Seen in one of our internal mailing list
Untempered criticism has a devastating impact
One nice prank on the spammer
Editor's note - I posted this entry on my older blog.
Befor going into the details, a bit of background first. Have you heard of the Nigerian Scam? Here it how it operates - you receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter often concerning Nigeria or another African nation containing either a money laundering or other illegal proposal. A sample goes something like
FIRST, I MUST SOLICIT YOUR STRICTEST CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION. THIS IS BY VIRTUE OF ITS NATURE AS BEING UTTERLY CONFIDENTIAL AND 'TOP SECRET'. I AM SURE AND HAVE CONFIDENCE OF YOUR ABILITY AND RELIABILITY.
So you get glittery eyed and start dreaming. You reply back and say "Yeah dude! i am in. Lets go and swindle gazillion dollars". Some more emails follow. At some point, you are asked to pay up front an Advance Fee of some sort or to extend credit. If you pay the money, there are often many Complications which require still more advance payments until you either quit, runs out of money, or both. Some times it may go further. You may be asked for your bank account numbers, copies of their passport and drivers licence and phone and fax numbers. What the scamsters are doing is the Identity theft. Your bank account is cleaned out once they have handed over all your details.
So after the gory details here is the story. Silicon.com decided to follow up on the offer and see where it leads to. Silicon.com's Will Sturgeon set up a Hotmail account under an assumed identity and contacted the scamster (a Mr. Madu Frank). You can read the rest of the story Silicon.com. Will Sturgeon made him run around in circles. Really good read. Enjoy!
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yahoo! news photos redesigned
Have you checked out the redesigned Photos and Slideshows on Yahoo! News? I recommend Most Viewed Photos slideshow.
sad news about Terry Pratchett
If you are a fan of Terry Pratchett and you missed the news - he has been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's.
Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)" he wrote in his message. "I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do,' but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.
Good to see he has his humor intact.
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Donald Trump
I have heard very few people say anything good about Donald Trump. I have seen him on tv only once on The Apprentice. When the time came to fire one of the contestants, he was very fair. He articulated the reasons for firing very well. I think he is a fair and straight-forward guy. Here is a snip from his interview.
woohoo! audiobook ready now!
I have been waiting for a long time for this audiobook to be available for download. Please put your hands together and welcome The Count of Monte Cristo audiobook, available as a free download from LibriVox.
A big thanks to the volunteers at LibriVox for the hard work.
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slow nfs mount in ubuntu
On my home server, I have a nfs server running and I use nfs to mount my music to my laptop. Ever since the first day the nfs mount process used to be dead slow. Today I got irritated enough to check out if this is a common problem.
It seems that this is a common enough problem. The reason is that nfs requires portmap to be running on both the client and the server side.
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