Category: The Web Sucks

Damned if you, damned if you don’t

I had a chuckle when I read these two bullet points in the Mozilla Firebird 0.6 Known Issues release notes: Form auto-complete is still an unstable feature and may lead to crashes. Followed immediately by: Disabling of form auto-completion is not working. Makes me wonder why I’d ever consider using something other than the World’s […]

Economic cost of the support@microsoft.com virus

Those wacky virus people have done it again. The big@boss.com virus (W32.Sobig.A@mm) has mutated into the support@microsoft.com virus (W32.Sobig.B@mm). Ariella and I were chatting about this over lunch. She suggested that if the government simply bought the rights to distribute Norton Antivirus and legislated that it be installed on all computers, we could do the […]

Investment advice

I’ve gotten about 5 or 6 copies of this spam message today: Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 20:28:48 -0700 From: Administrator <Admin@CorporateKiller.com> To: <admin@r…> Subject: Corporate Killer COOL Hello! you must invest money in http://www.corporatekiller.com/ This good!!! Very good! Admin of http://www.corporatekiller.com/ After such a persuasive argument, I’d be intersted in making an investment. Corporate […]

I almost fell victim to an identity-stealing scam

I got this email today, and I almost believed it. It’s a typical http://user:password@hostname/ trick. In this case, the user is tricked into thinking that http://www.paypal.com:secure-verifyaccount968ktz642@p9.da.ru/ is a PayPal URL when in fact it’s actually a website served up by http://p9.da.ru/ Here’s the full source of the email message: Return-Path: <anonymous@m1.netfirms.com> Received: from m1.netfirms.com (m1.netfirms.com […]

Hebcal by Voice is going away

Got this email from Tellme today: Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 01:10:11 -0800 (PST) From: Tellme Studio <developer@tellme.com> To: michael@… Subject: Tellme Studio program change VoiceXML Developer, Tellme has made many investments in VoiceXML over the past four years. One of these investments was in the Extensions program, with the goal of making VoiceXML a […]