capable of launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against webservers. What may have been the first Trojan horse custom-tailored for spammers emerged last November: called "Jeem," it grants the perpetrator full access to a victim computer, but also includes a built-in SMTP server to facilitate e-mail laundering.

Arbon says the spam worlds' plunge into adolescent hacking techniques is a result of spammers enjoying fewer and fewer online havens from which to operate. "With the filters and the lists and heurists and all the mechanisms out there people are using, I think the people that are trying to find a way to get the mail delivered are resorting to alternative tactics," she says. "It's untraceable. I hate to put that in print, but it's the truth."

Of course, it also puts the spammers squarely on the wrong side of the law. "As a general rule it's legal to send someone an e-mail even if they don't want it," says Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department computer crime attorney. "But once you break into their computer and get their computer to send e-mail to someone else, then you're violating federal and state computer crime laws."

[Via SecurityFocus]

File-Trading Hoax Snares Victims

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 01:37:33 GMT

File-Trading Hoax Snares Victims
By Katie Dean

02:00 AM Apr. 03, 2003 PT

An executive who claimed to have developed a file-trading service that intentionally flouted copyright protection laws revealed Wednesday that he made the whole thing up for a laugh -- and to sell a book.

The Honest Thief was announced in February as a new service from PGR BV, a Dutch Internet services company. Pieter Plass, founder of PGR BV and president of CBB, a Dutch construction company, said he cooked up the lie as a joke and publicity stunt.

"First of all, I wanted to have some fun with this," he said. "It's part of our culture to do April Fool's jokes. You can't be a prankster without pulling somebody's leg."

The service promised to take advantage of a recent Dutch court decision that "paved the way for the Netherlands to become the world's first legal haven for file-sharing companies," according to a February press release.

Plass said he wanted to hawk his book of management strategies -- also called The Honest Thief -- and promote the philosophy behind it.

"There is an element of honest stealing in everything you do," Plass explained. "That's how we learn, and that's how people reach their goals. Calling it 'honest stealing' is a more catchy way of saying 'all that you learn as you go along in life.'"

Those who were duped by the scheme include The Wall Street Journal, Business Wire, CNET, Wired News and the PR agency that promoted the company, among many others.

"I got fooled along with everyone else, and I'm not particularly thrilled," said Steven Phenix, senior director of the Alliant Group. "He's no longer a client of ours.

"That's not the way PR is done in this country," Phenix said. "I have a long list of people I have to apologize to."

Phenix said he knew about Plass' book, but said, "I wasn't aware that that was the reason we were doing this (publicity)."

Press releases were sent out by Business Wire when the company was first announced.

"We received this release from a PR agency that is an established client of ours," said Phyllis Dantuono, senior vice president for Business Wire. "I think it's unfortunate that their client scammed them. It's more unfortunate that the scam was passed on to all of us.

"When somebody's trying that hard to trick you, that stinks," Dantuono said. "It's like, get a life, guy. I think that's unconscionable."

The Honest Thief also planned to "launch" a legal defense fund for college students, capitalizing on comments by Rep. John Carter (R-Texas). Last month, during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, Carter said that locking college kids in the federal pen for illegal file trading would help curb piracy.

The Free 2B P2P legal defense fund was to be announced this week.

Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media program at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, said that this hoax joins a long list of schemes perpetrated on the Net.

"It's common human behavior that's suddenly distributed over a global network," he said. "Instead of a couple of suckers, you could potentially get millions."

In 1998, two "teenagers" who promised to lose their virginity online admitted the plan was a scam. Other tall tales included a woman selling her eggs on the Net and the fake diary of a girl who was dying of leukemia, he said.

The Honest Thief website now includes a diary documenting the scheme, step by step.

"I feel that people still have a sense of humor about it," Plass said. "They can appreciate the effort of it actually being a hoax, and telling that it is a hoax."

Grabowicz sees the incident as an object lesson for journalists and other media professionals.

"I don't care how good a reporter you are or how reputable a media organization, you can get snookered by one of these things," Grabowicz said. "Reporters really need to be on their guard."

[Via Wired]

Use a Firewall, Go to Jail

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 03:14:38 GMT

Use a Firewall, Go to Jail

The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.

Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal -- with no exceptions.

If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you're in violation, because the "To" and "From" lines of the emails are concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)

Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the "from" and "to" fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security "firewalls" use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you're in violation.

If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the "Internet Connection Sharing" feature of your favorite operating system product, you're in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virtually all versions of Linux) would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.

And this is just one example of the problems with these bills. Yikes.

UPDATE (6:35 PM): It's worse than I thought. Similar bills are on the table in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Tennessee, and Colorado.

UPDATE (March 28, 9:00 AM): Clarified the paragraph above about encrypted email, to eliminate an ambiguity.

[Via FreedomToTinker]

Iraqi Dead Counted, Not Forgotten

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 02:55:11 GMT

Iraqi Dead Counted, Not Forgotten

By Leander Kahney

02:00 AM Mar. 28, 2003 PT

A website keeping a running tally of civilian deaths in the Iraq war is attracting a lot of traffic, and appears to be emerging as an authoritative source of information on the gruesome subject.

The Iraq Body Count website claims to attract 100,000 visitors a day, and is increasingly being cited as a source in news outlets such as The Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News and the Associated Press.

"We're the responsible recorders of what the bombs are doing," said John Sloboda, one of the site's co-founders. "We're making sure (civilian deaths) are not forgotten, each single one."

The site's producers have also developed a JavaScript Web counter that can be added to any Web page to show the latest fatality estimates. The counters have been adopted by about 200 other websites, the project's site claims.

While no issue is as contentious in the Iraq war as civilian fatalities, no organization -- with the exception of Iraq Body Count -- appears to be keeping score. No one in the media, the U.S. military, the Iraqi government or humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross is estimating the conflict's running cost in Iraqi civilian lives.

Launched in January, the site is run by 16 researchers, largely academics and musicians based in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Sloboda, a 52-year-old psychology professor at the University of Keele in England, and Hamit Dardagan, a freelance researcher who lives in London, started the site.

The pair were inspired by the work of Marc Herold, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who devised the counting methodology when the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan last year. Herold felt Afghan civilian deaths were a critical issue that was largely being ignored. Herold is acting as a consultant to the Iraq Body Count project.

While Sloboda freely admits the project is "intensely political," and that most of the researchers are anti-war activists, he argued that the numbers are apolitical and speak for themselves. The raw data can and has been cited by people in both pro- and anti-war camps.

On one hand, the numbers illustrate the dreadful cost of war. On the other, they show how well smart weapons and careful planning can minimize casualties, especially when compared with the carpet-bombing campaigns of World War II or Vietnam.

"There's no inherent political message in the data," Sloboda said. "You read what you want into it, depending on your political perspective."

The site tallies civilian fatalities by analyzing news reports from dozens of mainstream news outlets, such as the BBC, The New York Times and Fox News.

If at least two reports of any incident -- a bombing, a missile strike or firefight -- record civilian deaths, they are added to the site's database.

There are often conflicting casualty estimates between reports, so the site records both the highest and the lowest numbers reported. As a result, the site's tally is expressed as the minimum and maximum number of fatalities to date. As of Thursday afternoon, the reckoning was at least 227 dead Iraqi civilians, and at most 307.

Sloboda said the site makes no claim to record the absolute numbers of civilians killed. "We are not counting deaths," he said, "but reports of deaths."

If available, the site also records personal details: who was killed, when, where and how.

Sloboda said most of the site's traffic comes from the United States. A link to the site in every story about the conflict posted on Yahoo News is driving a lot of U.S. visitors, he said.

The site has been the target of some heated criticism, most of it concerning the brutality of the Iraqi regime and its responsibility for the deaths of many of its own citizens. In response, Sloboda said, "We're responsible for our governments. We voted them into power. It's our taxes that are paying for the bombs. This is the project we've elected to do."

Sreenath Sreenivasan, director of online journalism at Columbia University, said the site is a novel use of the Internet -- both for gathering data and disseminating it.

Sreenivasan said it is in the interest of both sides of the conflict to control information about casualties -- the United States to play it down, and the Iraqis to play it up -- and if the project's numbers are accurate, then it is providing a unique and useful service.

"This is something we haven't seen in previous wars," he said. "It's another use of information that the Internet is bringing to the public."

The U.S. Department of Defense didn't return calls requesting comment, but in January 2002, during the war in Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan told Wired News that U.S. forces only had the resources to track casualties among its own ranks.

"We only track U.S. casualties," he said. "We don't track, and don't have the means to track, casualties ... either civilian or noncivilian."

Lapan said U.S. forces "have gone to painstaking lengths to minimize civilian casualties.... Obviously, we regret any civilian loss of life, and in any case it's always unintended. We avoid attacking targets if there are civilians nearby."

[Via Wired]

Music companies fear new 100-hour discs

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 01:55:19 GMT

Music companies fear new 100-hour discs

12:54 14 March 03
Barry Fox, Berlin

The music industry this week condemned the launch of two recording systems that will let people copy between 30 and 100 hours of music onto a single disc. The launches, from electronics giants Sony and Philips, are being seen as a potential pirates' charter.

"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people pirate more music like this has to be very bad news for the music industry," says a spokesman for Britain's record industry trade association, the BPI.

The launches come as the global music industry suffers its worst downturn since the CD format was introduced. Free online downloading and disc copying have been widely blamed for the slump in sales.

Sony's system will use the ultra-efficient data compression system used in MiniDiscs, to squeeze 30 hours of MP3 music onto a single blank CD. The discs will play on a new generation of personal stereos, which cost less than £100. Philips's system uses a computer DVD recorder to save at least 100 hours of MP3 music on a blank DVD, which will play on a new portable DVD player.

Business model

Why Sony should want to launch a recorder that might make piracy easier may seem surprising, as its Sony
Music division makes and sells CDs. While Sony Music did not want to comment on its sister company's launch, Mike Tsurumi, a president of Sony Consumer Electronics in Berlin, insists that the move makes sense. "The music companies need to change their business model," he says.

Tsurumi's colleague Simon Mori expects people to move towards downloading and paying for music from official music websites. One such site, dotmusic.com, was launched last week by telecoms company BT and 30 record firms, though at £1.49 per track, buying music this way is hardly cheap.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, which is relentless in its pursuit of music pirates, has not yet said how it will react to the new recorders.

Take this tech job and shove it

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 03:45:32 GMT

Take this tech job and shove it
Sure, there are plenty of opportunities out there -- if you have 10 years of experience and are willing to work for free.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo

Last summer, Tanya Bershadsky, a Web designer in her 20s who has worked in the up-and- down tech industry since the mid-1990s, was laid off from a big-name dot-com that unsurprisingly went belly up. Like a couple million others in her situation, Bershadsky quickly started looking for a new job and, like everyone else, her search didn't go very well.

Bershadsky discovered that it was possible to find dozens of job listings for the sort of work she was looking for. The trouble was, most of the advertised positions required prospective employees to have a skill set that rivaled Superman's -- you not only needed expertise in Flash and Java, but your new bosses also preferred that you'd graduated first in your class from MIT, knew how to shoot and edit and encode video, were "glamorous," typed 70 words per minute, took dictation and would perhaps wash the executive's car and feed his dog once in a while. Many times, the ads asked for intimate knowledge of the inner workings of some specialized world -- the cosmetic industry, say, or the French Foreign Ministry.

The worst part, Bershadsky found, was that several postings warned that employees should not only be qualified to do a job, but that they be "excited" and "passionate" about it -- a requirement that Bershadsky found difficult to fulfill because "80 percent of the jobs I was seeing posted, with these outrageous requirements, were unpaid internships," she says. "These were internships that required you to have three or four years of experience. What kind of shit is that?"

After a couple months of this, Bershadsky had had enough; she wanted to do something about the jobs she was seeing. So she went to a domain-name registration service and bought a URL for a new site she thought would, if not exactly make a difference in the world, at least make her feel better. The URL Bershadsky registered was fuckthatjob.com. "It was exactly what I was feeling," she says. "It felt right. I couldn't think of anything else to call it."

Bershadsky had a simple idea for the new site. She asked her close friends, many of whom were also looking for jobs, to send her the most outrageous postings they spotted; she would put up the listings and add snarky comments about the employers behind them.

She was quickly inundated with examples of over-the-top job requirements. There was, for instance, the film editor who wanted an assistant to help him finish a project -- the assistant would get no pay, and would need to provide his own editing equipment. Or there was a marketing firm in need of a "team player" to work as a copywriter. The applicant, who would be an unpaid intern, had to know HTML, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, PHP, JavaScript and "search engine optimization." The company wanted this person to have four years of marketing experience, and work for about 20 hours a week. The position was perfect, the ad said, for people who had "a desire to keep their skills polished during a lapse in employment. In other words, if you haven't been able to find a job and want to stay 'in the marketing loop', this is a great way to do so."

Fuckthatjob.com, currently making the rounds of the unemployed, provides a good window onto the dismal reality of the current tech job market. If one needed any proof, the jobs on the site -- as well as interviews with several people now looking for work -- indicate that we're now in an employer-dominated labor market. Employers will ask for the world from their employees, and often they'll come close to getting it, and for very little money.

It's a sad time to be looking for tech work. Three years have passed since the Nasdaq stock index closed at 5,048.62 -- which turned out to be its apex, the high- water mark of the late-1990s economic boom. Nothing has picked up for tech workers in that time, and many of them seem gloomier than ever about their prospects. "It seems like everybody I used to know in this industry has got some unbelievable story that isn't getting told," says Bill Lessard, the founder of Netslaves, a site that chronicled, through the good times and bad, worker exploitation in the tech economy.

Lessard is now halfheartedly looking for a job himself, but he's all but given up hope of finding something in technology. "I think that these job postings are indicative of just how truly crazy things have gotten. And the fact is that none of this is funny anymore; this is not just a fad story anymore. The fact of the matter is that the economy is awful -- there's no other way to put it."

Since the economy hit its peak employment rate about two years ago, more than 2 million people have lost their jobs, and there's no sign, yet, of a reversal. According to the Labor Department's latest numbers, about 300,000 jobs were cut in February alone. Tech workers across many industries have been among the hardest hit by the economic slump, but anecdotal evidence suggests that there's a specific kind of tech worker -- what some people call the "tech generalist," people who are pretty good at lots of different kinds of technologies, who consider themselves quick learners and can easily fit into new jobs -- who is having the most difficult time these days.

"I think I can do many different kinds of things, but it's like in the current marketplace I'm worthless," says Bill Lessard. The jobs on fuckthatjob.com bear this out, as do many of the listings on most online job boards, he adds. "They say you have to be able to do five things within a specified industry. You can do databases and graphics. You can do marketing and network administration. And whatever you do you have to have three to five years of experience working with cosmetics for elderly women."

Teresa Guerriero, who has worked as a director of application development for firms in several different industries, and considers herself flexible enough to learn new businesses, expressed a similar frustration. "They say they want you to have all these skills, plus you have to have experience in merchandising or retail or the pharmaceutical industry," she says.

Guerriero, who was laid off seven months ago, is not the sort of dot-com youngster who made millions in the last boom. She has a daughter in high school and a mortgage to worry about. But that background hasn't helped her much in the job market. She's been granted only three interviews since she began her search, a number that disappoints her greatly.

"I'm panicked now," she said, when asked about her state of mind. "I'm through my severance, and I'm slowly making my way through my savings. I thought it would take me six or seven months to find a job, and that's where I am now. But in order to feel some hope I would have had to have had a number of interviews by now, and I haven't. Although I send out a lot of résumés and I'll answer many ads, you're discouraged from sending your résumé in if you don't have 14 of the 15 things they want. If you were responsible for application development in the past, they now want you to be responsible for application development and networking and a dozen other things."

"I don't think anybody's afraid of working hard," she added, "but I was very surprised at the expectations they had."

Although technologists have had a hard time in this slump, their plight has been the least pitied. Much of the coverage of the new economy's souring has had the flavor of a morality play. Dot-com workers are portrayed as victims of their own outsized ambitions, greedy kids who lucked into a pot of gold they hadn't really earned. They flew too close to the sun, and got what was coming to them.

"You go from one exaggerated position to another exaggerated position. It used to be you go to cocktail parties and if they found out you worked in technology they'd say you must be rich, must be a genius," Lessard says. "Now it's like, 'You poor slob, you fool.' Everybody's waiting for you to jump out the window."

Tanya Bershadsky says, "It's kind of embarrassing to tell people you worked on the Web. It's got this weird stigma attached to it now -- when you say what you do, people know you're unemployed. It's like when you meet someone in New York and they say they're an actor, you know they're not working on anything."

Justin Market, a 25-year-old programmer in San Francisco, embodies the shopworn stereotype of the dot-com youngster who seemed to get everything too easily. (The name is a pseudonym; he didn't want his real name published, for fear that prospective employers might question his love of the software industry, which he is thinking about leaving entirely.) Six years ago, Market dropped out of college -- school was no match for the fortunes being minted in the Internet industry. It turned out to be a pretty good decision. Market founded a company that was eventually purchased by WebMD, and, when that company went public, he became an instant millionaire.

When he was 22, Market sold some of his stock to buy an $800,000 house in the city. "I listened to everyone but my accountant," he says now, "and I didn't put enough away for taxes." He has been out of work since early last year, and has about $300 in his bank account. He's trying to sell his house, which he thinks is worth a bit more than $1 million; most of the money he gets from that will go to pay the IRS. He owes "piles and piles" in taxes, he says.

Market's job search, so far, has been less successful than he'd hoped. "It used to be that if you were a smart programmer and could pick things up easily, they wanted to hire you," he says. "Now they want you to have done exactly what the last person in that job has done." The average salary on offer is smaller as well. At his last job, Market was making about $125,000 a year -- which he concedes is large sum for someone his age. These days, "the jobs I'm looking at are $80,000 or $90,000 for full-time," he says. "These are for actual development jobs, which I have a lot of experience in. I've written two books on Java."

Since the start of this year, there has been a slight increase in the number of viable postings available, Market says. He has sent in his résumé to dozens of firms, and has had "a handful" of interviews. But he hasn't received any offers yet.

Market is only looking for a temporary job, one he plans to keep for a year or so, just until he gets himself settled financially. During his last few months of unemployment, he discovered, he says, a new way to live -- a life of meditation and reflection, less troubled by the need to make money and spend it. Market teaches yoga now, and he thinks it's what he wants to do permanently. He's also taken up cooking; he finds that he can make better food than most of the expensive restaurants he used to frequent.

"I see myself being happier now," he says. "It's hard being financially pretty strapped, but I don't have the same stresses that I used to, I don't have the same constant push to acquire shit that I did. Before, I needed more and more stuff, like buying this house, and I've bought all sorts of expensive artwork. You know, I just had this money! You go from having $1,000 in your bank account to having a portfolio worth more than $1 million -- it was just there, and I spent it. But I learned a lot from it, and it was a lesson I had to learn. Things came so easy for me before."

Many other tech workers said they planned to get out of the technology field as well. Tanya Bershadsky now wants to work as a publicist. "When the Web economy collapsed, I felt that I had to reinvent myself," she says. Now she's doing some part-time P.R. work, but permanent work in that industry isn't easy to come by, either. There are several entertainment-industry job boards that allow workers to pay to get early access to new listings, and Bershadsky has willingly done so. It might seem exploitative, she agrees, but in a tight job market, any small edge can help.

Bill Lessard has been writing a book about the technology boom, "Netslaves 2.0: Tales of Surviving the Great Tech Gold Rush," which will be released later this month. But for much of the time he's been unemployed he's worked part-time at a catering company. "I think a lot of people are underemployed like that, and are really in a bizarre situation," he says.

"I remember one time they sent me out before New Year's Eve to place flyers under people's windshield wipers, and this seagull took a crap on me. And I'm like, here's symbolism for you. But you laugh, man, you have to laugh. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. I'm proud of what I've done with my life. I was part of the construction of the Internet, which is the greatest thing since the light bulb as far as I'm concerned."

[Via Salon]

The Best Spyware Stopper - YOU

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 06:30:07 GMT

The Best Spyware Stopper - YOU

By Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier


According to Fred Felman, vice president of marketing at Zone Labs, ZoneAlarm "shuts down Internet connectivity instead of losing control of the system" when an unauthorized application tries to send information from a user's PC.

After years of worrying about viruses and trojans, users have a new nemesis: spyware. This term refers to any program that distributes information from a user's computer without that user's knowledge.

To be sure, most of this software is more annoying than harmful. However, as Jamie Garrison, co-owner of Aluria Software, which produces the spyware stopper, put it, "Some spyware can ruin your life. It's that invasive."

So, what can a user do to avoid the onslaught of underhanded tracking programs?

The Spyware Menace

Garrison said the most pressing issue related to spyware is that people do not take it seriously enough. Part of the problem is awareness. Many people are only now finding out about spyware. "Few users are aware that everything they do on the Net or even while not connected to the Internet can be tracked," Ken Lloyd, lead developer at Aluria, told NewsFactor.

After all, spyware can range from a stealthy program that runs in the background, transmitting your surfing habits to a company for marketing purposes, to keylogging software installed by a spouse to monitor communications.

"Well over 85 percent of people have spyware on their computer," Lloyd said.

Programs That Fight It

Gartner analyst Richard Stiennon told NewsFactor that while antivirus products from companies like McAfee and Symantec can be used to detect spyware, the user is also an important ingredient in stopping spyware. He or she must recognize spyware programs -- and know enough to remove them -- when they are detected.

Of course, most users do not know much about spyware. Stiennon recommended that users get a desktop firewall program that blocks unwanted outgoing connections. Then, even if spyware is running, it will be unable to connect to a server to transmit information.

One personal firewall, ZoneAlarm, can make sure spyware cannot communicate with the outside world. According to Fred Felman, vice president of marketing at Zone Labs, ZoneAlarm "shuts down Internet connectivity instead of losing control of the system" when an unauthorized application tries to send information from a user's PC. Felman told NewsFactor that ZoneAlarm allows users to specify which programs are allowed to send and receive data over the network. Users even can restrict programs to certain ports or domains.

And in addition to antivirus vendors and personal firewalls, a number of companies like Aluria make spyware detection and removal software.

Arms Race

Even when a person recognizes spyware on his or her computer, removing it may be tricky business. According to Garrison, some spyware manages to "embed" itself into the software Windows uses to provide TCP/IP (Internet networking) services. She said that removing such spyware "actually removes your Internet connection. It's fixable, but it's a real pain."

This makes sense, considering that malware authors are always trying to stay one step ahead of users and spyware stoppers. The latest rash of annoyware consists of programs that send pop-ups to instant messaging programs like MSN Messenger. Even more irritating, many of those pop-ups simply inform users that they are vulnerable to unwanted messages.

And it gets worse: Stiennon said that programs being sold to block this plague of IM pop-ups are scams, too. "Just go into the admin functions in the control panel [and do it yourself]," he said, noting that the program vendors are taking advantage of people who do not know they can turn off the function by themselves.

The Perils of Free

In fact, according to Garrison, most spyware is installed by users voluntarily, even if they do not know it. She blames free products like Grokster and Kazaa for piggybacking spyware onto users' computers, though she noted that it is all disclosed in the fine print. "Here's the really dirty part of it. Let's say you go out and download a free program. It's almost certainly going to have spyware.... Very rarely does spyware get on your computer without your consent."

So, what is the solution? "Stop using free products... Don't download it if it's free."

Lloyd agreed. "The latest trend for software companies is to give their software away for free. By doing this they bundle ad software within it. They usually tell the customer in the EULA (end user license agreement) ... that some additional ad-tracking software will be installed, but they bury it so deep that the average person has no idea."

It's the User

In addition, Garrison said, most users have themselves to blame for spam. "They say yes to it in their user agreement."

Felman noted that users also need to be conscious of human engineering. "It's interesting; we talk about the automated way that people do this, [but] there might be a bigger risk in the human factor." Felman mentioned scams that depend on users not paying close attention and providing information to third parties about usernames and passwords. "I got an e-mail from an organization purporting to be Drugstore.com, and it looked a lot like other e-mails I've gotten from Drugstore.com, using images from their server but the text asking for my username and password."

Ultimately, the solution to stopping spyware -- and other scame -- lies with the user. Spyware removal and detection software can be useful, but the best way to fight it is by making sure it is not installed on your computer in the first place. In the end, as Garrison said, the best spyware-stopper is an informed computer user.

The strange case of the 'ruthless bastard' lawyer and the email hoax

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 06:10:13 GMT

The strange case of the 'ruthless bastard' lawyer and the email hoax
It's cost one law firm time and money. It could see the prankster doing time...

A Scottish law firm is counting the cost of a damaging hoax email that someone has sent to thousands of addresses, purporting to be from a prominent partner at the firm who promises to be a "ruthless bastard" and "screw the opposition" on behalf of his clients in legal proceedings.

The short, four-line email was sent out earlier this week and made to look like it came from legal practice Blackadders, which is based in Dundee. It is signed-off with the real phone number, name and email address of one of the firm's most experienced lawyers.

It reads: "If you want to raise a Civil Court action against someone anywhere in Scotland then I am your man. I am a ruthless bastard and I will screw the opposition to the wall even if it means bending a few rules."

Blackadders told silicon.com that the matter is now with Tayside police who are working with the firm's IT department. The company apologises to anyone who has received the email and stresses it was sent from a Hotmail address - probably using email address generating software favoured by spammers - and not by an employee.

Scott Williamson, Blackadder partner with responsibility for IT, told silicon.com: "This is clearly an attempt to discredit our reputation. We're not jumping to any conclusions as to who's behind it. It could be a former client, someone who came out second best in a court action - potentially one of thousands of people."

Blackadders has provided email header information to the police, who are now requesting ISPs release data relevant to the case.

Williamson said he doubts the culprit will be caught and added: "What's scary is how this was so easy to do. Any business affected by this kind of thing must realise the ongoing implications."

As well as adversely affecting the company's reputation, the law firm is dealing with bounced back emails from the original spam list as well as written replies - some in themselves offensive - asking why the partner in question would send such an email.

[Via Silicon News]

Girl Baffles Teacher With SMS Essay

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 05:21:30 GMT

Girl Baffles Teacher With SMS Essay

Last Updated: 03 Mar 2003 02:11 GMT

LONDON (Reuters) - An English essay written by a teenager in text messaging short-hand has reignited concern among teachers that literacy standards are under threat.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Monday that the 13-year-old's teacher could not decipher what the youngster had written.

"I could not believe what I was seeing. The page was riddled with hieroglyphics, many of which I simply could not translate," the teacher told the newspaper.

The teenager's essay which caused the problem began:

"My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc."

In translation:

"My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It's a great place."

Judith Gillespie, of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, told the newspaper a decline in grammar and written English was partly linked to the text messaging craze.

"Pupils think orally and write phonetically," she said.

[Via Reuters]

Oh My God -- Real News from World Economic Summit by Unguarded Reporter

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 07:16:32 GMT

Oh My God -- Real News from World Economic Summit by Unguarded Reporter

A reporter sent an email to a bunch of her friends about the World Economic Summit. She foolishly forget to tell them to keep it secret. Some startling revelations on what the world's rich and movers and shakers are thinking. She is very angry at finding these comments on the internet. Excerpts below:

The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of the dollar". All of this is without war.

- If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.

-Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.

- US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S. cannot behave in partnership with its allies -- especially the Europeans -- it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS, as well.

When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative -- it came from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!

I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."

These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war, and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and it's heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to the "second hit" effect -- a second hit that would prove all the world's post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what this, or that, war scenario would do to spot oil prices.

The world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive -- especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally -- better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.

Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.

Ciao,
Laurie (Garrett -- Newsday reporter)

Alert Web detectives insist these 'see-thru skirts' are a Photoshop job.

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 05:41:38 GMT

The Ottawa Citizen

Jennifer Campbell

Alert Web detectives insist these 'see-thru skirts' are a Photoshop job.

"The latest Japanese fashion craze" is definitely not what it seems.

The Queensland Sunday Mail reported last week that men's heads were madly swivelling in Japan over teens sporting see-through skirts that reveal the buttock cheeks and thongs or underwear of the wearer. But, the report authoritatively explained, the naughty bits are actually cleverly painted onto the fabric.

Turns out the newspaper was duped by an Internet hoax that's been circulating as an e-mail reading: "What you see below are not see-thru skirts. They are actually prints on the skirts to make it look as if the panties are visible. They are the current rage in Japan."

Web detectives say that the skirts probably don't exist and the photos are likely the result of some fancy mouse work. Says David Emery, author of Urban Legends and Folklore: "This is the latest fashion craze in Japan? I don't buy it ... These images show definite signs of being Photoshopped."

Mr. Emery points out that the legs of the women in the photos match perfectly with the alleged patterns on the skirt. Another Internet sleuth site, www.snopes.com , agrees.

"Lacking any evidence to the contrary, we'd guess that these pictures have been manipulated, taken from some other source and used out of context, or deliberately concocted to lend credence to a fabricated story," snopes.com states.

The latter site did point out that Japan is no stranger to bizarre fashion, showing photos of "infamous breast scarves." The scarves, which hang down in the right spot on the chest after being wound around the neck once, are capped at either end by a false mammary. However, the scarves were part of an artistic exhibition, not a commercial product.

It isn't just the Aussie paper that got excited about the story. Business people around the world have contacted Kjeld Duits, a Japan-based journalist and fashion photographer, asking him where they can get their hands on some of these skirts to import them to their own countries.

Reached yesterday, Mr. Duits said he's "very close to ascertaining which magazine in Japan originally published the images that have been used by an imaginative hoaxer to fool so many people."

[Via The Ottawa Citizen]

Workplace e-mail Can Explode in Clumsy Hands

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 23:11:11 GMT

Workplace e-mail Can Explode in Clumsy Hands
JARED SANDBERG, The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
©2003 Associated Press

Special dispensation should be given to people like Jodi Sedlock of Appleton, Wis., who spent years in leach-ridden forests and dark caves with bats. Four weeks away from completing her dissertation on bats, the former Chicago grad student still hadn't written her final chapter and desperately needed constructive comments from her adviser.

She begged him for comments and waited in vain all week for them. By Friday, she went home and added a few beers to her sleeplessness, caffeine and fret. She poured her frustration into an e-mail to her friend Nina. "Joel is such a bastard," she wrote. "He hasn't given me his comments."

She sent it out, then went to sleep. When she awoke, she found an e-mail at last from her professor. Her eyes drifted across her Inbox and, to her still-raw horror, she saw the terrible words affixed to his message: "Re: Bastard."

Holy guano! She had inadvertently flamed the boss. A forgiving and jovial man, he would ultimately dismiss the faux pas. But all she could do was cry and laugh - - not a ha-ha laugh but "an insane laugh," she says, "like a crazy woman."

Workplace experts gasp, agreeing with her self-assessment. Under no circumstances, they say, should you ever mock the boss in e-mail. It can threaten your career, torch morale and reveal your woeful unprofessionalism.

But, boy, is it fun. In an often upside-down work world, few things are as satisfying as a wicked e-mail making fun of the boss. Says Roger Brunswick, a psychiatrist at the management consulting firm Hayes Brunswick & Partners: "Ridiculing the boss is a form of humor and a way of coping with the stress of work life that the boss puts you under."

The danger is that the very technology that enables such delightful indiscretion can also betray you. Automatic e-mail addressing and drop-down menus make it too easy to send an offending message to the last person on earth who should see it. That threatens the integrity of a time-honored office tradition: backstabbing.

Perpetrators of this slip have an unmistakable quaver in their voice even years later when they tell about it, as if they had fumbled the pin of a career grenade. They have visions of repelling down the face of their office buildings and crawling through the ductwork to damage the boss's hard drive before he or she can open the e-mail.

Elizabeth Howell actually did that -- sort of. The former human-resources receptionist for CNN was 22 years old at the time and full of fury and spite for her boss. She composed an e-mail in which she called her boss mean, crazy and evil and sent it to her receptionist friend upstairs. Or so she thought. She quickly realized what she had done and her heart began bobbing in her stomach. "I thought I was going to throw up," she says.

Luckily, part of her responsibility included checking her boss's e-mail. She slipped into her office, deleted the tirade and vowed never to do it again. "It really left a serious impression on me," she says gravely, as if she were talking about a near-fatal bout with a bad oyster.

Tech engineer Andrew Green accidentally insulted a big customer when he hit the dangerous "reply-all" button. The customer didn't speak English well, so he had the further humiliation of having to explain to the man why he should be insulted in the first place. Now, he calls Microsoft Outlook "Microsoft Look Out!"

So what to do when the deed is done? Workplace coaches suggest 'fessing up immediately, apologizing, and doing whatever you can to suggest the e-mail was a one-time lapse in loyalty.

Here's better advice: Panic. But not so much that you make the bigger mistake of trying to use that "Recall" feature in Microsoft Outlook. Introduced in 1997, the feature was intended to help people unring an e-mail bell. But the feature works only when both the sender and receiver have Outlook and the offending message hasn't been viewed. Also, the recall notice must be opened first -- and Jupiter has to be aligned with Mars.

Above all, the cancellation notice from the sender just double-dares recipients to read the original offending message. Marc Olson, group program manager at Microsoft, concedes that "whatever is in that first message is now more important than it could have ever been."

Of the 8.3 trillion e-mails sent last year, how many were boss-bashing missives? "We don't have an estimate for that," says Mark Levitt, a vice president at International Data Corp., a technology-research company. He guesses a percent of a percent -- or 830 million barbs.

That includes Christie Breen, a former Internet developer. She begged Rich Ridolfo, then director of technical operations at Forrester Research, to scrub a mistaken e-mail. Ms. Breen was asked by her boss to furnish a "transition plan" for a new job at the firm. Instead, she sent her resume, which she was circulating outside the company.

Corporate policy didn't allow Mr. Ridolfo to delete it, but he took Ms. Breen to Dunkin' Donuts for consolation. Turns out he didn't have to. Her boss later thanked her for sending the "plan." The e-mail was never even opened.

[Via SF Gate]

Giveboobs.com: Tempest In a 'C' Cup

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 05:38:08 GMT

[Story]

Because apparently what the world really needs now is a young, perky, semi-intelligent girl named Michel who would like you to help pay for her big shiny new breasts. This is the idea behind giveboobs.com. This is yet another one of those glorious reasons you have DSL and copious free time and an inexhaustible sense of revulsion and awe. This is the sinister, ingenious online begging mini-phenomenon, as originated by savekaryn.com, taken to its next logical, and very nipply, level.

      You might remember Karyn: the blonde, semi-clever, twenty-nine-year-old Brooklyn lass who ostensibly ran up twenty grand in credit card debt and then went online imploring complete strangers to donate to her get-out-of-debt fund because she bought, like, too much pricey makeup at Bergdorf's and too many Prada boots on eBay? And her site was all, like, cute and simple and sincere and stuff? And her shameless, aw-shucks candor about her vacuous spending habits appealed to something sweet and altruistic in many thousands of sufficiently amused Netizens who all sent her a dollar or two or ten?

      According to her site, Karyn collected her twenty grand. All of it. No more debt. Go figure.   Then, boom: a hundred copycat sites were spawned, everything from yuppie couples begging for cash to pay for their fertility treatments to despondent pleas for help with medical bills. Ed wants a new Hummer. Penny wants help paying for nursing school so she can have a career after she divorces her nice, boring husband. And so it goes, all the way down to the unfunny dumb guy who just wants to be a millionaire and buy BMWs and big-screen plasma TVs and be a drain on the cultural karmic oversoul for about sixty more years.

   And now there's giveboobs.com, one young damsel's attempt to get you, the casual smut-loving boob-attuned Web surfer, to help pay for her boob job because, well, her mom won't fork over the cash. And the surgery is really expensive. And who doesn't love the idea of big, rock-hard cataloupes on tiny five-foot-one girls whom you will never date, much less grope the large, oddly unyielding breasts of? Exactly. She has raised $3,300 so far.

      Michel's site appears to be, at first nipply blush, one part genius, one part sad social commentary, one part sexually empowering yelp of independence, one part proto-feminist sabotage. Or something.

     It is where those icky Cosmo-enabled sexual constructs, those unhealthy and impossibly unrealistic ideals of cheap feminine beauty so loathed by feminists and Oprah, meet perky misguided entrepreneurial spirit. It is a multifaceted minefield of mixed messages. It is quintessential America. Indeed, the site asks one of the most pressing and prescient questions of the day: whom do big hard fake boobs serve more, the proprietor or the populace at large? Who truly derives more pleasure from admittedly shallow but hugely popular acts of plastic surgery? Cutesy, carnally naive Michel, who will henceforth be saddled with increasingly rigid stalactite appendages, or our sexually voracious culture, drunk on heavily airbrushed, buffed and pumped and lipsticked imagery? And hence, who should foot the bill?

      Some dudes might love the idea of giveboobs. Feminists and the sexually attuned might dread and pity it. But is our Michel really the one worthy of such praise or such derision? Where to aim thy finger of ironic lament?

      It's easy to argue that the evil media — the decades of Baywatch and lad's mags and bad porn — should be held responsible and should ultimately pay for every woman's fake boobs — and maybe a few pec implants and hair transplants for the men, too.

      But what to make of the great rallying cry coming from the hordes of freshly boobed American women: Yo, sweetheart, shut up already, they're our bodies. We love our fake boobs, and what's the big deal? Imitation body parts are de rigueur, they cry. There's nothing wrong with wanting to feel better about your appearance, they claim, pointing out how a full three-quarters of all female celebs — not to mention an estimated 137 percent of L.A. and Miami Beach and Vegas — have gone the way of the fake casabas. Along with nips, tucks, collagen, lipo and Botox, fake tits are now considered mere fashion accessories in the modern woman's arsenal, like diamond earrings or gold ankle bracelets or, say, Ben Affleck.

      Unless, of course, that's utter bullshit. Unless you realize what epic amounts of damage hath been wrought upon young women by such messages, how many Prozac prescriptions and bulimia epidemics and Marlboro/salad diets. how many disoriented and denuded seventeen year olds are now cramming the waiting lists of just how many plastic surgeons and psychotherapists.

      But then maybe you think, Oh hell, lighten up already. It's just a dumb little Web site. My inconsequential buck is funding just one pair of fake boobs in an ocean of silicone. It's not like I'm contributing to the downfall of Western civilization or anything, right?

      Unless, you know, you are. Just a little. Just a tiny bit. Unless there's something sort of ugly and sinister beneath the perky giveboobs.com exterior — the idea that you are, essentially, with your one little dollar, casting your vote for the notion of false charity and fake boobs and all they represent, and all the e-begging phenom represents, and really, who needs that ethical fingernail dragged across their karmic chalkboard?

      Sure, giveboobs.com is no big deal. Sure, it's just momentarily entertaining cultural effluvia. Then again, that's what they said about pop-up ads. And AOL. Spam. SUVs. J. Lo.

      Herein the lesson: Never underestimate the power of the tacky, superficial, stolen idea. When not even the needy are truly needy anymore, when the genuinely destitute and distressed (hello, Lyme disease) are eclipsed by the vacuously cute, by the lazy and the boobiciously vain begging you to pay for some pointless thing they don't even need, that they could get themselves if they actually tried and worked and saved, this might be something worth noticing — and worth avoiding. Besides, giveboobs.com certainly, in the end, won't give our lost Michel any sort of priceless lesson on the value of beauty, or sex, or life, or a buck, or a pair of really nice, small breasts, undistended, breathing free, all-natural and organically nipple-riffic.

      Go ahead — reach up, get a nice grip on giveboobs.com. Take a healthy squeeze of the idea. See? You don't really want that, do you?

[Via Nerve]

Public-Computer Users Beware

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 20:23:17 GMT

Public-Computer Users Beware

03:25 PM Feb. 06, 2003 PT

BOSTON -- A college student was indicted on Thursday on charges he placed software on dozens of computers that allowed him to secretly monitor what people were typing, and then stole around $2,000 using information he gleaned.

In what may serve as a cautionary tale for people who use computers in public areas, Douglas Boudreau allegedly installed keystroke-monitoring software on more than 100 computers at Boston College and then watched as thousands of people sent e-mail, downloaded files and banked online.

According to an indictment by a Middlesex County grand jury, Boudreau compiled a database of personal information on about 4,800 faculty, staff and students at Boston College.

He also stole about $2,000 using the computer information he gathered, according to the office of Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly.

Richard Smith, a Massachusetts-based Internet security consultant, said the software in question is typically used by jealous husbands or wives to spy on their spouses -- or by employers who want to snoop on their workers. The software is not new but poses a "sinister" threat to unwitting computer users, Smith said, noting that Boudreau could have used it with far more devastating consequences.

"With the amount of information he gathered from so many different people, there could have been a lot of things he could have done," Smith said. "I'm surprised this kind of thing hasn't been done more often."

Boudreau, who faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on all charges, was not immediately available for comment.

Boston College said it suspended Boudreau, 21, last year once it learned of his scheme.

"While we are grateful to the attorney general's office for their assistance in this case, it's important to state that Mr. Boudreau gathered personal identification numbers on students but never misused them in any way," said Jack Dunn, a spokesman for the college.

Dunn said the college was obligated by law to report the scheme to state prosecutors once it learned of it. Dunn said the Warwick, Rhode Island, student had cooperated with police during their investigation.

[Via Wired]

Top 10 Most Annoying Spam in 2002

Mon, 27 Jan 2003 04:40:41 GMT

Anti-Spam Leader SurfControl Cites Top 10 Most Annoying Spam in 2002
Company Urges Organizations "Layer Security" To Control Spam and Minimize Internet Risks in 2003

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., (January 21, 2003) - If you received a personal e-mail requesting help from a Nigerian attorney last year, you weren't alone. Thousands of other e-mail users received it as well. This e-mail is ranked as one of the "Top 10 Most Annoying Spam" in 2002, according to SurfControl, a leader in the fight against spam as the world's number one Web and e-mail filtering company.

The bogus Nigerian e-mail was among the most widely distributed and recurring pieces of electronic junk sent to inboxes around the world, including thousands of inboxes in American corporations. Spam last year cost nearly $9 billion in lost productivity, increased hardware and operational costs, such as additional servers, storage and IT staff time to deal with the problem, as well as bandwidth-clogging network issues, according to recent industry research and SurfControl experts.

SurfControl researchers compiled a list of the 10 most annoying spam by subject line:

XXX Your Free Adult Sites Password
Check out our new lower prices. Many "drug" types available. (Viagra)
Get Cash Out! Refinance while rates are still low…
Urgent and Confidential (Nigerian Hoax)
Remote Control Car The Size of a Hot Wheel!
Rated #1 Best Online Casino
#1 Pasta Pot As Seen on TV
Get Out of Credit Card Debt
Meet Singles in Your Area
Copy Any DVD in One Click

"We've seen a dramatic increase-more than double the number of inquiries-from companies interested in our SurfControl E-mail Filter and Anti-Spam Agent," said Paris Trudeau, SurfControl product marketing manager. "Companies were bombarded with spam in 2002 and this year they are looking for more help and new tools to control the ever-growing flood of spam."

SurfControl urges organizations consider layered protection, such as that offered through its SurfControl E-mail Filter 4.5, which combines strong anti-spam defense, anti-virus technology and advanced e-mail auditing and risk assessment features to protect against the ever-increasing variety of e-mail security risks.

SurfControl's Anti-Spam Agent is a powerful option that protects an organization from spam and junk mail through digital signature filtering to ensure near 100 percent accuracy and manages spam by text and multiple file types, including JPEGs, MPEGS and others. In addition, SurfControl also offers additional layers of spam control through intelligent content and digital signature recognition, reverse DNS lookup and HTML stripping capabilities. SurfControl also uses advanced technology known as Adaptive Reasoning Technology (ART) to apply the power and flexibility of neural networks to the challenge of content filtering and spam control.

"Spam is a huge problem, but companies worldwide are coming to realize it is only part of the problem," Trudeau says. "All Internet content you read, send and receive carries a risk. The need for e-mail filtering combined with intelligent anti-spam technology and other network security measures, has never been greater-and SurfControl's technology can help stop spam in its tracks," said Trudeau.

SurfControl is the only company in the security market that offers a total content security solution that combines Web and e-mail filtering technology with the industry's largest, most accurate and relevant content database. For example, SurfControl Web Filter with the Virtual Control Agent (VCA) provides expert content filtering and expanded site coverage to help companies customize security and manage Internet access to inadvertent or malicious threats to network security, as well as increase productivity, optimize network bandwidth, and limit legal liability. VCA dynamically categorizes new Web content putting relevant, specific and up-to-date content filtering in the hands of each organization. VCA's dynamic categorization combined with SurfControl URL Category list and daily updates provides the most comprehensive and accurate Internet management solution available.

[Via Fark]

US Military Spams Key Iraqi Officials

Wed, 15 Jan 2003 03:32:17 GMT

US Military Spams Key Iraqi Officials

Sun Tsu once said, "To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence." Indeed, the history of psychological warfare (PSYOPS) is replete with episodes of cunning ruses and devious mind games. Apparently, the Pentagon has decided to begin a bold new chapter in the art of disinformation and subterfuge. Their tool? Er, spam emails:

Thousands of e-mail messages have been sent out since Thursday, a military source told CNN. The official says "this is just the beginning of a psychological warfare campaign" to convince the Iraqi leadership they cannot win a war against the United States and its allies. The message includes instructions to the e-mail recipients to contact the United Nations in Iraq if they want to defect. Senior military sources told CNN this was the first time the military had engaged in this type of "information warfare campaign." Sources say the program was developed by the military and intelligence agencies in recent weeks. The disguised e-mails, being sent to key Iraqi leaders, urge them to give up, to dissent and to defect. If they do not, the messages warn, the United States will go to war against them. The U.S. military and intelligence officials were apparently hoping that the Iraqis do not realize where the e-mails are coming from.

This last sentence raises all kinds of unintentionally hilarious questions. First, how can the U.S. government hide their identity in such a situation? For example, even if the Pentagon sets up a dummy email account from "Ahmed" urging you to give it up, I'm pretty sure that any "key Iraqi leader" with an ounce of intelligence would immediately figure out what's going on. Second, how would you make sure that these Iraqi officials don't immediately delete these emails? After all, I'm fairly certain that the scourge of spam emails isn't unique to the West, right? I mean, if these Iraqi officials see an email with the subject "hot Iraqi wenches want you," or "Congratulations! You've won ten million dinars!" what are the chances that they would bother opening it? Anyway, here's the kicker:

CNN learned about the operation Friday afternoon, and was initially asked not to report on it by senior Bush administration officials. Those officials later decided the information could be released.

Translation: Unkie Karl was just about to put a DiLulio on Walter Isaacson's ass, until Colin convinced him that leaking this info wasn't such a bad idea after all.

MIKE WENDLAND: Internet spammer can't take what he dishes out

Fri, 06 Dec 2002 16:01:21 GMT

MIKE WENDLAND: Internet spammer can't take what he dishes out

December 6, 2002

BY MIKE WENDLAND
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

West Bloomfield bulk e-mailer Alan Ralsky, who just may be the world's biggest sender of Internet spam, is getting a taste of his own medicine.

Ever since I wrote a story on him a couple of weeks ago (www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_20021122.htm), he says he's been inundated with ads, catalogs and brochures delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to his brand-new $740,000 home.

It's all the result of a well-organized campaign by the anti-spam community, and Ralsky doesn't find it funny.

"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me."

That they are. Gleefully. Almost 300 anti-Ralsky posts were made on the Slashdot.org Web site, where the plan was hatched after spam haters posted his address, even an aerial view of his neighborhood.

"Several tons of snail mail spam every day might just annoy him as much as his spam annoys me," wrote one of the anti-spammers.

Ralsky is indeed annoyed. He says he's asked Bloomfield Hills attorney Robert Harrison to sue the anti-spammers.

Woman falls for Nigerian e-Mail Spam Scam, steals $2.1m from law firm.

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 03:04:47 GMT

Woman falls for Nigerian e-Mail Spam Scam, steals $2.1m from law firm.

A fool and her bosses' money are soon parted [The Register] [MyFreePress.com]

A bookkeeper for Michigan law firm Olsman Mueller & James has been taken for $2.1m by Nigerian 419 fraudsters, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The 59-year-old woman received a fax from one Dr. Mbuso Nelson of the Ministry of Mining in Pretoria, South Africa, asking for help in getting a cool $18m transferred to the US. We all know what comes next: the hapless victim set up a bank account, only to be told that certain expenses had to be met. Fuelled by greed and stupidity in equal measure, the woman dutifully wired huge sums to accounts in South Africa and Taiwan. Cue popping champagne corks in expensive Lagos restaurants.

Naturally, the promised $4.5m commission never arrived. This proved a tad embarrassing for the victim, who had funded the entire operation with the contents of her employers' bank account. Incredibly, her bosses only discovered the cupboard was bare when a cheque for $36,000 bounced.

The woman now faces up to three years' jail on 13 counts of wire fraud. Luckily for her, sheer idiocy will not be a factor in sentencing.

Meanwhile, other participants in the drama have been setting new benchmarks in superlatives of incredulity. "It's unbelievable that she fell for this," gasped investigating FBI Special Agent James Hoppe, echoing the sentiments of Jules Olsman, president of Olsman Mueller & James. "This is just absolutely beyond description," he said. ®

Internet Pleas For Help With Credit Card Debt, Sex, Hookers, $20,000 to SaveKaryn

Thu, 01 Aug 2002 17:56:43 GMT

The Lord Helps Those Who Help Themselves

If you're desperate for a little lovin' and don't have any potential prospects in sight, you might want to hire professional help . But, what if their prices are just too steep for you? While some people have sought the kindness of others to help them through a financially difficult time, others may need more fundamental assistance.

[Memepool]

Judge, See ya Later, Gator. Gator Software & ad hijacking

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 05:20:08 GMT

Judge: See ya later, Gator

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
July 12, 2002, 1:35 PM PT

update A federal judge on Friday ordered software company Gator to temporarily stop displaying pop-up advertising over Web publishers' pages without their permission.

The order was issued in a lawsuit filed against Gator in June by The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dow Jones and seven other publishers, which allege the company's ads violate their copyrights and steal revenue.

On Friday, Judge Claude Hilton granted the motion, according to the clerk's office at the federal court in Alexandria, Va., where the suit was filed.

The companies had sought a temporary injunction against Gator preventing it from delivering ads keyed to their sites pending the resolution of the suit, in which they are seeking a permanent injunction against the company and monetary damages for any advertising dollars made from their Web pages.

Terence Ross, attorney for the plaintiffs, said the judge quickly granted the motion, prohibiting Gator "from tampering with the 16 Web sites involved in the litigation during the pendency of the case.

"This really is a clear-cut case in my opinion; Gator is infringing our copyrights and trademarks. The judge came to that conclusion, and a jury will make the same decision in a trial."

By delivering unauthorized pop-up ads, Gator is altering the intended display of the publishers' works, a right that has been recognized by the Supreme Court, Ross has argued.

In early August the judge will set a court schedule, and the case will go to trial before the end of the year, Ross said.

In a statement issued Friday, Redwood City, Calif.-based Gator said that it would honor the judge's request but asked for an expedited trial.

"We are highly confident that once all the facts are presented in the upcoming trial, no court will issue a ruling eliminating a consumer's right to decide for themselves what is displayed on their own computer screens," Gator CEO Jeff McFadden said in the statement.

"Such a ruling would attack a consumer's right to use hundreds of popular software applications that automatically display separate windows while the consumer is surfing the Internet."

Gator develops software that manages passwords and fills out forms for about 10 million Web surfers who often download the application unwittingly through other popular file-sharing programs. Also bundled in Gator's software is a program called OfferCompanion, which monitors Web surfing behavior and delivers targeted pop-up ads to viewers. For example, a Web surfer may see an advertisement for Ford Motor--delivered by Gator--while visiting Toyota.com.

Gator has been selling such advertising for more than a year and has accumulated several top- tier advertisers, including Target.com. According to Ross, the plaintiffs were stirred to action after the company published marketing material in April essentially promising ad buyers placement on the Web sites of specific publications, including The New York Times.

According to the suit, Gator is "essentially a parasite on the Web that free rides on the hard work and the investments of plaintiffs and other Web site owners. In short, Gator sells advertising space on the plaintiffs' Web sites without (their) authorization and pockets the profits from such sales."

The decision does not bar Gator from delivering pop-up ads over other sites. But it could establish a precedent that prohibits third-party software operators from delivering ads that alter another Web page. It also highlights mounting tension over tactics used by Gator and others.

Earlier this year, WeightWatchers.com sued rival DietWatch.com for using Gator to deliver ads to visitors of its site. On June 11, a court granted WeightWatchers a permanent injunction barring DietWatch from serving ads on its site.

Last year, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) criticized Gator for selling banner ads that obscure those sold by online publishers. Gator sued the IAB, alleging "malicious disparagement" over its statements, but the two parties found common ground when Gator agreed to stop selling banner overlays.