Spam "from" the "Church" of Scientology

Hello, what do we have here?

The Church of Scientology Mission of Sherman Oaks is extending an invitation to you to receive an OCA Personality Test and evaluation free of any charge or obligation.

Your personality has everything to do with your income, your future, your personal relationships, and your life.

A test of this kind would normally cost you $500.00 and up. It is offered to you here free of charge as a public service.

[...blah blah blah...]

Contact Us:
Church Of Scientology Mission of Sherman Oaks
13517 Ventura blvd. , Sherman Oaks, CA, 91423
shermanoaks@scientology.net
(818)995-3460

[...] This e-mail message is an advertisement and/or solicitation.

By the definition enacted in US Federal statue, this message is illegal spam, as it does not contain any mechanism for opting out.

It was also sent to an email address that should never receive unsolicited email, which indicates that the address might have been harvested -- also illegal. Has anyone else received this?

Most of the links point back to the domain zogdom.com, which seems to have stealthy whois information. The email originated from CrystalTech Web Hosting Inc. in Arizona.

Remember kids, Scientology isn't a religion. As Wikipedia says:

...the governments of Germany and Belgium officially regard the Church of Scientology as a totalitarian cult; in France, a parliamentary report classified Scientology as a dangerous cult; in the United Kingdom and Canada the Church of Scientology is not regarded as meeting the legal standards for being considered a bona fide religion.

L. Ron Hubbard would be proud...

Tags: spam, Scientology.

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You've probably been noticing some odd things happening with the email feed, like duplicated or missing posts. Sorry about that; it turns out that KBcafe's Rmail service isn't terribly reliable. So I've switched to using FeedBlitz.

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Once you're happy that it's working OK, you'll probably want to unsubscribe from the Rmail service, using the unsubscribe link at the foot of the emails that they send.

Thanks!

What's Google's next move in wireless?

Google's in a great position to take advantage of the many things it has going for it. As well as search, these include:

• Location dependence—Google is now very good at geo-location, and directs you to a search cluster near you for performance. It can also show you geo-targeted ads, which will probably become more fine-grained in future.
• Wi-Fi—it seems that Google is about to launch a public access Wi-Fi product, which it will also secure with a VPN offering: Google Secure Access. This should mean that security will be better on a Google Wi-Fi access point than with, say, T-Mobile. Speculation is that access will be free, and Google will generate revenue by mining contextual information as they do today with Google ads.
• Bandwidth—Google seems to have been busy buying up insane amounts of "dark fiber" capacity in the US, which it'll need if it's going to offer free Wi-Fi!

As an example, combine these three factors with Froogle (Google's comparison shopping service). If you're out shopping in bricks and mortar stores, what if you could connect using your PDA over Google Wi-Fi for free, it knew where you were, and could show you the closest place to purchase what you're looking for?

Tags: Google, Google Secure Access, Wi-Fi, WiFi.

No, I'm not sending you spam

Hi. If you've come to richi.co.uk to find out who's sending you spam ... it's not me.

Spammers usually send email with forged senders. In this case, using email addresses @richi.co.uk. It appears that quite a number were sent out over the last few hours, with subjects like "FW: whats up?" and "lol, I found a gold mine"

In tech. circles, this is known as a Joe job:

an incident of spamming designed to tarnish the reputation of an innocent third party ... most email Joe jobs are acts of revenge.

Tags: spam, Joe job.

Here we go again

So... I was trying to make heads or tails of this press release this morning:

“The [spam] filtering approach was designed to handle junk mail for people receiving between zero and sufficient numbers to cause a nuisance. The real issue now is for people in the flood category, where filtering is not viable.”

Huh? What are they talking about? Let's read on...

Figures vary for the volume of unwanted mail. ... Using 80% means that four out of five mails for users [who get 30 or more spam messages per day] need to be marked, filtered, re-directed, quarantined and possibly archived.

Aside from the dodgy mathematics (there's no direct correlation between the number of legitimate and spam messages you receive), what is the point of all this?

High volumes are starting to strain the filtering approach because the filter has to take action on each mail it determines to be unwanted. This strains computing resources and also obliges recipients to take some action. Because the mail may have come from a source that has sent mail before, the receiver cannot ignore it.

Uh-oh, I have a bad feeling about this...

The alternative to filtering lies in the challenge-response method of dealing with spam, as used by the NMS’s Australian-developed TotalBlock solution.

Bingo! Yes, dear reader, it's our old "friend" challenge/response again. You may recall my previous post on this subject.

So, to summarize, if spam is a "nuisance" to you, why not turn it around and be a nuisance to legitimate senders who want to communicate with you, and be a nuisance to the poor people who are getting their email addresses used as forged spam senders? Yeah, and let's "oblige senders to take some action" instead. That's reasonable. Sheesh.

When will you people figure it out? In nice, simple language:

1. Challenge/response causes spam
   
2. If you use it, you're a spammer
3. If everyone used it, email wouldn't work!

Tags: TotalBlock, spam.