Author Archives: ayn

Phishing

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I’m getting sick of phishing emails, I get about 5 different ones a day, they mostly target Amazon, eBay, and PayPal. All of them look pretty damn real, but it’s pretty obvious the hostnames or the IP addresses part of the URLs aren’t the real deal…

A lot of these phishing pages actually link to the real site to get the images, as they are too lazy to steal them and host them at their sites. It’s pretty easy to write software to identify images referred from phishing sites. It really shouldn’t be hard to identify them, and automatically perform a DDoS attack on that server, as most of these phishing sites probably aren’t that well protected themselves. But of course, this wouldn’t work if they download the images and host them on their servers themselves.

I guess ISP’s and the media ought to better educate the public on phishing emails, it’s pretty easy to go to sites like http://www.antiphishing.org to check if it’s a reported phishing attempt. Or just go to the sites directly to see if you really need to update something instead of clicking on the links in the emails.

SpamAssassin usually filters out stuff like this, I think the reason why I see them is because they usually forge legit from: email addresses. Like I have *@amazon.com and *@ebay.com on my whitelist, so they got through. If I start to get more than 10 a day then I’ll adjust my SpamAssassin settings. Now they are kindda entertaining to read at times…

Friendster’s Woes Continue

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Friendster’s Woes Continue

CEO Scott Sassa is out at Friendster after less than a year on the job. Jeremy Zawodny leaked it and then Businessweek confirmed it. There’s also talk of a new infusion of VC cash and a round of layoffs. You’ll find plenty of commentary about these events around the Web. Our 2 cents comes from the 30,000-foot perspective. With all the good news and positive activity in the search/social networking/tagging sector, it can be easy to forget that life at a start-up can be a real bitch – not to mention investing one. The VCs behind Friendster – Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, and Battery – are not dumb, but they’re also not immune to the uncertainties that face emerging businesses. There’s still time to figure this one out, but we’d expect some more pain along the way. For a good overview of the challenges facing Friendster, check out this post by Bill Burnham. Read: Friendster Profile – [a:c] Read: NY Times No Friend of Friendster – [a:c]…

American Idols final

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I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I watched the American Idol final, I’m at the second song right now… Jesus, with perfect pitch this is a real torture to listen to. Maybe they needed some in-ear monitors or something, but I can’t believe the final two could be so out of pitch… This season sucks… LOL…

24

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So 24 was finally over, the 2-hour season finale was GOOOOD, although a bit predictable. (and it was too easy to find the projectile of the missile and only took one shot to shoot it down) Have to wait til January 2006 for the next season, damnit… Since I didn’t watch the show until this year, maybe I’ll rent them out at Netflix… 🙂

Also notice they use Verizon for their cell services and the RAZR V3 was shown all throughout the episode!! Does that mean VZW is getting the RAZR soon? 🙂

Update: According to this thread, “Michelle” has always used a RAZR, so I guess they weren’t implying anything…