But, hey, the University of Nigeria offers courses that might help a certain Harvard attendee balance his budget. For instance, Retail Management 604:
Learn the secrets of purchasing Hermes and Louis Vuiton leather goods for less than $1.00 each and reselling them for over $100!Just like oil wells!
I just got a bunch of spam in Dean’s World trackbacks.
I’d never seen that before but I guess it’s inevitable.
And so it begins. (Sigh)
Dean, thanks for the heads up!
In the case of Howard Carmack it is $16,000,000 lost in a suit and 3.5 to 7 years in jail.
I am often annoyed by the stretched attemps of journalists and their editors (and your current host) to tempt readers with stupid puns, alliterations and the like. For some reason, yet to be explored, this does not bother me so much when bloggers are the perps.
I am doubly annoyed when they lie at the same time. Today C/net published an article with this headline:
‘Phishing’ scams luring more users
I have a few samples of Phishing scam emails locked away in a folder and, yes, the headline lured me to the article to see if there was new info. Especially the bit about the apparent growing success of these scams.
But it turns out they have no clue. Here is the meat:
…said Monday that in September 2003 the company encountered just 279 phishing e-mails. In January 2004, this figure reached 337,050 and then dropped back to 215,643 by March. The company said it is impossible to estimate exactly how many people have been fooled by the phishers.
You read it right. The rate is down and there is nothing to substantiate the headline’s allegation that these scams “‘are luring more users.” Argggghhhh….
All this aside you might want to make antiphishing.org a regular stop for the latest scam updates.
This looks like a good thing:
Comcast, the US cable giant, is threatening to disconnect customers whose infected PC are being used to relay spam messages.
Up to 30 per cent of spam is now spewing from hijacked “zombie” PCs. Spammers use Trojan horses and worms to take over PCs and use them as spam engines, a practice that can severely disrupt the operation of ISPs.
I’d like to see them extend this to include PCs infected with Blaster and other worms that continually spew out probes looking for machines to infect. There policy should provide a mechanism for these users to regain access once they have cleansed their PC.
There is some risk that Comcast will block some innocents as well. Remember, Comcast is the outfit with the Kafkaesque usage policy.