Markus’ Blog

Has your e-mail address ever been used as sender address in spam? Count yourself lucky if your answer is no. Mine has — as of yesterday night. My main e-mail address, that is, the one I never give out to sign up for something, the one I never enter on web forms. Bloody fuck!

Needless to say I am highly pissed.

I hate spam and consider spammers the scum of mankind in the 21st century. And now this. Guys, I hate you lots already, you don’t need to try getting me to hate you even more.

So far, the fall out has “only” been bounces (“mail could not be delivered”) and auto replies (“Thank you for your e-mail regarding ‘V*1*AGRA’. I am currently out of the office, but will read your e-mail when I return.”). I got 50 51 of those between Mar. 27, 22:56 and Mar. 28, 04:52 Mar. 28, 08:05.

If that’s it, then I got away fairly “good”. I don’t think it’s over yet, though. What pisses me off the most is that I can’t do ANYTHING about it. NOTHING. They send spam with my e-mail address and I get to sit back and watch, and receive — at the very least — all the bounces and auto replies. However, if I’m truly “lucky”, I’ll get (some of) the blame for sending the spam, too.

I am waiting for two things now:

1. that those fucking bastards keep re-useing my e-mail address in future spam runs, i.e. it’ll never end and I’ll have to can my e-mail address. They have it now, so why not keep using it. Stuff it into a big database and have the spam sending software randomly pick it.
2. for pissed off people, who still don’t know that spammers fake sender addresses, telling me to stop trying to sell them pills or other shit and threatening me with law suits or something.

Just lovely.

I am dying to know how they got a hold of my e-mail address. That would be very, very, VERY interesting. Alas, I am never going to find out.

PS: Oh, another bounce just came in as I was typing this post. I had no idea I was fluent in Russian (and Mandarin, too, by the way, just in case anybody was wondering):

This is the Postfix program at host mail.ngks.ru.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.

For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the message returned below.

The Postfix program

<kribtsov @int.ngks.ru>: data format error. Command output: kribtsov: Mailbox does not exist

Reporting-MTA: dns; mail.ngks.ru
Arrival-Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:10:43 +0300 (MSK)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; kribtsov@int.ngks.ru
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; data format error. Command output: kribtsov: Mailbox does not exist

Subject: Те�нологи� п�о�е��ионал�ного �еле�онного поведени�
From: ��и��ина <mmayer[at]mmayer|dot|net>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:33:50 +0000
To: <kribtsov @int.ngks.ru>

TPE���� дл� �ек�е�а�ей, менедже�ов по п�одажам, �е�еп�иони��ов

«Т�Х������Я �Р�Ф�СС�����Ь���� Т���Ф������ ��������Я»

1 а п � е л � 2008 г. (� 10.00 до 18.00)

1. Спе�и�ика �еле�онн�� пе�егово�ов. �б�ение без виз�ал�ного кон�ак�а: важное п�еим��е��во п�и пе�егово�а�. (Уп�ажнение).
[...]

This news doesn’t come entirely unexpected. Apparently SCO filed for bankruptcy protection shortly after they lost their lawsuit against Novell. The courts ruled that “Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights” and not SCO. That was on August 10, 2007.

If SCO doesn’t own the copyright to UNIX to begin with, they don’t really stand much of a chance suing IBM for copyright infringement, which was going to be their ingenious next step. So, on Sepember 14, with nothing else left to do, SCO filed for Chapter 11 protection.

Dear SCO Customers and Partners,

This afternoon we took the extraordinary step of filing for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to protect assets for our creditors and stockholders and to ensure the continuation of our normal business operations. This decision was not taken without extensive consultation with the board of directors, and many outside experts and legal counsel.

SCO intends to maintain business as usual throughout the Chapter 11 proceedings. Subject to court approval, SCO will use the cash flow from its operations to meet its capital needs throughout the reorganization process.

Other companies such as Delta Airlines, Texaco, Dow Corning, K-Mart, United Airlines, Toys R� Us, Macy�s Department Stores and others have emerged from Chapter 11 protection after restructuring themselves for success. We intend to do the same.

We value our relationship with you and want to provide the assurance that you can continue to order product, and receive exemplary service and support from us during this restructuring period.

We invite you to consult with your SCO representative if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Darl McBride
President & CEO
The SCO Group

That’s what you get, suckers. Instead of being a technology company (like you once were) and trying to innovate, adapt and change, you decided to become a lawyer shop whose sole reason of existence was to find parties you can sue for copyright infringement: parties who actually did some productive work. Some parties didn’t even make profit off their work, because it was released to the community for free. Yet, you tried to make money off of them. Impressive business model, I have to say. Why do productive work if you can just sue those who actually do work and make them pay you?

Well, because it didn’t quite work, did it? And that’s good. You are a disgrace to the technology industry and I hope you either go under and disappear, or re-emerge as a new company with new goals. A company who will actually focus again on creating and selling a product and making their customers (and shareholders) happy.

Yesterday, I sold my trusty Sun Ultra 60 after owning it for 6 or 7 years. Can’t remember if I got it in 2000 or in 2001. I got it in fall, that I do remember.

The box definitely found a good home — with a fellow geek that is looking forward to experimenting with Solaris on SPARC hardware. Way to go, my little box.

I got another interesting specimen of e-mail today. It’s along the lines of this masterpiece I wrote about last year.

Here it comes. The e-mail address they published in the original has been removed, because I am certainly not going to help them with their scam by publishing their e-mail even more.

Dear PayPal,

This is a message to inform you about the CASE PP245621185, concerning your paypal account and 1 other

Beginning on 2 July 2007, a new PayPal company, PayPal (Europe) S.a r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. (PayPal Luxembourg), have become the service provider for PayPal in the EU.

Due some technical errors we face we have delayed some payments. You are now having 1 payments to you from [hotmail -email address removed] of a total of 321.65$ to be added in your account.

Please proceed to the payment of the fee (0.35$for each payment+1%) which is 3.26$.

Once your payment been received you will get a receipt via mail and your payment amount of 321.65$ will be visible and added in your account. If there is no amount in your account or you are not able to proceed with the payment your account access will be limited. Login in the following link and proceed with the process.

Sincerely,

PayPal Account Review Department

The first thing to notice, of course, is the bad English the mail is written in. Although I have to say it’s not nearly as bad as the “German” in that other e-mail from last year. At least this e-mail is understandable and only slightly off. Still, not the kind of publication you’d receive from a reputed company.

The scariest thing, though, is that here will actually be people replying to this scam by sending money. And you don’t need many people replying. Say it cost $500 to send the spam to 2 million e-mail addresses. All you need is 0.1% of those 2 million recipients to reply to you and you are making $(3.26*2000)-500=6020. More than $6000 in profits.

Yes, 2000 people is lots, but 2000 people out of 2 million is not that many. Still, I don’t know if it is actually reasonable to expect 2000 people to fall for this scheme, but it is certainly a possibility.

The funniest detail I haven’t even mentioned yet. They didn’t even get their calculation right. It says “Please proceed to the payment of the fee (0.35$for each payment+1%) which is 3.26$.” If I understand correctly, that means 321.65*0.01+0.35, but the result of that calculation is 3.56, not 3.26 as they claim.

Obviously, they are not very thorough scammers.

The new computer’s up and running. Yay. Even the dual screen setup works (thanks to Xinerama).

All the data has been transferred over. The new box is nice and fast, quieter than the old one, too. And it has two screens. I am happy. A few kinks remain. Power saving sometimes doesn’t bring back the monitors from stand-by. That’s a little annoying. Once I find out what’s causing that and what to do about it, it’ll be pretty much perfect.

I’ll have to tweak and fine-tune the configuration a bit more, but that can wait till we get back from New York.

So my computer got here on Monday, a full two days earlier than projected by FedEx. That was good news. Even better news was that, unlike February of 2006, it wasn’t busted, which means I get to keep it. Everything is looking good and the box seems in perfect working order.

I began setting it up Monday evening. For the first time ever I used Solaris netboot to install the OS rather than burning CDs and installing from them. I started preparations to set up my current workstation as boot- and install-server on the weekend.

On Saturday, I downloaded all five Solaris CD-ROM images. On Sunday I set up the install directory, copying everything into a single directory.

The following list is of steps is more for myself, so I know where to look if I ever need to do it again. Anybody remotely sane can skip over the following list.

• Burn CD #1 onto a rewritable CD and making sure volume management for the CD drive is working properly. Both steps are necessary, due to the way SPARC boot CDs are laid out (several partitions on a CD). There’s no (easy) way to access all required partitions other then burning the image to CD and have volume management mount the slices (partitions) properly.
• Copy the contents of CD #1 into the install directory (./add_to_install_server /mnt/disk1/isostuff/solaris/INSTALL/).
• Mount CDs #2 through #5 through the loop-back (lofi) interface, saving myself the trouble of actually having to burn them onto CD, and copying the contents into the install directory.
• Do the same for the language CD.
• Finally, set up all services that need to be running on the install server: NFS, TFTP, BOOTP. ./add_install_client -e 0:3:ba:44:98:b5 titan sun4u
• The step about setting the MAC (ethernet) address of the client workstation on the install server is crucial. The install server has no other way of identifying who’s asking for a boot image. Before, I had just done ./add_install_client -d titan sun4u, which was rewarded with an error message about not receiving ARP/RARP replies when I tried booting the new system.

I enjoyed not having to watch the installation in order to swap out CDs. There were no CDs to be swapped. Everything was already sitting on the install server and got installed in one big sweep.

After that all the Blastwave packages that I am using on a daily basis went onto the box. From KDE to OpenOffice and from Apache to Samba and everything in between.

The “toughest” point here was to get a copy of wget up and running first in order to download the Blastwave packages. I decided to just install the SUNW copy of wget (/usr/sfw/bin/wget) and use that to boot-strap Blastwave.

Next on the list of things to do is to migrate all the data over. Once that’s done, I can start using my new computer as my main workstation and retire the old one.

Anybody interested in an Ultra 60 with dual 450 MHz CPUs, 896 MB of RAM, 36 GB and 18 GB hard drive? lol It’s still not a bad box, especially if used as a server. On the desktop, it’s not the fastest of the bunch.

Apparently it’s geek weeks for us. New gadgets (I like to call them “toys”) all around.

First we got our new printer.

Then, Brigette bought her old LCD monitor from work for a whopping $25. That means LCD monitor for her, and two (traditional) monitors for me (I took over the Brigette’s old CRT monitor).

Next, I ordered my new computer, which is currently on its way from Michigan to Vancouver and is scheduled to arrive on June 27.

And finally, last weekend, Brigette and I got ourselves new cell phones. The old ones were three years old by now and mine had been looking really beaten up for a while. Brigette got a LG TG800 and I have a Samsung SGH-D807. They both have cameras, support bluetooth, play MP3s and are all around way more modern than the old ones. Of course, compared to what the really fancy phones (or Blackberries) can do these days, they are probably a little boring, but they’re plenty good enough for what we use them for. Our old phones we gave to Phones for Food.

I bought (well ordered) a new computer for myself today. It needs to get shipped now, which means I won’t get it till June 27 or so (that’s my guess).

It’s not really a “new” new computer. It’s refurbished. And of course, it can’t possibly be an ordinary computer, crazy Unix Geek that I am. lol I need my occasional fix getting fairly uncommon hardware (and running fairly uncommon OSes on it). While this might be a little bizarre to the ordinary person, I consider it — for the most part — a quite harmless trait of mine. My wife may beg to differ, of course.

But just think, schveetie, how much worse it could be. I could spend all my money on alcohol…err…wait, did I just go and buy an “emergency pack” of beer yesterday? — Never mind, then.

The computer I am getting is a Sun Blade 2000.

Let’s hope shipping goes better this time than it did last year. I attempted something similar in February 2006 and got a busted computer chassis delivered. UPS must have dropped it and dropped it good. The vendor was so nice to ship me a new chassis, but after swapping the guts from the busted chassis into the new one, nothing worked. I subsequently gave up and shipped everything back. Getting the money back from the vendor fortunately not a big deal. But then the 8 month ordeal with UPS began. That’s how long it took them to finally refund me GST/PST and brokerage fees.

This time it’s going to get shipped by FedEx — and by a different vendor. One I’ve (successfully) bought from before. We’ll see what happens. I am optimistic.

I noticed the “Street View” button on Google Maps a day or two after they launched this new feature. I hadn’t read anything about it yet, but I immediately got curious.

I found this to be a very cool feature. I think it’ll be especially helpful finding the way around in a foreign city before actually going there. I find that Google’s satellite images alone already help a lot here. This new feature will improve that experience even more. However, I do find “walking” through the virtual streets a little too slow to be comfortable. And that’s on a system that’s not slow at all doing other tasks.

If I have to drive around in a region I have never been to before, I like to check out the route beforehand. Google’s satellite images allow convenient things like “does road ABC have a left turn lane at the intersection with street XYZ…yes, in fact it has two left turn lanes, two straight through and one right turn lane”. Stuff that is never recorded in any street map. So, now you know where you can turn before you’ve ever been there.

However, I have since read that there have been privacy concerns, as there are people who are easily recognizable in front of their house or on the street. Other times even the interior of apartments can be seen clearly. I totally understand that people are unhappy with that. I wouldn’t feel very comfortable, either.

Wonder what Google will do about that issue, if anything. I hope they do, but without taking the service down again.

Today we got our new HP 2605dn laser printer. We bought it online about a week and a half ago from Costco where it was on sale for a really good price.

Setting up the printer was really easy. Also, it seems to be working very nicely, both, from Windows 2000 as well as Unix (using CUPS with the PostScript driver and a custom PPD for the HP 2605dn).

The benefits over the old HP 990C DeskJet are:

• higher print speed
• better print quality
• network connectivity (the printer hooks up directly to the LAN)
• better Unix support (due to native PostScript)

So far, I am very happy with it, and I think Brigette is, too.