Mobbing

This Guess-the-Google is almost addictive! I got Eleanor into playing this game too! wahhahaa!

I was also listening to Babel Gilberto But i don't like her! i think her mummy sings better than her!



Word of the day:
serendipity
The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
An instance of making such a discovery.



Prof talked about privacy issues in class today. It reminded me of my singnet email account which is constantly bombarded by spams! it is super irritating to see 20 odd pages of emails in the account only to know that more than 70% of them are made up of gibberish subjects!!!! how do those things even get to my account?

According to how stuffs work,

How Do They Get My Address?
Where does a company get millions of valid e-mail addresses to put on a CD and sell to you? There are a number of primary sources.

The first is newsgroups and chat rooms, especially on big sites like AOL. People (especially first-time users) often use their screen names, or leave their actual e-mail addresses, in newsgroups. Spammers use pieces of software to extract the screen names and e-mail addresses automatically.

The second source for e-mail addresses is the Web itself. There are tens of millions of Web sites, and spammers can create search engines that spider the Web specifically looking for the telltale "@" sign that indicates an e-mail address. The programs that do the spidering are often called spambots.

The third source is sites created specifically to attract e-mail addresses. For example, a spammer creates a site that says, "Win $1 million!!! Just type your e-mail address here!" In the past, lots of large sites also sold the e-mail addresses of their members. Or the sites created "opt-in" e-mail lists by asking, "Would you like to receive e-mail newsletters from our partners?" If you answered yes, your address was then sold to a spammer.

Probably the most common source of e-mail addresses, however, is a "dictionary" search of the e-mail servers of large e-mail hosting companies like MSN, AOL or Hotmail. In the article Hotmail: A Spammer's Paradise?, the author describes the process:

A dictionary attack utilizes software that opens a connection to the target mail server and then rapidly submits millions of random e-mail addresses. Many of these addresses have slight variations, such as "jdoe1abc@hotmail.com" and "jdoe2def@hotmail.com." The software then records which addresses are "live," and adds those addresses to the spammer's list. These lists are typically resold to many other spammers.

E-mail addresses generally are not private (just like your phone number is not private if it is listed in the phone book). Once a spammer gets a hold of your e-mail address and starts sharing it with other spammers, you are likely to get a lot of spam.

actually i know bits and pieces of that information, at least, enough to stop me from stupidly signing up for anything that people send to me or sign up at websites that require my email address before i can read its content! then again, each time i give a fake email address i feel that i'm compromising my highly mighty integrity! hehe.. and sometimes, when i type the same fake email address too often, the website actually knows that fake email address! there'll even be a drop down "menu" for me to choose the address that i typed before! it's so convenient!

this scenario is still fine. but when it comes to joining "networks" like hi-5 or friendster and several others ... like those sms.ac or crap that many many people sign up for, the decision of not joining becomes slightly more tough. i don't want to be "anti-social" by rejecting every request to join network. i don't really want to "reject" reject people...! but it is either that i join the network and be "connected" to those friends or i don't bother about them at all! argh!! how??? i wonder if those websites trade my email address so that they can remain a "free" website for all happy poor folks like usme!

somehow, with these networks coming along, i become lazier when it comes to contacting people. and likewise, people become lazier when contacting me. Everyone seem to have the burden to check their emails often enough to be in time for dates or appointments! i remember for my project meetings, i have to check the email 3 times in the day to make sure that i don't miss any last minute emails in my account that calls/cancel/change the meeting! Handphone seem useless cos SMS is more expensive than sending mass email!

argh... irritating