Zone38 Presents...
Letters to the World

31-Jul-2004

Spam is the new absurdism

Filed under: Spam — codeman38 @ 1:26 pm

Not as good as his polysyllabic cousins, I’ll admit, but this spam pseudonym is still oddly amusing: “Chose D. Balls”.

And I have another spam here, this one advertising an online casino, from one “Ogre Beer”. Now I suddenly have the mental image of Shrek downing a mug of booze.

30-Jul-2004

Just call me ‘Under’…

Filed under: Spam — codeman38 @ 10:18 pm

The latest from the spamonym files: “Preposition A. Perot”. No relation to H. Ross, I suppose…

29-Jul-2004

Horsing around

Filed under: Spam — codeman38 @ 10:50 pm

The latest from the ‘silly spammer names’ files: Ponies M. Lounges.

Insecurity by obscurity

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 8:54 am

Webmasters, if you don’t want something to be publicly accessible, then for all that is good, don’t make it publicly accessible! Otherwise, Google might just index it, and in this case, that’s definitely Not a Good Thing. (via Lockergnome)

Phishing For Dummies

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 8:34 am

The sad thing is, there are people out there who would fall for this:

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by
(IKS4LY@aol.com) on Thursday, July 29, 2004 at 10:33:37
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

: Dear Paypal customer,we are sorry to inform you that we are having problem's with the billing information on your account.

We would appreciate it if you would goto our website and fill out the proper information that we require to keep your account

active

Please Update your account information by visiting our updates web site below.

http:\r.aol.com\cgi\redir-complex?url=http://paypalzz.tripod.com/index.htm

We are here to serve you

Steve Johnson.

Billing Updates Center

Acoount Updates Team.

2004

IFLT6A.

Note the reversed slashes, which mean that the link won’t work correctly on any standards-compliant browser. I suppose this scammer only uses Internet Exploiter… serves him right, I think. 😉

And naturally, the scammer’s site has already been shut down. Duh. Really, Mr. Inept Scammer, you at least remotely considered that using one of the most popular free hosting services was not a good idea, didn’t you? Guess not.

::sigh:: Scammers these days. They can’t even be convincing.

27-Jul-2004

Yet another IE bug…

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 8:17 am

Internet Explorer can be crashed by using a particular four-character string in a style sheet. Unbelievable.

26-Jul-2004

Security by infinite recursion?

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 11:06 pm

Here’s a usability howler for you: If you forget the password you used to register on Adobe.com, the site offers a form to recover your lost password. Only one problem… you need to know your password in order to access the form. D’oh!

(via the oft-amusing This Is Broken)

25-Jul-2004

These aren’t the joys you’re looking for

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 10:18 pm

Along the same lines as the previous post, and also found via some Engrish-related Googling… here’s what you get if you buy bootlegged Star Wars DVDs.

Some choice selections from the… rather fractured descriptions on the backs of the cases:

Attack of the Clones: “Improbity trade the federal strike against the nape of the star the empress ten years, day that own thenot of the common run power line peaceful anner the gold grow upped…”

Return of the Jedi: “The ream person is greatly terrified, with the’s war!”

And it’s a bit blurry– I’m especially unsure of the second word– but I believe the description of The Empire Strikes Back starts off: “mark rice the is improbity influence for line road fram for the sake of resisting the black warrior of day follow the elder generation”.

I also love the fact that Return of the Jedi stars “Carie Fishersir” and “Alecgu Imess”. And is rated both R and PG. Those silly bootleggers.

And this is completely ignoring the subtitles from Episode IV

There’s Nothing Can Be Descirbe My Hateness

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 9:40 pm

Yes, everyone’s probably familiar with the captions from that one bootleg of The Two Towers.

But a Google search led me to discover that there’s another bootleg of the movie with even worse subtitles, which appear to have been translated from English to Chinese and back. Needless to say, this version makes even less sense than the more well-known one, which consisted mostly of an ESL student’s mishearings; take, for instance, the subtitle quoted in the subject line of this post…

23-Jul-2004

No, they weren’t advertising condensed milk…

Filed under: Spam — codeman38 @ 9:18 am

Pseudonyms taken from the latest batch of spam:

“Contentment M. Cows”
“Endorser E. Mesquites”
“Menageries O. Howl”

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