Fans of parodically bad writing, take note: the Bulwer-Lytton Contest results are in. I’d have made some witty comment, but my creative spark’s just not there tonight; regardless of what they say, no muse is definitely not good muse…

Y’know, after I got one too many spams advertising a Canadian pharmacy “verified by BBB”, I just had to go check it out and see how truthful they were.

So, after removing all tracking information from the URL to prevent any sort of click-through revenue, I entered the address of the site. It looked fairly legitimate, and even had a number of seals at the bottom identifying affiliation with various big names in online business.

Except… well, let’s just say that something was rotten in the province of Ontario.

Upon closer inspection, every one of the links pointed to a page on the pharmacy’s own domain. Sure, they tried to hide it by hiding the address bar via JavaScript, but it wasn’t too hard to unhide it and reveal their duplicity.

And why were they hosting the BBB report on their own site, rather than linking to the BBB? A quick search at the BBB’s web site turned up the real report (compare the mailing address in that first screen shot if you have any doubt!), which points out that they’re not even a member— membership, of course, being a requirement to display the seal featured on the front page. Oops.

Oh, and also, those links in the fake report don’t work at all. So much for getting the much-needed background information.

Even worse: They claimed to be a secure site using a Verisign encryption certificate. Of course, that was also a fake certificate hosted on their site. Indeed, there was no security at all— no padlock in the corner, no HTTPS URL, nothing.

So yeah. Avoid these guys like the plague— no pun intended!

This one… well, I’m not even going to touch the URL, because it doesn’t work anyway. :-p

Subject: Application approval #06864597I Sun, 24 Jul 2005 09:33:19 -0800
From: “Rodney” <Rafael.Braun@charter.net>

(more…)

Subject: UK NATIONAL LOTTERY CONGRATULATE’S YOU
To: codystw@sinamail.com.tw

Never mind that errant apostrophe— why should I be concerned that some random guy in Taiwan won the lottery?

I also have a spam for prescription drugs here from one Sanatorium D. Tinglier. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d be willing to buy drugs hawked by someone with a name like that!

I swear, I just don’t get spammers sometimes. “Fill your wife’s hospital”?!

As is usually the policy around here, all the text below, save for the URLs, is verbatim.

Subject: Rep0rt : f|LL yOur w1fe’s hospita| nOw
From: From: “Dena Horton” <fvgpvpz@webtv.net>

(more…)

I’d be far more inclined believe your e-mail is a notification from a major online bookseller if it didn’t contain sentences like this one, quoted verbatim:

“Complete the form below , with all your corect information wroted by you las time you changed / updated or maked ! your acount.”

Wroted? Maked? Come on…

Egads. The fact that people are opening this Mytob virus despite the utter illogic of its social engineering is scary enough, but what’s even more scary is how much of a bandwidth eater it and others of its ilk are. Here’s a screenshot of what greeted me when I checked my mail late this afternoon, after spending the morning and early afternoon on a trip away from the computer.

OK, so maybe I’m partly at fault for having a catch-all account, but still. At least you can’t say I’m helping to spread it… I’d have to load up Virtual PC and copy it into a shared folder if I even wanted to execute this trash in the first place. 🙂

Edited 2005/06/10 to add: Oh, yeah, and it was surprisingly easy to filter on the server side, too. How? Well, suffice it to say there’s no such product as “Zone38 Antivirus”, so why would any legitimate e-mail mention it? Of course, this needs to be changed to apply to your own domain, but still, it’s prevented me from having a mailbox looking like the one in the screenshot above…

LOL. Someone’s trackback-spamming my blog with a link to “http://thebest-pills/weight-loss-pills.html”. I’m not leaving anything out of that URL– that’s exactly what they posted.

Yes, that’s right. No top-level domain whatsoever. Talk about pointless spam.

Well, I’m visiting UGA‘s campus right now, and the good news is, I think I can get around the campus fairly well now.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about going off campus: not only do the city buses not run on Sundays, they also don’t run after around 6:30 PM. There go all my plans for nighttime mall trips. (And the street on which the mall is located is hardly pedestrian-friendly, I should add… besides, it’s an insanely long distance from campus.)

I hate this world sometimes.

Speaking of bad transit maps and UGA, this part of Athens Transit’s system map really needs to be redesigned. There are so many routes overlapping that I literally can’t tell what goes where in some parts of the map. And some of the street names and landmarks are obscured by the routes, too, which only makes things worse. Oh, and forget about trying to find one of the smaller streets on campus under all those routes– as far as I’m concerned, they don’t exist on this map! >_<