Month: June 2010

Most Convincing Spam Yet

In the past I’ve often remarked that spammers must be stupid because they generally commit some silly, obvious error when forging an email. That all changed today…

This morning I received an email, ostensibly from Amazon, advertising Erotic Monday specials. I’m a pretty laissez-faire kind of guy but this seemed a bit over the top for me. I mean, I read my personal email on my personal machine at work, but I do use the company network and they monitor traffic to some degree. The last thing I need is to have to justify my personal computer usage because I much prefer to work on a mac to the extent possible.

All of this to say receiving this email put me over the edge. I decided to unsubscribe from Amazon’s friendly reminders about sales and specials. Having made the decision, I clicked the “unsubscribe” link only to be surprised when I landed on some purported Canadian pharmacy’s international shipping page. Thinking this to be exceptionally odd, I went back over the email’s source code.

Lo and behold, it’s a damn near perfect forgery. It copies Amazon’s layout, uses images off Amazon’s servers, it links to products in Amazon’s catalog. The only difference being that several key bits of hyperlink functionality run out to this spammer’s site instead of Amazon. This is how I would do spam if I were inclined to spam. Thankfully it was sales-oriented spam and not infection vector spam because I didn’t give it a second thought before clicking the unsubscribe link.

/me makes a mental note to mouseover all links in HTML email before clicking.

Mobile Radio Is Go

Rolled out this morning with the Egg’s new dual-band Yaesu in full operations mode. Once I made it to what passes for an arterial in our neighborhood I fired up the mic on the 2 meter call channel. To my surprise I was answered with a 5×5 from someone also in the south of Bellevue.

It’s not going to set any DX records, but it is my first QSO on 2 meters. If I hadn’t been so excited I would have had the operator repeat his sign because he clipped it each time he identified. Then I could thank him publicly.

Now I’m faced with the daunting task of programming all of the area repeaters into memory with a clunky interface. Should of sprung for the spendy computer cable.

A Yelping Hand

One of the things we tried a fair bit of while in Los Angeles was Yelp* when looking for places to go, eat, waste time, etc. I have to say it batted about .500 in terms of giving good advice. The closer in we were to the city itself, the better it seemed to do. Out in the Empire it was a bit more dicey.

Using Yelp in the Omaha metro area, however? Yelp == Yikes! I’ve never been more certain that I and my circle of compatriots are not similar to the vast majority of folks here. On the other hand, Applebee’s will be happy to know that they’re one of the metro area’s favorite restaurants. /eyeroll

More generally, we discovered a great many more things about the iPhone than we knew before we left. There have been tremendous strides made in localizing the web and I really can’t imagine traveling without one now. It is so much easier to plug in to a “foreign” environment and navigate as a native. All in all, very sweet. I just wish I could go more than 8 hours on a charge these days. Not really ready to upgrade, Mr. Jobs, but this lack of battery longevity and the inability to replace it myself (on the up and up) is really killing me.