This one threw me for a second until I realized I was only seeing the plain-text part:
Before you can purchase magical spells at the Mage Guild, you will have to find Orations by Poggio in the monastery of St. Gall A.D. 1416.
Once I noticed the message had HTML and a GIF image, I realized it was just another image-only spam with random words and random code.
But, hey, I liked the opening line!
Beware the unexpected attack vector – The Register (not that one)
Your enemy may not come at you from the direction you expect. Set up sentries around the beach, they’ll get you through the ocean. Set up a firewall, they’ll get you through web browsers. It’s mainly about computer/network security, but it has an interesting story explaining why there’s only one major newspaper in Los Angeles. (TL;DR: the LA Times bought up all the independent distributors and sabotaged their rivals’ deliveries.)
Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM. After all the wild claims they’ve made without providing evidence, it’s nice to see even the judge is getting sick of it.
You know, when Napster announced its subscription music plan, I never gave it a second look. Not because I assumed it wouldn’t work with my Linux box or Katie’s Mac, but for one simple reason:
No matter how many songs you “buy” on the plan, once your subscription lapses, they’re all gone.
Want to stop paying $15/mo? Say goodbye to your music.
Napster goes out of business? Say goodbye to your music.
On the other hand, suppose I’ve bought a bunch of songs from iTunes at 99¢ each, and I decide I don’t want to buy any more from them? No problem. If the marketplace changes two years from now and Apple decides to abandon the iTunes music store, I can still listen to songs I bought from them.
Amazingly, some people still need this explained to them. John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes, “I thought this was obvious, but, judging by my email, there seems to be a fair amount of confusion…” Forget the math, do the logic first!
There is one flaw in Gruber’s logic regarding CDs vs. subscription music: while I expect CDs will be playable over the next decade or two, eventually they will go the way of vinyl records. However, if I were to bet, I’d expect my CD collection will be playable long after Napster To Go has, shall we say, gone.
Hmm, CNET reports that spammers are starting to route zombies’ mail through the ISP’s servers. (Hmm, that sounds familiar.) I don’t know about the “email meltdown” Linford warns against, but it will require a change in tactics. And so the escalation continues…
Remember Charles Booher, the spam victim who was arrested for making death threats to the sender? (Early reports were that the person on the other end of the phone was an innocent third-party, but that turns out to have been a smoke screen.)
Aunty Spam reports sad news: apparently Booher committed suicide last month, just a week before his court date.
I mentioned I set up some new spam traps a few weeks ago. This amusing disclaimer appeared in one of them over the weekend:
You have received this message for one of the following reasons:
1) By accident.
2) Someone else is using your email address without your knowledge.
3) You have responded to one of our free gifts/courses.
4) You have sent an e-mail to one of our email addresses.
5) You are a member of one of the safelists, by doing so, you have agreed to receive this message
Heh. I like #1. They accidentally harvested the address from a web page and added it to their lists. “You know, I was surfing the web, and I left my autospam-assistant program running, and one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, it was spamming you.”
Of course, the rest of the disclaimer is funny too, if you’re familiar with the history of spam legislation. Continue reading
