Occasionally I dissect spam emails that find their ways through the spamfilter. Very oftenis some kind of paypal or ebay info saying that the account expired or they suspect some problem information with the account and ask you to login and verify. The login link is always in the email. It always looks ok on the first sight but if you look at the spelling of sender, words and so on you can see the spam.

Todays dissection (original is german): Paypal Security

Wichtige Sicherheits-Hinweise Ihr Konto Zugriff hat nur begrenztem Umfang (Transl: Important security note, limited account access)

Sender: sicherheit_@_paypall_de (see, the double ll at the end) paypall.de is registred by (check here)

Text: PayPal arbeitet ständig an der Gewährleistung der Sicherheit durch regelmäßige Screening/Kontrollen der Konten in unserem System. Wir haben vor kurzem Ihr Konto überprüft, und wir brauchen mehr Informationen, die uns helfen sollen Sie mit sicheren Service anbieten. Bis wir diese Informationen sammeln, Ihren Zugang zu sensiblen Konto-Funktionen werden begrenzt oder beendet werden. Wir möchten Ihren Zugang Wiederherstellen so schnell wie möglich, und wir entschuldigen uns für die Unannehmlichkeiten.

The german text contains quite a number of errors.

Paypall.de points to merchntaccount.com which is a misspelled version (missing ‘a’) of merchantaccount.com (a creditcard/online commerce service provider).  merchntaccount.com is registred by (check here), same person or organziation.

The fake login page is not accessible (anymore ?) at this bogus address (some characters removed to stop anyone from stumbling upon it)

http: / / smokylake. com/www. paypal .de/de/_xxxxxxxxxxx_ = _login-submit/webscr.php

Why does spam work ? Because someone sends out this email to 100.000 recipients. If only 1 falls into the trap it worth his effort to fake everything.

I occasionally get skype-invitations or contact-attempts from totally strange people in all kind of languages, but Skype never before opened by itself with a chat from someone NOT on my contact list.

Some days late, I read Professor Randy Pausch passed away on July 25th. Even I was never able to meet him or to join his classes, he was a inspiring person. His famous last lecture “Really achieving your childhood dreams” at CMU (link) in September 2007 you can see here (link). I wont comment or try to summarize because it would never be close to his very own word. Please read more about him and also his work on Alice (link).

You dont want to stick postit notes on a CD to label the content ! Lucky this backup was redundant !

I use a 12″ powerbook for 4 years now, during that time it served me well and I replaced only a faulty harddisk and a battery. It hardly will crash in the Windows way. A blue screen staring at you right in the middle of doing something, but MAC OS also has a nice message in 4 languages that it needs to restarted due to an error. It dont bombard you with a memory dump that no one can read anyway.

Seems as fast its “in” Google,  as fast it disappears. Found after 6 hours, another 12 hours after removing the word it cant be found anymore.

Experiment closed. Maybe I am too paranoid.

You want to go back history lane ? Check out webpages at the WayBackMaschine (link) ! Look at early versions of some websites. “Where you want to go today ?” Remember the sloganby MS in 1996 (link).

6 hours after placing the non-existent word “XYZ” (replaced original word to virtually remove its existence) on the blog, google lists it already. Now I removed it, will see how fast it disappears again. To be honest I am pretty impressed how fast google crawls the web with trillions of pages !

Did you ever google for “google” ? You will find all activities and projects they do (images, news, groups, earth, map, lab,..). The first non-google source is from stanford.edu followed by finance.yahoo.com on page 4 !

The first not-so-google result is “Google Fight” (link) on page 7. You can compare which word out of 2 has more results in a cartoon style.

Yo remember my technology creation 2 days ago ? The Retraxiom Intrubator (link). No search engine could find the word or term. Now it is on, within 48 hours Google found it, even on a non-Google run platform.
Check it out at http://www.google.com.sg/search?q=Retraxiom+Intrubator

The next experiment would be: How long does it take to get rid of it ? Is that possible ?
OK, lets start with a new word: XYZ (no matches in google now)
Please note I will remove the word after they found it and will re-check its virtual existence.

Edit:
I replaced the original word with XYZ in order to find out how fast the word disappears from the search engine.

According to a Microsoft Press release (link) you still can buy XP until 2010 (first plan was to stop it in 2008!) because an increased demand in UMPC’s and low-budget desktop PC’s. They also say the hardware vendor are still running behind VISTA requirements.

a) Why does MS continues to deliver OS with ridiculous hardware requirements and resource greedy software ? XP is stable and can run on Intel Atom chipset. Why can Apple implement smooth screen features on an iPhone while Vista needs 2 GB to get Aero running ?

b) 2010 ? You can buy XP until Windows 7 is supposed to be out. Then skip Vista !?