Month: November 2003

Be sure to check those URLs very closely

I quickly mentioned a while back that Barney had been taken for some cash by a PayPal scam. He’s written up a story about his experiences, and this should be a lesson to everybody: 1) PayPal will never ask for your PIN, and 2) Is it really PayPal? URL spoofing is the most common way of hiding this sort of thing. Looking through my logs, this is the URL that Barney was sent to (but, on his defense, you couldn’t really tell you were going here as it was an HTML formatted message):

http://211.113.186.42/pp/http://www.paypal.com/process.htm?id=65455nbn{snip}

Needless to say, it’s not PayPal, it’s 211.113.186.42 which is an IP address in Asia. That’s a complicated and ugly way of hiding URLs, but there are simplier ones:

http://[email protected]/

You could put (nearly) anything in front of that “@” sign, and get this page:

http://scams_like_this_suck_microsoft.com&[email protected]/

Here’s a good writeup on the various tricks used to obscure URLs. Regardless, make sure you’re really going to the right place. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with what Barney did.

November 2, 2003

Student faces criminal charges for stealing 25-cents worth of cheese

This is why I RARELY vote for school bond measures. They’d have plenty of money if they’d just get rid of morons like this. All tenth-grade Corey Cambell wanted was some cheese with his fries, and he was willing to pay for it. But they wouldn’t let him.

“I was walking out of the door and the lady called me over,” Cambell said. “I said okay. She asked me what I had, and I told her cheese. She told me that cost 25 cents and I said ‘OK, let me give you 25 cents for this cheese’. And she said ‘No. Give me your ID’.”

The next thing Campbell knew, Deer Park Police were giving him a ticket.

“The ticket says this is a Theft, Class-C violation, including one plastic container of melted cheese,” said Corey’s Mom, Donna Campbell. “It’s valued at 25 cents.”

Money Corey offered hand it over, but the school said to tell it to the judge.

Full, ridiculous, story.

November 2, 2003

I can imagine the reaction in households from this

Thousands given wrong STD results. Whoops….

November 2, 2003

One of these pictures is not like the other

One of these pictures just doesn’t belong.

November 2, 2003