The anti-piracy parody

Anyone else spotted the irony in The IT Crowd’s parody of “anti-piracy” advertisements? Yep, the bloke who ripped it and then uploaded it to Youtube was committing piracy.

Ebay phishing scam

Last weekend, I got one of those “unpaid item reminder” emails from what looked on the surface to be the automated Ebay system. Here’s how I immediately recognised it as a phishing scam:

1. The "To" message header says "undisclosed-recipients". No personal email addressed to you would ever be sent to "undisclosed-recipients" because it’s a sure sign that it’s a bulk email addressed to a bunch of other people too.

2. The "X-Mailer" message header says "Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00". Since when would any business, especially one the size of Ebay, use Outlook Express?

3. Because my email client is configured to ignore HTML, all I could see in the body of the message was a single sentence which says "this message does not have a plain text part". I don’t know of anyone other than rank amateurs or spammers who send HTML-only mail.

These people are about as dumb as dodos. I wonder how much money they made last week?

I’m going to be rich

I got five copies of this over the weekend. It must be important if “Madam Cole” went to the trouble of sending it five times, right?

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More spam than legit email? You betcha!

Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica quotes an IDC report that predicts this is the year where spam will for the first time outnumber real email. I have no idea how the folks at IDC came to that conclusion but looking at our own ISP’s internal statistics, that’s already happened well before this year.

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Merchants of Deception

Just finished reading “Merchants of Deception” by Eric Scheibeler and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who has suspected that there might be dodgy goings on at Amway, one of the largest privately held companies in the world.

If you might have suspected that the Amway business is designed for Amway to make lots of money, while the majority of the recruited distributors slowly go financially broke while destroying their existing relationships, read about one man’s experience of nearly a decade in the Amway inner circle.

Then make up your own mind.