Makes me angry to get spam

[Furby]

My grandma got an email a few weeks back saying they had noticed some "problematic" uses of her bank account, i.e. overseas and know criminal type transfers, or something. Wanted her to got to a link and contact them or they would freeze her account. She has an account that she uses over the net, so she figured she had better contact them through the link, but ask me first because I had just stopped over.
I looked it over and wasn't sure what her access site normally looked like. Ran a few searches through  a few search engines to find that the link they had given her was a know phishing site. Went back and reread her email a couple of times and there was no mention of her account, who the account was with, the site she normally uses, or anything like that.
She simply "assumed" by the way it was worded, where it came from.
I can see why they send out billions of these emails, plenty of people just don't pay attention or simply assume.  :

[Timber_Framer]

Furby
I had one just a few days ago that told me I needed to check my Citibank account and needed my account number.
I don't have a Citibank account >:(
I can't imagine how many poor folks are getting ripped off by these scams, and you know old folks are especially vulnerable
 :-[

[SwampDonkey]

Yahoo has a bulk folder where any emails with attachments are sent. If you mark a sender as spam it gets deleted. I direct all my inbox and outbox emails from yahoo through Outlook. My website has 3 accounts (If I remember) and its better than my isp because my ISP either deletes the emails above a certain amount of storage space and you are blindly downloading email bomb messages. Yahoo lets you see the email on the website so you can decide wheather you want to download the message for reading. 99 % of spam I get is from people getting my email address off my website. The other 1% is from a  few sites that trade or sell your email address to spamers.

cheers

[SwampDonkey]

Hey Furby I got that Chinese email once too, last week I think.

Also been gettin junk email with attachments from Poland, but yahoo puts thm to 'bulk' and I hit delete without downloading them off the server.

Firefox has spam blocking built in. Jeff's google script didn't even popup, just a message on a banign screen saying he hijacked google.

I noticed in the new Firefox 1.0 that it doesn't keep opening new windows for each click on the forum reply emails. You can set it to open a new window if you like though, or even open tabs in the one instance of Firefox. Now I can keep my system 'cleaner' by not having to open Firefox a zillion times, one for each click of a new link. That's why they made a back button or drop down history back list for. ;)

[Jeff]

That chinese email is much broader then the forum. People just figure it may be connected to us because of the subject matter. I got an email from somebody that I correspond with but is not a member of the forum or never has asking if somebody could have gotten thier address from me because they were getting this chinese wood spam and they knew I take care of forestry websites :-/

[Tom]

Aren't you taking care of the Chinese Forestry and Wood sites now? :-/ :D

[Woodcarver]

I was another recipient of the Chinese e-mail a few days ago.   For some reason I get very little spam. I hadn't received any for several days until the Chinese e-mail came along.  Don't know why I have been so lucky, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[VA-Sawyer]

If Jeff happened to get a YEN for doing the Chinese Wood Web site. ( Pun Intended ! ) Then we would all know about it.  
VA-Sawyer

[Tom]

That would certainly put a different "slant" on things ;D

[DanG]

You bad, Tom. You really BAD!

I'm just glad that Jeff keep's all the cracks chinked for us.

[Tom]

I feel some yellow wisdom coming about.
Man with one chop stick go hungry.

[Ianab]

Groan  :D

[SwampDonkey]

Warning!!!

Man with two chop stick can go blind.  Poke

[GF]

Jeff,
  I tested your website hijack with Windows XP SP2, IE showed it as a fake website at the bottom with a exclamation point, and showed in the address link https://forestryforum.com/hijack.html.

 I then tested in Windows XP with SP1 and the address does show http://google.com but still shows fake website in the bottom left.

 We see thousands of Spam emails come into our system daily, prblem with spam filtering is you will sometimes get false positives, where the filtering software thinks its spam and its not.  Currently I run all the emails through the spam filtering software and append the word SPAM to the front of the subject line, this allows the people to determine if its real spam or not.  I also do keyword searches in the subject and message looking for certain criteria and immediatly delete those emails at the email server level.

[GF]

Speeking of Chinese, a got a Olympus DM-20 DVR (Digital Voice Recorder), worked good for about a month, now everything is in Chinese on the digital display.  Instruction manual does not even mention anything about this, neither does online support at there website.  Guess the English side of the chip went out  :D :D

[Ianab]

Hmmm.. I see your problem GF
There will be a setup option for language.... just now it's in Chinese :
If you can find someone who can read Chinese and look in the options there is probably one for language... but I dont know the chinese symbol for that .. :

Ian

[GF]

Ianab,
   Called tech support found out you have to format the unit to get it back to english, batteries running totally down causes this.  Luckily the direction they sent me told me to press foward six time then press play, and then foward one time and play, this is how to get to the format menu, but it was all in Japanese.  I cant tell Japanese from Chinese looked all the same to me.

[VA-Sawyer]

Jeff,
I was impressed by your faked google site. I found that if I shrank the faked window then the fake address stayed on my desktop. After updating to XP SP2, I tried it again. It really shows up as a fake site now. For tonight Microsoft is almost a 1/2 step ahead of the scamers. Tomorrow will be another story.  

[sawguy21]

 :D :D :D Chortle. Snicker. Read today that Bill Gates gets hundreds of e-mails a day, most of it spam.  :D :D Sweet justice

[Jeff]

I simply don't understand the wide spread ridicule placed on Bill Gates. He started with nothing but an idea and built it to what it is today. He did not inherit what he has, he built it. The only explanation I figure that fits is jealousy. I think its great that someone has a chance to go from where he started to being the richest man in the world.

Said a hundred times here but never by me, theres MY 2 cents.

[Buzz-sawyer]

Jeff I have a theory, ....
 that the policies and procedures of Microsoft are translated as Bill's personal decisions directed toward the unhappy anti.bills.
The idea being that he wants to suppress competition and control the industry...
thats all I can guess it is....other than class envy...

[beenthere]

Jeff
I agree with what you said and wondered about (regards the widespread ridicule). I also wonder why, but feel that envy and/or jealousy play a big part. I think microsoft may be with us for awhile, although there are those who are trying to build a better 'mousetrap' (and may already have done it).
But, reminds me of the many who have redesigned the typewriter keyboard to be more efficient than the 'qwerty' system. However, getting it to the point that we use it is another story (or bigger accomplishment). Having the majority of users is certainly a plus. I don't plan to change anytime soon.

[Gary_C]

Jeff
I cannot admire Bill Gates for his accomplishments because I strongly resent the way he went about doing it. Particularly the way they promised this Windows X.X Version fixed all the problems of X.X-1. And we kept buying it and buying it. He certainly got rich, but left a lot of angry and unhappy customers in his wake. If his was not the only show in town, he would not have been where he is today.

I actually bought two versions of OS 2 out of frustration (or hope) but that was a joke. Did you know that Microsoft actually put a nasty little virus in one version of their programs that disabled your mouse if they detected any version of OS 2 on your computer. Had to wait for almost an hour on their support line to find that out and how to disable that ugly little message to their competition.

I will never be a Bill Gates admirer.

Gary

[Ianab]

Although I've got nothing against Bill G personally, and admit he is a very astute businessman, the monopoly he has created with Microsoft is a mixed blessing. On one hand at least we have some 'standards', most PCs will run the same software and open the same files. Current versions of Windows are orders of magnitude better than the old ones. But having said that it's still buggy and not particularly secure, maybe MS should spend a little more of it's budget writing secure and bug free programs and a little less on trying to convince us they already have  :
Having been in the industry for a few years now I've become a little cynical about Microsofts business practices. Maybe part of their success is BECAUSE they are more worried about potential competition than about their own products? MS current focus is to try and supress the Linux operating system, they cant buy it, they cant sue anyone for releasing it, so it's a problem. Last MS tech breifing I went to was basically a brainwashing session on the evils of Open Source software. Not that I'm complaining beacuse they gave us all a free copy of Office 2003 Pro just for turning up. I haven't installed it yet, I'm still playing with Open Office  :D

Anyway, thats my ramble, and comes down to MS being a mixed blessing

Ian

[Norm]

I can remember when IBM was the bad boy of business, same with AT&T. Competition and a free market have a way of making those fields change, AT&T is going downhill fast and IBM is not much more than a service company.

Plenty of alternatives to microsoft if you don't like em, problem is that much of what they make is better than the alternative. I use mozilla but IE still works better for some things. Linux is free but is so much easier to hack into than 2003 server I can't use it.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will pave a path to your company no matter who the competition is.