Category: Spammers / Scams

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That’s interesting! Since the global CrowdStrike meltdown I havent received SPAM emails

Digital manufacturing.Coincidence? 

It’s probably something like bunch of compromised servers were acting as routing agents and now that those links have been broken.

The IT professionals are looking closely at their systems and questioning all the excessive traffic. They’ve probably throttled it and are waiting to see who complains.

Since so many corporate desktop computers were affected, I’d bet a lot of the worm/phishing/bot software lurking on them has been purged as part of the cleanup.

CrowdStrike was supposed to be protecting corporate computer systems. Maybe this screwup has uncovered that CrowdStrike wasn’t performing exactly as advertised.

It wouldn’t be the first time vaporware was sold to Corporate America. Remember the DOT Com boom/bust? With few exceptions, there was nothing real, but venture capitalists spent billions on smoke & mirrors.

Maybe Corporate America and IT professionals should re-examine CrowdStrike and not be so single sourced? They’ll never listen to someone like me.

I don’t have 100K in student debt forgiven by President Poopy Pants. I also don’t have the right letters after my name, I could say, “The sky is blue,” and they’d dispute or ignore my observation.

A week later one of them would publish a paper on the likelihood that the sky is definitively blue. The byline would have the requisite A.A. B.S. Phd. Maybe there’d be an “et al” too.

For SPAM to drop 99% like it has in my case, suggests something other than CrowdStrike failing. Sure CrowdStrike is the overarching issue and the cleanup is long and tedious.

The question is, will enough people in the right positions ask questions about other functions that have suddenly changed? If SPAM/Phishing emails are being routed by corporate servers then the questions becomes how much of the corporation equipment and bandwidth is being consumed and effectively used for free?

The monetization of SPAM / Phishing is akin to Mining Bitcoin.

No corporation would allow their servers or systems to be used for Bitcoin mining for free. I’ve worked at companies that denied SETI’s distributed computing application from running on their equipment.

The SETI software was at one time a benign screen saver application that used idle computer resources for analysis of radio signals from space. The application itself was slick. It got out of your way when you needed to work. But if you were in a meeting, or at lunch, or home with your family, the system used your desktop CPU cycles to do work that SETI didn’t have the computing resources to do themselves. 

The result: SETI analyzed way more of the sky than they would have been able to in a reasonably short time. Signals of interest got to the right people and sophisticated analysis programs in weeks rather than being buried for years. All it cost was nothing more than leaving computers on, which Corporate America does so that the machines can be updated 24/7 anyway.

But some corporations wouldn’t give SETI anything for “Free”.

So why are these corporations giving SPAMMERS valuable resources for free?

The IT folks don’t pay attention to anything that is “working”. It’s a human trait, “if it works, don’t fix it.”  But that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to be monitoring the systems, specifically network traffic.

The math is pretty straight forward. How much email is sent within the company. It’s logical to assume most corporate email would be internal. If you notice that your external mail packets are greater than your internal email packets and you’re not engaged in sending customer contact and retention emails then you probably need to track down who’s sending all that mail.

Sometimes it’s an employee, making a few extra bucks on the side. I busted some guys who were looking at and sending/selling porn from my testing lab network. I saw a weird spike in traffic and it was regular enough that I got curious.

Sometimes, the network traffic can’t be tracked to a specific computer or lab. Then you’ve got a more serious problem. 

I’m hoping that the IT folks worldwide, in the process of fixing the CrowdStrike problem are also fixing the SPAM problem.

In the mean time I’m going to enjoy my SPAM free life. I’ll be expecting my SPAM filters to blow up as soon as the CrowdStrike problem is resolved and everyone goes back to business as usual.

Later that day…

Ahhh, there we go, the SPAM is restarting. I’m sure it will be up to its normally annoying level in no time. Oh well it was really nice while it lasted.

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Janet Yellen says Trumps Tariffs instead of Federal income tax, would make life unaffordable..

The Article is here

Janet Yellen.Since she’s been wrong on just about every single thing over the past 3 years, I cynically wonder if I should, as a matter of course, invert anything that comes out of her mouth.

I also wonder if she meant unaffordable for the Federal Government? My assumption is that if the Federal Government was 1/3 its current size and functional, that perhaps the tariff idea would work.

It’s not just about taxes. It’s about the horrific inefficiency of the Federal Government. It’s about the way our leadership spends money like drunken sailors. They remind me of a shopping addicted, depressed housewife with a credit card watching QVC all day long.  Believe me, that’s a combination that you do not want.

In the case of our government, we don’t ever see the UPS guy delivering boxes of crap that end up being returned or just going right in the trash can. Our government has found that dumping our money directly in the trash is far more expedient.

You might think I’m being funny. I’m not. I’ve seen first hand what the husbands of shopping addicted folks have to put up with. I’ve seen the stress & strain, the haunted look on a man’s face when the credit card bills keep rolling in and the house is filling with useless crap. I’ve witnessed the fights, the divorces, the “discovery” of a whole bunch of joint credit cards a guy didn’t know his spouse had opened.

It’s not much of a stretch to describe the American Taxpayers as the abused breadwinner being saddled with ever increasing debt by a spouse who insists on buying the Pretty Polly collectors edition faux porcelain doll with genuine agate buttons for only $495. Followed by the same Pretty Polly in a different color dress with genuine synthetic azurite buttons for $595. Both can be purchased together for $1550 and you get free shipping with a certificate of authenticity. 

Our government has forgotten that they’re supposed to provide Value for the dollars they’ve spent. Lately, all we’ve gotten for the taxes they’ve burned so frivolously is the equivalent of a shitload of Pretty Polly dolls, and a maxed out credit card at 22% interest.

Janet Yellen reminds me of the woman who, after the divorce, decides to part with her collection of Pretty Polly dolls, only to discover that every single version she purchased with its “Certificate of Authenticity” is available on eBay for .10 + $22.95 shipping and that she’s not going to be able to pay the rent.

Eventually the Federal Government will reach a point that the American Taxpayer demands a divorce. The manner in which that happens remains to be seen.

The Federal Government in general and this Administration in particular have done more to make the American People turn away in disgust than any time I can remember. 

That being said, I watched the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation.

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Fasinating how draining Twitter is…

At first it’s interesting. There’s a stream of “new” data and ideas.

You interact because some people are funny, and if you’re lonely you’re reaching out to other humans, trying to connect.

There are positive connections but generally they’re temporary. When they go away as they inevitably do, it hurts in a way. It’s not a major hurt but suddenly you’re unimportant in someone else’s life and you wonder if / what you did wrong that made them go away. What changed between this week and last week? Are they just busy, or did they find someone more interesting? With the possibility of thousands of followers all interacting or attempting to interact daily or hourly if you fall of the edge of the map it usually goes unnoticed.

This has the potential to make any loneliness a person may feel, much sharper. 

Some people will move on without paying much attention, after all, there are literally thousands of other people. Some people won’t notice, and others, those with few followers may be devastated.

Everyone is clamoring for attention “Pick Me, See Me, Talk to me”, and yet the satisfaction provided is not sustaining.

In my observations of the “Twitterverse” I’ve started to understand this and noticed a few other things too. 

Twitter has a lot of really shitty, stupid, and narcissistic people. I can only imagine what TikTok or other platforms are like.

For someone like me, seeing that level of stupid or meanness is super depressing. This is especially true when the Twitter Stream is like a broken sewer pipe of shit. It wouldn’t take me long based on a raw Twitter feed to decide that humanity needed to be nuked.

Even if Twitter represented only a fractional part of humanity, it’s pretty clear the species is doomed. Dropping nukes might be a mercy.

The fact that it’s monetized and you can apparently make reasonable money using Twitter, in some cases brings out the absolute worst in people.

The parody accounts are sometimes funny but in other cases are even more depressing because sometimes you’re transfixed by the sheer insanity. You’d never normally watch some of the shit, but it’s like watching an accident, you can’t look away. Then you have to try to unsee what you saw and are depressed about being pulled into it in the first place.

The “Free Energy” Twitter accounts are really depressing for someone like me. Time and time again, the “free energy” person has “figured out” how to make an electric motor.  Something that’s been known for 200 years or so. However, because apparently Science isn’t being taught in school anymore, these people think they’ve got something new. 

All the free energy people succeed in demonstrating is that a rather substantial part of humanity isn’t more than two steps away from seeking out an old crone to “cast the bones” about next years harvest.

That’s really depressing!

So much potential wasted, so many petty people, so much ignorance.

Much of which could be addressed and improved if sites like Twitter and the internet in general weren’t intellectual wastelands.

How many African American fights do I need to see happen in a fast food joint? How many weaves need to be snatched off a fat chicks head before any shame is felt?

Twitter and sites like it pander to the lowest common denominator. In doing so, they drag the rest of us down into the gutter.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Twitter is not healthy, not even a little bit.

I rather think that cigarette smoking is a healthier pursuit. 

I’m speaking of Twitter because I long ago gave up on FaceBook and all the rest. I have a twitter account and I’m considering deleting it. This is actually the second twitter account I’ve had. I’d forgotten why I deleted the first one. Now that I remember, do I delete this one too, or should I simply stop using it then check in only when someone sends me something from Twitter.

Yes, I know Twitter is called X now, but typing “X” in sentences play hell with auto correct and spelling subroutines.

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You know, I don’t think DirecTV gets it.

I saw an ad for DirecTV today. The ad is selling the ability to stream DirecTV content via the internet.

You can see what I’m talking about at directv.com

Their big selling point is that you don’t have to have a dish on your roof. Uh… big deal! Their little dish is the least of the problems with them.

First and foremost in my mind is that I’d still be locked into one of their bullshit programming packages that forces me to pay for channels that I will never be interested in or watch. BET? Uh Nope! Zero Interest! I think I flipped through once a decade ago and needed subtitles to understand the language being used.

All I could think of, was the scene from Airplane where Barbara Billingsly says, “Excuse me stewardess, I speak Jive.”

I looked at their cheapest package which ends up being around 85.00 a month because you have to rent their box and the channel lineup was for shit! Oh they include SyFy, but SyFy doesn’t show Science Fiction anymore. It’s all reality shows and honestly stupid shit.

I can stream local channels without DirecTV. Heck I can and have been streaming local TV channels from places that I think I’d like to live. It’s great to listen to their news and see what’s happening. The human interest stories tell me about the communities. The crime reporting (or lack thereof) give me information about the safety of the area. There’s also a fair amount of information to be gleaned from the political reporting on their local level and how they report on national news.

So why do I need DirecTV? Oh, right I need to rent their box, plug it into my internet, and then buy a nearly $200 package per month to “Experience” all they have to offer. But wait… I already pay $80 a month for internet… So NOW you’re talking $280. For that, I get all their channels, a fair number of which I am not ever going to tune into.

I don’t speak Spanish, so I’ll never use the Spanish channels. I don’t speak Ebonic, so I’ll never watch the BET offerings. I’m not a Catholic and honestly have never enjoyed televangelists. If I’m gonna go to church, I’m going to get up, get dressed, and actually go to a church. So all the church channels are off the plate.

If you start talking about the “Premium” channels… HBO, Showtime, Max, Disney, and all those channels aren’t gong to do much for me because generally speaking they all play the same thing at different times of the day. I can also order those channels through the internet directly, and once again I don’t have to have DirecTV’s box. I’d have to do the math, but I think I can have them on a subscription basis for less as well.

CNN is included on all the packages and MTV is apparently still around. CNN I will not watch, and MTV? Haven’t even thought about that channel for at least 20 years.

I might be interested if I could pick and choose my channel lineup. Let me construct my own package of channels in blocks of 10. Charge a fair price and have a Premium Block where the HBO, Showtime, etc live.

Make it easy for the consumer to change the selections, make it web based, or better yet ON the DEVICE the user has to rent, so no-one has to listen to crappy English from a call center 1/2 way around the world who will inevitably screw things up worse each time the consumer calls about their service.

10 Channels cost X.
20 Channels cost Y
30 Channels costs Z
Premium block of 5 or 10 costs some higher price 

Make the cost per block predictable and easy to select.

Then DirecTV streaming service might have a chance in hell of surviving.

I could see myself easily with the 4 or 5 local channels, the local PBS stations, WGN, and TCM and that would about fill out my first block of 10. 

The point is, suddenly the viewers via their selection of channels implement a merit based system. Neilson would know which channels and what shows work instantly.  Hollywood could then create entertainment that actually entertained instead of throwing crap against the wall to see what sticks.

It will never happen.

What’s sad is DirecTV just trying to reboot the same tired old paradigm of the cable days and thinking that’s innovation.

I have to ask why they’re doing this now? I can only imagine that their current satellites are running out of fuel and will soon be unable to maintain orbit, or their relative positions in orbit, both critically necessary to maintain coverage.

The cost to launch new satellites is prohibitive and If memory serves, they’ve lost a few on launch recently. Some of the oldest units have probably become non functional or DirecTV has been forced to de-orbit them prior to failure, to burn up in the atmosphere or crash into the ocean so they don’t crash down on populated areas.

Eventually, the constellation of DirecTV satellites will become too thin to provide coverage. I think this is a “Hail Mary” move. DirecTV is trying to do a sort of “Bait & Switch” on consumers. They’ll get everyone who is already using their services to switch to their “Faster more reliable” service.

“New!!! Improved! Now with zero downtime due to weather conditions or blockage of the dish.”

Because so few people understand how so much of our technology actually works they’ll keep writing the check instead of thinking it through and looking for alternatives.

There’s very few channels that can’t be streamed. Most newer smart TV’s have the applications built in. Or An Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, FireStick,  or PlayStation can be loaded with the appropriate applications to access the streams.

Why do I need DirecTV again?

Don’t fall for it, Don’t subsidize shitty programming that you’ll never watch because of a crappy bundling scheme on the part of Cable or Satellite providers.

Show them you’ve got a brain!

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Oh For God’s Sake!

Now in addition to all the other shit I’ve got on my plate, I’ve started getting text messages from random numbers asking me if I’m wanting to sell my house.

MOTHERFUCKERS!!!! These sons of bitches are really starting to damage my calm!

I’ve increased the shielding as best I can but with all kinds of private information literally SPATTERED all over the fucking internet there is no way to be totally secure.

Let me be clear. When and or IF I sell this fucking house it’s not going to be through some anonymous jackass contacting me through a text message. I’ll be selling the place through a realtor.

I swear to God! I’m beginning to feel like I should just sell everything, convert it to cash and then convert the cash to gold or diamonds, close every single bank, phone, internet, email, or whatever account and go completely off grid in Costa Rica or something.

At least then I wouldn’t feel like I’m exposed to some nameless faceless fucker metaphorically slipping a knife between my ribs from behind. Or If such a person were to show up, they’d be physically present and I could shoot them.

I’ve deleted as much as I can for today. This was some time I didn’t need to have stolen from me. And Yes, I view it as having time stolen. No-one should have to deal with the intricacies of deleting their information from the web. Their information shouldn’t be on the web in the first place. A lot of these data aggregators have these really interesting methods of getting you to delete your information. They want you to create an account first. Sigh! Isn’t that how the problem originated in the first place? Some dumbassed account created for something equally pointless, like a dancing cat video or something?

Anyway, I’ve spent the past hour or two deleting profiles from all the various sites. Thankfully there are only 9 that had my shit. I’ve enabled home title security everywhere and reported the text message phone numbers to the FTC and FBI.

Not that I have much faith that they will do anything, but at least I’ve recorded my concerns and those reports should be date and time stamped. If someone does do something illegal and it looks like my house title is questionable, I’ll be able to hold up the reports, and subpoena the records to state I sought protection under the legal structure.

There really is a certain allure to cashing out of the system completely. It’s not possible, but oh if it was… What would that look like?

I guess it would look a lot like my childhood.

Phones mounted to the wall. Politeness dictated that you let the phone ring 10 times before giving up. After all, the person might have been out in the yard, or had their hands full, or been in the bathroom.

The only interference in your daily life was paper mail. Since paper mail cost something to produce and put into the post office system, what little junk mail you received was generally pertinent to life in your area. New siding, concrete driveways and such.

There just wasn’t as much crap to filter through.

In the past hour 70 junk emails have appeared in my junk folder. They’re all utter bullshit but they’re sucking up CPU cycles in my computer. They’re sucking up bandwidth on my fiber connection. And they’re taking time from me, in that I have to modify rules to flush them.

The new assault is against your home title and your banking / credit system in general. I’ve been hearing about title theft for a while and honestly blew it off as fear mongering to sell a service to the public that they don’t need. I’ve revised my position a bit because of the sudden uptick in junk email and now text messages or phone calls asking “Do You want to sell your house?” And they have my name and the physical address. They’re offering to buy the place even if it’s occupied by tenants.

What the living fuck?!?