Lee.org

At the request of a client, I contacted Symantec about some suspected pirated software I bought on Amazon zShops. I sent the Symantec legal department a juicy info packet on my purchase.

From: Chansonette Connolly [mailto:ccon.don't spam her.nolly@symantec.com]
Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 4:03 PM
To: [Lee]
Subject: Re: Report of Suspected Piracy of Norton AntiVirus 2003 from a Third Party on Amazon.com 4/21/04 – [removed] (zShop)

Dear Mr. Sonko,

Thank you for submitting to us the CD you purchased from [removed] (zShop) marked “Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2003” for evaluation, together with your documentation. We have examined the CD you submitted and believe it to be counterfeit. Therefore, and as I am sure you can understand, we will not be returning the CD to you. Our records show that this entity is not an affiliate or authorized partner of Symantec.

You may wish to contact your credit card / financial organization and find out what options you may have in a situation like this. We appreciate your taking the time to send us documentation relating to your purchase, which will assist us in continuing to investigate this matter further.

We appreciate the faith you have shown in Symantec’s products by purchasing legitimate software to replace any counterfeit software you might have had. Please be assured, you have made the right decision given the risks associated with counterfeit software, be it faulty operation, leaving your computer open to cyber attack or possible damage to your computer. Furthermore, legitimate software gives you the right to obtain updates generated by Symantec for that software. Updates are necessary to help protect your system from cyber attacks, which evolve on a daily basis.

We look forward to serving you as one of our valued customers and hope to make your cyber experience as safe and enjoyable as possible.

Sincerely,

——————————————————————————–
Chansonette Connolly
Manager, Worldwide Brand Protection
Legal Department
Symantec Corporation
Office: (408) 517-8045
Interoffice: 6 [408] 8045
Fax: (408) 517-8121

Email:
chanso.don’t spam poor Chansonette.nette_connolly@symantec.com

www.symantec.com

Any my response

When I wrote to Drakes (the company that makes Devil Dogs, Ring Dings and Yodels supermarket pastries) telling them about some bad Yodels I bought last year, they at least gave me a coupon for some free Yodels. When I wrote to them, all I included was a photo of some sorry-looking Yodels and a short explanation. When I wrote to you, I included a lengthy description that puts me on the spot vs. Amazon and vs. an Amazon seller, packaging material, and the actual product. You now have all the incriminating evidence you need to stop a major American pirate of your software.

For my trouble, all I got was a pat on the back. You can be sure that I won’t ever be bringing potentially pirated software to your attention again. You could learn a lot from a Yodel.

cwRsync is a yet another packaging of Rsync and Cygwin. You can use cwRsync for fast remote file backup and synchronization

boxbackup has been ported to cygwin on Windows!. It’s still in beta but this is looking like a real option. When I get a minute (yeah, right) I’ll try it out.

If you have ever accidentally deleted your web site, you might find it cached on the web with one of these tools

* Archive.org
* Do a Google search for your web site like so: allinurl:mysite.com site:mysite.com

(thanks to Uptimebot and Google for that second pointer)

CA has this big ad in eWeek Magazine for their backup software. So I asked them

I am looking for a backup product capable of backing up from a Win XP computer to an untrusted Win XP or Linux machine on the internet. It should be possible to access the data on the untrusted machine in a random access manner.

We’ll see what I get for a response.

http://habeas.com/ I still don’t totally understand how this company uses the power of haiku to defeat spammers. But I think I like it.

I think it works thusly:
- If you promise not to spam people and sign up with them, you get 8 points subtracted from your SpamAssassin score when you use the Habeas header in your emails.
- If you (illegally & inappropriately) use the Habeas header in your email, then when the Habeas people catch you, they’ll tell SpamAssassin that the IP address that sent the email gets 8 points added to their spam score.
- If you illegally use the Habeas header, they’ll sue your ass off, but quick, for copyright infringement (the poem), defamation (their header would never voluntarily associate with spam), and license infringement (you didn’t sign up for the Habeas service).

Nice. Of course, a distributed offshore email relaying scheme can probably get around it. Forged headers might also be able to get around it. The battle continues…

(For reference, using the phrase “WIN FREE VIAGRA!” in the subject field of an email costs the message only about 4 points. A difference of 8 points will almost definitely make or break an email’s spam threshold in SpamAssassin. I’ve only every been marginally happy with SpamAssassin’s performance. I set it to a threshold of “8″ and it catches about 10 spams a day (that’s 40% of the spams I receive recently). If I set it any higher, it starts catching legitimate mail. Still, SpamAssassin from my email hosting company and Cloudmark Spamnet on my client have been working together to do an excellent job recently.)

Thanks to Dada Mail for pointing out this Habeas thing to me.

Oh and I also just noticed….

Vispul’s Razor (the source code for Spamnet) is open source. The plug-in for MS Outlook (the Spamnet service) isn’t.

The Vispul’s Razor / Spamnet collaborative filtering servers are located at cloudmark.com.

That’s an interesting collaboration between open source and not… The unix folks are free to develop the brains of the system in an open source environment while Vispul is (hopefully) making money off the gazillions of Windows clients. If you had unix at home, you’d be able to get the service for free. But hey, Vispul is only charging $2.00/month for the service. It’s well worth it for any individual client to buy the service. Everyone wins. Open source seems to work.

Ok, this is pretty cool.

http://www.digitalsundial.com/

Pixyglam Yahoo Group is the place to find out all the poop.
Ha ha

TGIF Humor is the list to be on for that

Outlook 2000 had a tiny little feature whereby when your mouse hovered over a web link, the target would appear in the status bar down at the bottom of the window. Outlook 2002 eliminated this feature, making forged emails like this (at right. Click
to enlarge) possible.

The link on that email takes you to this web page (at left). Everything appears to be all on the up and up, right? Wrong. Look closely at that web page… at the top of the email. The address is “http://63.203.30.222/registration/Verify.htm” That isn’t a Paypal address. It’s a thief’s address.

If Outlook hadn’t gotten rid of that little feature, it would have been harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes on this kind of scam. Hmmm…. I’ve been hearing how Microsoft is pushing for an email postage/verification/something system lately. Am I just a wacky conspiracy theorist by suggesting that Microsoft is crippling their own program in order to make their new email verification system more necessary? No, that’s crazy.

Molls sent this to me before xmas. I stole it from this site and pulled it local for posterity. Click on the picture to play this shocking Shockwave.

PPG showed this to me. From :The New York Times

Gallery Show Seeks the Art in Spam, Seen Through the Eyes of the Future

January 26, 2004
By SAUL HANSELL

The discordant verse, in simple black letters on white paper, is in keeping with the basement alternative art gallery in which it hangs:
———————————————-
victorious tank tepid conservatism veldt

cerulean carl
frontal decry brennan
———————————————-
It may seem the work of a striving, if cryptic, poet. But it is an excerpt from the nonsense words found in a junk e-mail message, as captured in a Manhattan exhibit that tries to make art out of spam.

The exhibit, titled “Reimagining the Ordovician Gothic: Fossils From the Golden Age of Spam,” is at Spaceworks at the Tank, a gallery and performance space on West 42nd Street devoted to experimental works.

Jesse Jarnow, one of the curators, said the name was inspired by a display he saw at the American Museum of Natural History on the Ordovician period, an era that ended about 445 million years ago, when the earth was dominated by primitive sea creatures.

“They had all these brightly colored snails,” he said. “But they don’t really know what it was really like.”

Riffing on the idea of junk e-mail as a lowly commercial life form, Mr. Jarnow along with the other curators, Daniel Greenfeld and Mike Rosenthal, tried to depict how an archaeologist 450 million years in the future might present current culture, based only on relics of spam. Motifs include the random text typically added to the end of spam to avoid being discarded by spam-finding filter programs, which the exhibit presents as the work of the “great writers of the ‘Ordovician Gothic.’ ”

The accompanying text notes that “this school of writers emphasized playful literary juxtaposition, frequently casting aside the period’s typical syntax in order to achieve a more visceral form.”

Using the sort of displays common in natural history
museums, the exhibit examines other aspects of the world as captured in the amber of spam. Light-up dioramas, for example, show pictures of the actual deposed African leaders who are frequently the purported authors of e-mail proposing deals that typically involve wire transfers of many thousands of dollars. “It is not known whether or not their appeals were received by willing accomplices or not,” the exhibit commentary says. “If they were, most likely, those who responded were simply drawn into the deep unrest from which the requests sprang.”

The spam exhibition will be on display through Feb. 15 at Spaceworks at the Tank, 432 West 42nd Street. It is open Thursdays and Fridays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m., and during performances.

I spent New Years eve in Philadelphia. Saw fireworks right up close! I was there with PPG and several PP friends. PPG’s Sw has an apartment right on the river (no, literally. If you drilled a hole in his living room, you’d hit a parking level and then water!) The party itself was a bit low key for my taste, but the apartment is lovely. Red curtain, amazing modular wall storage up to 18 feet, rice paper lighting, and a winch-operated table!

I got a cell phone.

Sony Ericsson T610 with a T-mobile 300 minute plan & bluetooth headset….

I ordered it on Amazon.com… it should arrive late next week.

My folks just got a new computer running XP Home. I’m installing stuff on it and happily noticed that the Messenger Service is turned off by default. This is the service that allows Messenger Spam. :-)

I tried doing an upgrade install on a client’s computer from XP Home to XP Pro. The Upgrade install failed miserably. Midway through, the upgrade got stuck, churning over one point and restarting. I had to install Pro from scratch. Hurumph! A few months ago, I tried doing an upgrade from 2000 Pro and had a similarly crappy experience :-(

A month or so ago I did an upgrade installation from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It sucked. Windows ran slow, there was this persistent hesitation problem where the machine would lock up for 5 seconds out of every 10 minutes… My computer wasn’t happy. So when I got the 200 gig hard drive, I decided to do an install from scratch. You know, ever since Windows 95, it’s been “a good idea” to reinstall Windows every 2 years or so. What’s with that??

The only problem I’ve had so far is that Maxtor insisted that I use their Maxblast3 formatting software and not the XP formatting tool. That’s kind of funny because I banged my head against a wall of “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt | \system32\hal.dll | Please reinstall a copy of the above file” BECAUSE of the Maxblast3 software” for 4 hours because of that bad suggestion. To get around this problem, I booted to my old XP and formatted the 200 gig drive with Windows and Partition Magic 7. After that, I installed WinXP on the new drive just fine. Patting myself on the back, I figured that one out all by myself.

My Windows XP install is now snazzy-fast :-)

I changed my DNS so that Spenix would be my new web provider. A month ago I switched from Register.com to GoDaddy.com for my DNS b/c GoDaddy is $8/year instead of $35 and GoDaddy’s website has a few more bells and whistles. Now I’m moving from Earthlink to Spenix b/c, although Earthlink has very good LiveChat support, it’s for a product that doesn’t have as many features and easy customizations as Spenix. And Spenix is $8/month instead of $20/month! Of course, it worries me that the main Spenix.com site appears to be down today. But I’m sure that’s just a little glitch… Yipe!

Some site details like the comment engine and hit counter will be broken ’til I fix em. so there.

I wrote to a friend today the following:

We were talking before about what the heck we should each do for a living… I wanted to give you hopeful news and say that I’ve been being “The Computer Guy” with moderate success for the last couple months. I go to people’s homes and help them with their computer problems. Little things and large things alike. And gosh darn it, I think I’m good at it! There’s a big teaching component to it, showing people how to do things and helping them help themselves. I think this could really be something.

Why do we send up 7 astronauts in the space shuttle? Why not send up 5 robots controlled by radio from the ground and 2 astronaut/robot-technicians? But of course I don’t know what the heck those 7 astronauts do right now.

This reminds me of an important interview about remotely operated vehicles that I saw on Scientific American (Beneath the Sea: Into the Deep, Part I, May 14, 2002) with Bob Ballard:

ALAN ALDA (NARRATOR) In spite of the spectacular scientific advances that have been made with the use of small manned submersibles like Alvin, Ballard says we don’t need subs like this any more. He came to that conclusion right here on the Galapagos Rift.

BOB BALLARD The turning moment for me was in a submarine just like this one, when we found these unique life forms. And we were down on the bottom of the Galapagos Rift, it was 1979, OK. And biologists had never seen these life forms ever before, and we got them in the submarine and, a scientist by the name of Holger Jannish, who just couldn’t wait to see these creatures. He knew he was going to be famous, just to be the first to see them biologically. And so we got down there and they were right outside the window. And I was sitting over here and I had brought down a new prototype camera system — a digital camera system. And I was looking at the animals and I looked up from my porthole and I looked at Holger, and he had his back to the window. I said, “Holger, what are you doing?” And he said, “I’m looking at the monitor.”

ALAN ALDA That’s amazing.

BOB BALLARD And I said, ” Wait a minute, let me see if I got this right�

ALAN ALDA We came all the way down here�

BOB BALLARD We came all the way down here, and you turn your back to the window — and I went (snap)

My senator wrote back to me today (via email) about how he’s co-sponsoring federal anti-spam legislation:

Dear Mr. Sonko,

Thank you for contacting me about spam. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.

The growth of the Internet and the increased use of e-mail have led to the emergence of “spam,” or electronic junk mail. Numerous marketers have begun to send unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) over the Internet. Because this marketing technique is easier and less costly than traditional direct marketing techniques such as direct mail solicitations, e-mail accounts worldwide have been deluged with this unsolicited correspondence.

Spam is not just a nuisance, but it can also bring consumers higher charges for the Internet as service providers are forced to continually upgrade their systems to handle the increased traffic. Spam filters built into MSN and Hotmail servers, for example, block 2.4 billion messages a day. While proponents of UCE insist it is a legitimate marketing technique that is protected by the First Amendment, Congress should enact reasonable restrictions.

Although 35 States have anti-spam laws, there is no federal law specifically concerning spam. Consequently, I have co-sponsored CAN-SPAM, the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act” (S. 877), which would do the following: create criminal penalties for the transmission with knowledge and intent of spam messages with header information that is materially false or misleading; prohibit deceptive subject headings; require a functioning return address for the message recipient to submit a request that he or she not receive future messages; require clear identification that a message is an advertisement; and require that message recipients have an opportunity to opt-out, and for the sender to provide a valid physical mail address.

Please be assured that I will continue to support practical, sensible regulations that reduce unwanted spam while taking the concerns of legitimate, honest retailers into account.

Thanks again for contacting me.

Senator Frank Lautenberg
http://lautenberg.senate.gov/

The 500 Coolest Chicks Ever

:-)

The new spam filter is working out great. I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could be, but you know what I mean.

A couple months ago I saw Henry Rollins in concert. I took some notes about his show but never bothered to put them in my journal. Here you go:

“Ramones Fans can’t kill each other. Here’s what you do. Give the Israeli army the first two albums and let them groove to it for a while. Then give the Palestinians the second two albums and let ‘em enjoy it. Then one day, they’ll be on the front and one of the Israelis will hear something on the other side. He’ll say, “Hey do you hear that? It sounds like the Ramones but it’s not any album that I’ve ever heard! I’m gonna go check it out. Here, hold my gun.”"

[note: blowing a "P" into a microphone makes that cool "poof" noise that you hear in the Jack Flanders audiotapes. Jack Flanders and Ruby R000000000000L!!!]

He’s done 106 shows a year for the last 23 years. Wow.

[I've said this somewhere in my journal... it's nice that Henry agrees] “Bush isn’t connected with his material. That smile that bunches up in the corner of his mouth…. he’s pretending to be human.” [He then went into a thing about his awful pacing as well :-) ]