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07/11/2005: Hard to tell who's more stupid.....
I've just gotten a couple interesting emails that got shunted to the spam folder of one of my Yahoo mail accounts (I maintain a couple Yahoo accounts, one for subscribing to various mailing lists and one for a "spamcatcher" address to use for Web registrations that require an email address).
Both purported to come from "admin@yahoo.com", and both had attachments (files with the .zip extension) that are undoubtedly viral payloads (I'm not downloading them to find out). The first one supposedly told me that my mail account password had been successfully changed, and if I had not changed my password, I should check the attached file for instructions. The second one informed me that my mail account had been suspended for certain "irregularities", and instructed me to open the attachment for information on how to reactivate my account.
Now the regular readers of This Humble Blog are intelligent people, so I'm sure y'all have seen the logical problem with these emails already. But for those of you who are just passing through.... think about it a sec.
Someone is sending me an email telling me my account password has been changed, or that my mail account has been suspended.... but in order to receive it I had to log into my email account (which, of course, is kinda impossible to do if the account's been suspended) with my "previous" password (which, of course, shouldn't work if it's been changed).
I don't know which bothers me worse: that the senders of these viral payloads don't see the inherent logical contradiction in their email, or that there are actually users who will not stop and think long enough to catch the contradiction and realize that the email must be bogus.
Favorite Sayings: "There's a sucker born every minute, and two to take him." This may have been true in the past, but now, if you adjust for the increased population base, birth control, and the so-called moral decline, not only are there five suckers born every minute, there are now fifty-three to take him.
--George Carlin
Len on 07.11.05 @ 07:51 AM CST
