Output Stream of Consciousness

I must admit, a few months ago, we were bandying about the idea of changing our phone number. Why? The incessant barrage of telemarketers and scammers was getting to be too much. They outpaced our actual calls from friends and family by about a 4:1… more »

We got a call from a person wanting to buy a Jeep from us a couple of days back. That seemed pretty odd, but hey, wrong numbers happen. Then it kept happening. No huge influx, but 3-4 calls per day. I was home for one today, and decided to ask them… more »

A hearty thank you to the folks who do my hosting for catching this. A hacker or script kiddie managed to upload a somewhat nasty-looking package into my cgi-bin directory. I haven't thoroughly investigated the code yet, but from the looks of it, the… more »

Not content with letting me in on my European lottery winnings, or being a company representative, or helping ousted generals smuggle their money out of foreign countries, they have now outdone themselves with THE DEATH THREAT. Full text and very slig… more »

Just poking a quick heads-up here, since this particular scam isn't being caught by some anti-phishing filters. It's entitled "PayPal Resolution Center - Remove Account Limitations", and it points here. You get the typical bullshit that phishers use t… more »

Online IQ tests are ever so much fun, especially when you do well in them, especially after someone issues a challenge. Such was the case with the popular IQ Test on Facebook. Nevertheless, there was one question I didn't like - I've taken many such t… more »

I wish I had an original cite for this bit of Javascript that my wife found posted in a Fark forum, but it's fantastic fun, so I'm posting about it regardless. To operate it, you copy the entire paragraph below, navigate to a web page (Fark works pret… more »

Here's the text of the scam: Royal Bank of Canada Dear customer, Due to the recent upgrade of our servers, we have issued this warning message. It has come to our attention that some of our customers no longer have access to their banking… more »

Okay, maybe you have encountered this, maybe you haven't, but if you try going off and listening to a RealPlayer sound clip on a web site in Firefox... say, for example, of Mitch Hedberg, you might often get it coming up with a dialog asking you to open… more »

As of right now, their online booking system does not handle infants very well. Essentially, if your infant does not have its own seat, which is usual for a very young infant, your chances of online check-in seem to be slim to none. Now this may just… more »

Looks like there's been a small revival in the availability of DRM-free music. No major revolution, but you have the advent of Amazon's DRM-free MP3 collection, which contains quite a number of bands, and even the icon of DRM, iTunes, now has "iTunes Plu… more »

We got a small swack of spam comments today which point at pages on http://meta.missouri.edu/ serialize/tmp/@top/ (I've broken up the link here so the spammers don't get more traffic). I've sent the webmasters off a warning. UPDATE: Yay, the pages are… more »

800notes.com is a simple site with but two purposes: letting people post information on persistent, unknown callers, and looking up such posted information. It helped me look up our of our persistent nuisances, 1-800-566-8064, which seems to do cold c… more »

Oh boy - the sources of free money just keep moving around, like some sort of Quantum Leap scenario. Who's got tons of cash and somehow needs me as a willing partner in crime this time? FROM CAPT. MATHEW ZEDWICK, US ARMY FROM BAGHDAD-IRAQ. Reply Ur… more »

I have seen a remarkable decline in the variant of the 419 scam with civil servant/general needing to get millions of dollars out of the country and having chosen you to help with this sub-legal endeavour. The slightly newer take seems to be asking pe… more »