I wrote recently about spam I received from a new, shady-seeming progressive organization called Nation of Change, sent to an email address that I had only ever used to subscribe to another organization’s mailing list.
I asked a lot of questions about Nation of Change, and thus far they’ve failed to respond to any of them. Here’s what has happened instead.
In September 2009, I registered as a developer at sun.com. When doing so, I used a tagged email address, i.e., an email address part of which was unique to my registration at that site. I’ve never used that particular email address anywhere else or published it anywhere.
In January 2010, Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun. The Sun developer web sites were eventually decommissioned and are not active today. Since the completion of the acquisition, I’ve received no email at the tagged email address I gave to Sun. Until today, that is.
Today, I received this spam sent to that tagged email address:
Received: from mail.recruitingbee-agent8.com (mail.recruitingbee-agent8.com [184.172.232.199]) by jik3.kamens.brookline.ma.us (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id p7BNER5P022529 for <[elided]>; Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:14:27 -0400 Received: from find ([127.0.0.1]) by recruitingbee-agent8.com with MailEnable ESMTP; Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:14:39 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 From: "Tech-centric Jobs" <noreply@recruitingbee-agent8.com> To: [elided] Date: 11 Aug 2011 18:14:39 -0500 Subject: Technology job openings Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Message-ID: <EF440C500DF841B3AE10C51197A0EA91.MAI@recruitingbee-agent8.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit **********************************************************************
Find the latest software & programming jobs http://www.tech-centric.net/
**********************************************************************
A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. ~Doug Linder
The latest programming jobs are available: http://www.tech-centric.net/
If however you are not interested in exploring programming jobs at this time please optout:
http://www.recruitingbee.com/unsubscribe.aspx?email=[elided]&token=[elided]
All the best, The Health Medical Job Site 1350 E Flamingo Rd Las Vegas NV, 89119
It looks like either Oracle sold the email addresses of sun.com web site users to a third party, or somebody stole them. Neither of these casts Oracle in a particularly good light.
I am, of course, going to do my best to contact someone in Oracle who might be willing and able to look into this, but I am rather skeptical that I will have any success.
Those of you who have been reading the ongoing saga of my dissatisfaction with Citizens Bank will no doubt be pleased to hear that it is nearly at an end. Last week, my wife and I transferred our home equity line to Century Bank and opened a checking account there, and we applied for a Capital One Venture Rewards card to replace our Citizens Bank card. In another week or two the final details of the transition will be complete and we will close our Citizens Bank accounts for good.
In the meantime, however, I have yet another bit of Citizens Bank lunacy to report.
As I previously reported, somebody has been interacting with Web sites using my email address.
I suspect that in addition to the ones I know about, this individual is probably also doing things that I don’t know about, because I assume that not all the web sites at which he’s using my address are kind enough to send me an email address alerting me to what he’s doing.
Today, however, I did get a notification from one site that I didn’t know about before — he apparently signed up for a Skype account using my email address. They emailed me about it because he attempted to purchase Skype credit but didn’t complete the transaction.
I immediately took advantage of Skype’s password recovery feature to reset the password on the account. I.e., I stole the account from the identity thief, just as I did when he signed up for a gmail account using my email address.
Then I sent this message to Skype’s customer support department. I don’t honestly expect them to respond in any useful way, but I figured it was worth a try: (more…)
Long-time followers of my advocacy may recall my story from years ago of attempting to get the Social Security Administration (SSA) to deal with the fact that they sent several of my kids’ social security cards to the wrong address because the software they were using to canonicalize mailing addresses was buggy.
Some sleuthing on my part and help from people on the Web revealed that the most likely explanation for what was going on was that the Social Security Administration was using a software package from Semaphore Corporation to perform address canonicalization. To be clear, the evidence behind this theory was purely circumstantial — the SSA was canonicalizing my address wrong, and Semaphore Corp.’s software canonicalizes my address wrong in the same way.
Semaphore was notified in August 2005 that their software was canonicalizing my address and others incorrectly. As noted in my original story, their ridiculous response was:
The USPS has a large number of esoteric rules about which ZIP+4 to match when the address-city-state-ZIP inputs are incomplete or conflicting and ambiguous, and rules don’t even exist for many cases, so you’ll continue to see the logic evolve as CASS changes to include more of the above situations.
There are two reasons why their response was ridiculous:
I originally posted my story in August 2005. Tonight, six years after I first posted it, I received a long, convoluted email message from an unnamed individual at Semaphore which can be briefly summarized as follows:
But you don’t have to trust me. Below is their email message in full, with some commentary from me. (more…)
IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of August 12, 2011, it appears that Brave New Foundation had nothing to do with the spam reported below and in fact they are as much a victim as I am. Please see this posting for details.
Let me tell you about a little strategy I use to find out who’s buying and selling my email address… When I give my email address to an organization or Web site, I “tag” it to make it unique to that site while still ending up in my inbox. So when that site decides to sell or share my address, I know who did it.
When I put my address on a petition created by Brave New Films (now the Brave New Foundation) during the 2008 presidential campaign, I did not give Brave New Films permission to give it out to others. Guess what, folks, that’s spamming, and it’s evil, and I don’t support organizations that spam or help others spam. By giving out my address and others without permission, Brave New Foundation has permanently lost my support, and by using my and others’ illicitly obtained addresses, so have you.
But that’s not the end of it. (more…)
I’ve added “Basic Instructions” to my comics aggregator. Tip of that hat to Seth Gordon for pointing me at this fine comic!
UPDATE: Because the author of “Basic Instructions” sometimes publishes his strip after people have already read their daily comics, I’ve also added “Basic Instructions (1-day delay)”, so you can use that one instead if you want to be sure not to miss one!
GoComics.com changed their Web page format and broke my screen scraper again last night. I’ve updated my comics aggregator to support the new page format as of this morning.
For some reason lost in the mists of time, I decided at about 7am yesterday that I just had to upgrade my Fedora 14 desktop to Fedora 15. Sometimes I get these weird ideas…
I followed the instructions on the Fedora Web site for upgrading using yum, and 2,978 downloaded packages and several hours later, I had a Fedora 15 system. But the fun was only beginning. Here, for the benefit of others who follow me, are the problems I encountered after the upgrade and what I did to fix them. Much of this I learned from other helpful people on the web, but some of it I had to figure out for myself.
[Unit] Description=Foo server After=network.target [Service] ExecStart=/home/jik/scripts/foo.pl Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Then I did “sudo systemctl enable foo.service” and “sudo systemctl start foo.service”.
I’ll continue to update this list as new things come up.
It took a day or so to get used to, but I think the GNOME 3 UI is growing on me.
Somebody seems to be using my email address in a weird, ongoing way that doesn’t seem to be benefiting them in any way. The fact that I can’t figure out why they’re doing it concerns me, because I have to suspect that there is some benefit to them, which I just haven’t been able to figure out. I’m worried that if it’s helping them, it’s probably hurting me, even if I don’t know it.
Therefore, I’m blogging what I know, in the hope that perhaps someone else will be able to look at the facts and point out something I missed about why this is going on.
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