I read in Le Monde
today (sorry the article is in French) the story of a guy like anybody else,
who was receiving spam like anybody else.
The only difference is that one day when that Scottish guy named Craig
received 6 junk mails at once, he decided it was enough and started chasing
down the senders of that kind of emails.
A famous one is the one where you receive a mail from the wife of an
African dictator who inherited a huge sum of money but she cannot get hold of
the money without your help. So if you agree to pay a few thousand dollars for
the account setup fee or whatever, she agrees to give you a certain percentage
of the money (I can't believe how much money I could have made if only I
hadn't trashed those emails!).
Craig started to "play" with one of those emails, using a fake identity and
some photoshop tricks to make the guy believe he had all the money required in
cash.
The whole story was told in a weblog and every new step forward (mail exchange, comments from Craig, etc.) was a new entry in the blog, the whole thing with a certain humour, until the end when Craig finally met the guy reponsible for that scam at the airport of Dubai.
As far as I am concerned, I use Mozilla which filters junk mail, so I don't
get too bothered.
However, I never miss a chance to have some fun and to record the email
address of such junk mail (a unique oppportunity!) and to follow Scott Adams' advice (the author of Dilbert):
whenever I receive some other junk mail where I am requested to input my email
address, I look in at records to use the email address I had carefully kept
away from deletion!
Shouldn't we help spammers to know each other better? ;-)
Note that the article in Le Monde also mentions that "Le journal du Net", which started talking about Craig in France, reported that some less happy people than Craig believed the story and were robbed, kidnapped or sometimes killed after their arrival at the meeting point.
The 419 Fraud as it is called is also referenced on the website of the FBI, as well as other types of scam.
I've just bumped into this cool weblog called "Title n." and found out about this System Administrator Appreciation day, celebrated every last Friday of July.
Aren't you tired of your users saying "What did you do *again* ? It used to
work fine until IT messed up with something..."
Wouldn't that be great if - for a change - your users came to you to thank
you, to give you some chocolates or a small gift from ThinkGeek, like a Valentine Day for
Sysadmin (since it's common knowledge that Sysadmins don't have girlfriends or
boyfriends anyway ;-))?
The sysadminday website not only makes a lot of sense ;-) but it's also a great collection of links to funny stories like "Advice to employees on the proper use of the System Administrator's valuable time" or the famous "Techtales"!
Well, maybe you have to be a sysadmin or a complete geek to appreciate that kind of humour but I just love them, which puts me in one of the 2 categories, or maybe both ;-) !
I
have mentioned the tenki.jp site before,
when there was the last major earthquake in Japan a few months ago.
However, at that time, I hadn't had a look at the other pages, such as the one
that gives the weather forecast for
Tokyo for example.
Most of the time, it's very useful and accurate, as long as you can read
some Japanese. I especially like the small icon which tells you whether you
can leave your laundry outside for drying or not and how long that would
take!
That extra bit of information is just so funny to me, yet I find it also very
handy!
This morning however, I was wondering whether I should take my laundry out: it was amazingly hot and sunny but when I checked the website, it was saying that it wasn't a good day to do the laundry. I thought "Ha! They can be wrong sometimes too!" but left without taking my laundry out because I was already running late for the office and something inside me was telling me to always trust the Japanese weather forecast...
Well, a few hours later, just out of nowhere, it started to rain... I have
to admit that somehow, Japanese have developed a high sense of wheather
forecast (there's even a TV channel dedicated to that) and they are just so
accurate!
The same thing happened to me last week when I was looking at the predictions
on Yahoo for
Yakushima (actually Kagoshima, the closest main city), just because I thought
it'd be easier to read a page in English.
While Yahoo was announcing thunderstorms for the whole week, tenki.jp showed a
nice and sunny day. Again, they were quite right and I had a wonderful weather
for my trip.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I'll just forget about my own pride and so-called ability to foresee the weather changes and rely more on some Japanese who spend their days doing the same thing :)
In case you still don't want to believe, just ask my friend Jean-Paul whether his shoes have dried today ;-)
