I just don’t have the time and energy to deal with it. 6 friggin mail with threats and whatever bullshit from Canadian Courts to 10,000 Canadian dollars at stake. All for a stupid stupid spam scam.

JM has a schizophrenic Bro, SM or Brian, and wants us to believe that all the harmless spam including the Single Dad with a *wink* in the end to be  really harmless. And now that his name has become famous in the spam world, he wants to undo the harm.

I am just plain sick of it. And I have decided to remove the posts.  However, I have got hold of a blogger friend, who wants to keep the posts alive. Here are the Links.

Link 1: The story of the Single Dad

Link 2: When spammer strikes back.

Link 3: The trail of mails.

Peace.

An interesting thing I came across today,(like other things on the Internet) is this comprehensive hierarchical chart enlisting the different categories in which GEEKS (probably like me) can be categorized. Most of the topics have stuff related to Japanese Anime or just Anime, and Sci-Fi fantasies and X-Men comics. The hierarchy arrow pointing downards denotes: “Consider themselves less geeky than”. The Base or the Bottom Most in the Hierarchy is Published Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors and Artists. As we go higher up in the hierarchy, the specifications get deeper and more specifically pointed towards me. Stuff, like Anime Fans who insist on Subtitles, Anime Fans who Use the Term “Japanimation”, Pokemon fans over the age Six, Comic Book fans who only read X-Men Spinoffs, et al. The highest point in the hierarchy is definitely not close to me at all, by any stretch of imagination. It reads-People who write erotic versions of Star Trek where all the characters are furries ….OMFG. For the full chart go Here.

Image Courtesy: schaapy

There are no second thoughts about the mobile industry being totally swept by the charm, the intelligence and the utility of Apple’s biggest gadget ever( you think it’s the Nano, fight me), iPhone. Not only has it given immense competition to market leaders Nokia and Motorola, but it has also spawned a huge list of iPhone wannabes, predictably from the Chinese manufacturers, even before it was officially released. The latest addition to the list is a DAP from Taiwanese company Digisino which sports a touchscreen interface, has a voice recorder and FM Radio as well. More surprisingly, it is being displayed at CES 2008. Wonder how Steve would react to this?

Check out the specifications( after the jump):-

FM radio
Touch screen
2.8inch 262K TFT display
Audio formats:MP3/WMA
Digital voice recorder
Photo formats support:JPEG,GIF
with Speaker, mini SD slot
Voice recoding
Supports ID3-tag
Built-in Li-ion battery
Built-in games
Storage capacity: 256MB, 512MB,1GB, 2GB,4GB(optional)
supporting multi-national languages
Supports Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Approval: CE, FCC, RoHS
After sales service: 1 year warranty
Inner packing:
Color box
Outer packing:
40pcs/ctn
Carton dimensions: 54.5 x 32.5 x 28.5 cm

Official site:digisino.com

I am proud of my GMail which has a very sensible Spam Filter. But this time it was Firefox which saved the day for me. Not that I didn’t know it, but it doesn’t hurt to praise Firefox. I received a mail from alert@hdfcbank.com ( HDFC is one of the most established banks of India) with the Subject Line reading:

HDFC BANK ALERT. The mail surely looked like a spam, but was surprisingly in my Inbox. What it had to say is shown in the pic below.

The Link shown here (netbanking.hdfcbank.com) actually redirects to a marcharbel’s org site, which I’m not going to link to.The site has been disable by now, but just tried hitting it (in Firefox) and was pleased to see the results. Here’s what happened.

Hence proved, Firefox rules. Public Service Announcement: Please enable your status bars for your browsers. For any suspicious URLs given in mails, please check the actual URL to which the link provided in the mail is actually pointing it. It appears in the status bar when you have the mouse over the link. Best Security practice: Never reveal financial details like bank account no, User ID, password, PIN no, DOB, personal details in mails. And yes, if you feel any sort of suspicion, it is best to Google for it first. There are scores of websites providing information on such scams and all of them are indexed by Google. Until next time, Surf Safe!