Nobody's Fool

Gone Phishing

You've got to just love the spammers who use such bad grammar that they fumble their attempts to steal all your money:

We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your Citibank
account from a foreign IP address and we have reasons to believe that
there was attempts to compromise it with brute forcing your PIN number.
No successful login was detected and you have full protection by now.
If you recently accessed your account while travelling, the unusual login
attempts may have been initiated by you.

"Brute forcing" my PIN number? Do you think this guy perchance moonlights writing porno spam?

spamwich

Today, I received my first text message spam on my cell phone.

I didn't even know I had text messaging on my cell phone.

I am mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. (I just heard something about Network, the movie that that quote originated from, the other day, and now I feel like I have some good reasons to order it from Netflix.) Spammers have completely infiltrated my personal email account. I can log on every five minutes and have about 12 new spams, most of them about online pharmacies, male enhancement drugs, and ... well, a lot of them I'm not quite sure what they're advertising.

Now, they've found my phone? How did this happen? I am not pleased. We basically don't answer the phone at home anymore unless we absolutely recognize the number ("blocked call" usually signals my parents-in-law, but even then we only know it's them if they call at a certain time of day). Recently some poor, clueless political organization ignorantly allowed their name to ring through on our call waiting. All we needed to see was "CALIF FUND" and we laughed gleefully and left the house.

Text messaging, though, appears to creep in unannounced. And I'm also beginning to understand that I could be charged for getting them. Which also burns me.

I guess what I don't get is why spamming is such an attractive endeavor for these people. Are they actually making money off the products they're advertising? Is "Haha, U Have A Real Small Pe--nis syce" really an enticement for a legitimate number of the thousands of people who received the email? And does the poor woman with the Russian domain suffix who dared to send the poorly spelled message from her account actually get a cut of those sales, or is she just a slave to the greedy genius behind this brilliant marketing scheme?

I've heard all the stories about the women in Alabama who quit their jobs at Dress Barn to become millionaires as spam business owners. But how?

Would somebody please explain the economics of spam to me? Because really, I'm just not getting it.

you got to know your chicken

I suppose this is really not all that mind-boggling, when you consider that there are really only so many things you can do standing in the middle of a living room. I mean, the possibilities are pretty limited. After you get over the initial amazement, you start to realize they probably only had to film several dozen variations to cover their bases.

More amazing is that a pandering fast food chain like Burger King and the vendors that come up with its inane ad campaigns could produce something this clever.

I have to say, he does a pretty impressive downward facing dog.

Best Spam Subject Line of the Day

u r stupid if paying too much for softwares chickadee depressant

(I keep getting these spam mails that begin to state somewhat clearly what they're about, then tack on the strangest nonsequitors at the end. And if they weren't obviously generated by some kind of bot or something, some of them would be genius.)

Ghost World (Wide Web)

I've often lamented that I'd never again be able to see the home pages of the dearly departed dot-coms that at one time in my life were so familiar. They were so much a part of our culture there for a few years, even if most of them were jokes.

This site captures a good many of the pages just before or just after their demise, before the servers were unplugged. My old dot-com isn't on there (we barely scratched the surface of consumer recognition), but the site where I met my husband is, as well as a few of my old favorites and some of the more infamous dot bombs.

I stumbled upon this quite by accident this afternoon. I was looking at a vendor's Web site and noticed the vendor linked to marchFIRST as one of its "creative partners." What I found there was shocking: it's the marchFIRST graveyard, a sparse page of links to information about bankruptcy procedures and former employees' benefits and W2 information. Rather than pulling the plug, they've let the site exist as a means for dusting up the destruction.

So then I googled "marchFIRST" and found the Ghost Site. It's sad, really, considering that they were the biggest thing in new economy "solutions" back in the day. At one of my own miserably flailing dot-coms, we threw their name around snottily, more out of envy and reverence than anything. They were ridiculously, pompously overpriced, overused, and overrated, but three or four years ago that was OK. How the mighty fall hard.

(I should also mention that I really miss the dot-com ad campaigns. When we were in Maui on our honeymoon, the local radio station would play Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "What a Wonderful Word/Somewhere Over the Rainbow" about ten times a day, and I would turn it way up and yell "It's the eToys commercial!," getting all teary as we cruised along in our convertible. That commercial used to make me cry, boy.)

Old Home (Page) Week

Through blogs, I'm rediscovering some online personalities I discovered in the early, early days of the World Wide Web. (Back when people still called it that. I saw a message on the BART electronic board this morning that referred to the "World Wide Web" and thought it sounded so awkward.)

For instance, I'm very happy to see that Debbie Ohi Ridpath is still alive, well, creative, productive, and recognized. Her site for writers, Inkspot, was one of my first "bookmarks" and daily-visited sites, back when I was still the crazy kid in my office who went online every day. I'm also pleased to see Amy Gahran's blog. Contentious was a fantastic resource for me when I (like everybody else) was trying to figure out what being an online editor actually meant.

The other person I've managed to rustle up from my past is somebody I cyberstalked (in the most innocent way) for years. In college I played around with LambdaMOO a bit. I never really understood the way it worked — the supposedly fascinating part about it was that it was text-based and object-oriented, and that if you halfway knew what you were doing you could build on to it and invent tricks and actually make your mark. Being a geek in an entirely un-tech way, I was more interested in the idea of interacting with other people online (before chat rooms and graphic-based role playing games entered the picture).

One of the more interesting people I ended up connecting with remained somebody I kept tabs on for two reasons. He was the first person to make me aware that my idea of combining concentrations in design and writing was actually not so far-fetched (he was a grad student in Carnegie Mellon's Interaction Design program). He also maintained one of the most comprehensive lists of interesting links on his personal Web page that I'd ever (and still ever have) seen, so I bookmarked him and returned time and again. Recently, looking for one of those links again, I googled him and found his blog. He's still thoughtful and full of good ideas, just like he was back in (gulp) 1994.