10.18.07
Posted in Pet Hates at 9:59 am by blog
This is something that annoys me greatly, the acronym ‘SQL’ is just that, an acronym, it is not pronounceable as a word because it has no vowels.
Why is it that some unpronounceable acronyms are always referred to as such (eg DVD) and yet others are seemingly acceptable to arbitrarily modify.
There is a comedy TV show called ‘Fonejacker’ where someone makes humorous telephone calls to unsuspecting members of the public, and one of his sketches is posing as a man who tries to arbitrarily modify unpronounceable acronyms so that he can say them, often causing great confusion to the person on the other end of the phone. For instance, he will call an electronics store and ask for a “Doovde player” (DVD player) or perhaps a “Puss 3″ (PS3). A few examples of this can be found on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjH9cEoEup8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmyU7T1Rc1s
And many more can be found simply by searching for ‘fonejacker’.
So why is it considered acceptable to mispronounce ‘SQL’ as ’sequel’ and yet mispronouncing ‘DVD’ as ‘doovde’ is considered ridiculous? This becomes even more stupid once you consider that ’sequel’ is an actual word which has a different meaning, whereas ‘doovde’ doesn’t have any other meaning, and could thus easily be used as a word referring to ‘DVD’.
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10.05.07
Posted in fastmemorymanscam at 9:30 pm by blog
So FastMemoryMan has another ebay account called “EMartBuy”, most probably to make it harder for all the people who search for “fastmemoryman” and find sites like this one. More than a few people have either posted here, or emailed me separately to say they won’t be doing business with him having read this site.This second account is registered as being in the UK, which seems highly suspicious. Perhaps this account has something to do with the UK operation that he falsely claims is just his “shipping agent”.I also found some more information on him, this time written by an “ebay trusted reviewer”, you can read it at:
http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/FASTMEMORYMAN-scam-cpus-amd-intel-memory-computer_W0QQugidZ10000000004009354?ssPageName=BUYGD:CAT:-1:SEARCH:2
Also while doing some other digging, it seems that his domain emartbuy.com is registered with the following details:
EmartBuy Ltd
Chetan Saraf
135 N MAIN ST
WASHINGTON COURT HOUSE, OH
43160 US
Phone: 614 5898253
Email: sarafchirag@blueyonder.co.uk
Interestingly, that email address is a UK ISP. I’ve not checked it, but it’s strange that an american would have an account with a UK cable provider.
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09.30.07
Posted in fastmemorymanscam at 8:46 pm by blog
So judging from the number of hits and comments I get, far too many people have been screwed over by FastMemoryMan…So here is the best of my advice to dealing with him…
- Don`t send defective goods direct to his US address
If your in the UK send it to their UK address, despite his claims the UK office will forward the package on to him. Similarly, if your in Europe and shipping to the UK is cheaper than the US. The address for the UK office is:210B The Big Peg120 Vyse StreetBirminghamB18 6NF
- Send the goods back BEFORE you file a PayPal dispute
PayPal’s system is very inflexible and favours the seller, it requires that you ship defective goods to the registered address, and using online tracking, all at your own expense. The PayPal terms of service state that tracking is only required for items over $250, however if you don`t use tracking, they will cancel your claim and give you no recourse. Similarly, all the forms on their website are only geared to accept a tracking number, there is no “this item is under $250 so i didn’t use tracking” option.
I cannot stress this enough, he HATES negative feedback. Often by filing negative feedback, he will ask you to remove it and often make you an offer. I and several other people managed to get full refunds this way, but perhaps you can screw him for more. If you do, we’d all love to hear about it! Also when you leave feedback, someone suggested that you should wait until the very last few minutes before the ability to leave feedback expires, and thus he’l have no chance to leave negative for you.
This is the most important of all. FastMemoryMan is a compulsive liar, and he will try every trick in the book to screw you out of your money. For instance, he tried to trick me into believing the motherboard for which i purchased memory doesn’t have the chipset he listed as compatible, but infact has a completely different incompatible chipset, and thus it is my fault the memory does not work. Checking with the motherboard manufacturer’s website quickly exposed this lie.He does not run a big company, his name is Chetan Seraf, and he is a one man band in the US. He is also associated with a small company in the UK.When you return defective goods, he will give you an RMA number, this is always “RMA D4″, and is not in any way unique to you. There is no returns department, it is just the one guy. He will often mail you under different names claiming to be someone else, so don’t fall for it.
- Report his listings to ebay
They probably won’t do anything, but enough complaints may have some effect against him.
- Report his fraudulent listings to manufacturers and the relevant authorities.
Quite often he will make false claims about a branded good, this is fraud and should be reported to the proper authorities and the manufacturer he is counterfeiting. Most reputable companies won’t take too kindly to a fraudster like this selling cheap unbranded goods and trying to pass them off as theirs. It harms their reputation and they need to know about it.
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08.20.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:39 pm by blog
Aparrently the Skype service went down this week, and stayed down for 2 days leaving users unable to use it…
Now Skype uses it’s own proprietary protocol, it’s not based on any kind of standard like SIP or H.323, so you have to use the Skype client and connect it to the Skype service.
But when the service is not available, your screwed, and if you want to communicate with people you have to use something else.
If you had used a standard protocol such as SIP, then you can easily have a backup provider which your client can switch to automatically. You may not even notice that your primary service provider went down at all.
Similarly, because they can be replaced so easily, standards compliant service providers have to compete for your custom. There are hundreds of SIP providers out there, your free to shop around for the best value provider rather than being stuck with a single supplier.
So if you use a standard protocol you get choice, the choice of where to get your service from, and the choice to use another service if one fails you (eg: an outage) and even to use multiple services at once, automatically switching to another if the primary fails.
If you use proprietary protocols like Skype, you are at the mercy of a single provider. You have to pay whatever prices they decide to charge, and simply put up with whatever outages they have.
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07.31.07
Posted in spamcompanies at 12:12 pm by blog
I have receive a couple of emails and one post to this site from someone at Acunetix on this matter.
Although he denies that the company or it’s employees send spam or sell email addresses to spammers, the question still remains as to how the email address uniquely used on their site received spam.
It certainly wasn’t as the result of a brute force scan for guessable email addresses, as my mail server responds the same to both valid and invalid addresses, and there were no server logs indicating attempts to send spams to other common names.
It is unlikely that acunetix monitor the actions of their staff 24/7, so there is still a chance a rogue employee sold/leaked email addresses without the company as a whole knowing, similarly there is always the chance of one or more of their servers, or those of their isp being compromised.
So, i ask other people who have signed up to acunetix.com some time ago if they have started receiving spam on the address they used.
Many people use unique email addresses for such signups, but often put the company name in the address (as I often do too), however an unscrupulous company would likely filter these. Indeed, i have never received spam through a company where i put their sitename in the signup address.
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07.29.07
Posted in spamcompanies at 10:23 pm by blog
A few days ago i posted about how a unique email address i created for signing up to acunetix.com started to receive a large volume of spam. As i wrote that article, i also mailed the company to complain, also cc:ing their upstream provider.
I looked through the original mail from Acunetix, and it came from the IP address: 213.165.181.136, which appears to be a cable provider in Malta. I then looked through my web logs, and low and behold:
213.165.181.136 - - [27/Jul/2007:11:16:27 +0100] “GET /wordpress/2007/07/27/acunetixcom-sells-your-mail-address-to-spammers/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 2605 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5″
213.165.181.136 - - [27/Jul/2007:15:13:51 +0100] “GET /wordpress/2007/07/27/acunetixcom-sells-your-mail-address-to-spammers/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 2605 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5″
213.165.181.136 - - [27/Jul/2007:15:16:00 +0100] “GET /wordpress/2007/07/27/acunetixcom-sells-your-mail-address-to-spammers/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 2605 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5″
213.165.181.136 - - [27/Jul/2007:15:42:51 +0100] “GET /wordpress/2007/07/27/acunetixcom-sells-your-mail-address-to-spammers/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 2605 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5″
213.165.181.136 - - [27/Jul/2007:15:43:00 +0100] “GET /wordpress/2007/07/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 7811 “http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/07/27/acunetixcom-sells-your-mail-address-to-spammers/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5″
So interesting… They have viewed my site using several different computers, my guess is several employees of the company. However, they have not replied to my mail… They haven’t yet tried to deny selling their customers’ email addresses. It does look very much like they’re trying to lay low having been caught out.
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07.27.07
Posted in spamcompanies at 9:58 am by blog
A few months ago i signed up to download a piece of software from www.acunetix.com. Aparrently they provide software for testing the security of web sites. Of course i created a unique address for the sole purpose of this signup.
I got the software, had a play with it, and received a couple of followup marketting mails from acunetix, then heard nothing for several months. All fine so far i thought.
Until recently, when I started receiving spams to this address which was uniquely created for acunetix. I got the typical spams, fake rolex watches, cheap software (probably pirated), and various types of medications.
And these were only the spams that reached the second stage of my spam filter, spam which goes over a certain score or comes from a blacklisted address doesn’t even reach this stage, which provides an interface for me to weed out false positives.
I have received a total of 431 spams to this address within the past week.
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Posted in spamcompanies at 9:51 am by blog
To combat the problem of websites that need an email address for signup and all the junk mail they send, I came up with an approach designed to let me minimise that problem.
Basically, i create a new email domain and account for each site i sign up for, for instance if i were to sign up to my own site i would create an address like:
blah@www.ev4.org.firenzee.com
This address is unique to the site in question, so that if they continue to send me unwanted emails i can simply remove the account and the mails are gone.
Doing this however, resulting in me making an interesting discovery, not only did a lot of companies send me large amounts of marketting material on a regular basis, but some actually sold or leaked my details to spammers!
Yes that’s right, single use email accounts which were only ever used to sign up to a single website were now receiving bucket loads of the typical viagra, penis enlargement, fake rolex and all the other garbage spams that float around the internet on a daily basis.
So this category here is to name and shame these companies in the hope that the information will disuade people from signing up to such unethical companies, and hopefully in the long run to discourage these companies from such behaviour.
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07.09.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:53 am by blog
Today i had a listing cancelled on ebay, for:
“Circumvention of eBay Fees (=LS &12362 JM119848267)”
However, your listing was in breach of eBay’s Circumvention of eBay Fees policy and has been removed from eBay. All fees related to this listing have been credited to
your account. We also notified members who placed bids on the item that the listing has
been canceled.
We would like to take this opportunity to let you know what part of your listing is not permitted.
Your listing(s) contains the following information:
Payment by paypal will incur a 5 additional charge to cover fees
You may not manipulate eBay’s system in order to avoid paying certain eBay fees. This includes practices such as adding previously unspecified fees after the end of the
auction, or charging excessive postage and packaging in order to recoup your listing and Final Value Fees. Fee avoidance provides a poor buying experience and gives you
an unfair advantage over other eBay sellers.
Payment surcharges are a form of fee circumvention. eBay prohibits surcharging by sellers. Surcharging occurs when sellers pass the charges they incur for using eBay or
third party services such as payment services onto buyers.
eBay has adopted this surcharging policy to ensure that all buyers receive clear and accurate pricing information when trading on eBay.co.uk. This surcharge policy
applies only to items listed on eBay.co.uk.
For more information on Circumvention of eBay Fees copy this link into a new browser window:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/listing-surcharges.html
What this basically boils down to is. I as a seller cannot make the buyer pay to cover the charges imposed by paypal… Thus, if a buyer pays for the item with cash, a cheque or some other method I receive all the money. If they pay using paypal, I lose a percentage of it. I don’t consider this at all unreasonable, if a buyer wants to use a method of payment that will cost more, they should foot the bill, not the seller. Ebay are doing this because making buyers pay the paypal charges discourages people from using it, so they screw the sellers instead.
Also let’s not forget that paypal take a cut from the money intended for shipping costs, so sellers have no choice but to inflate shipping costs to cover it.
So as a consequence, i will stop using paypal.
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07.04.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:06 am by blog
A followup to my earlier posting on http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/03/03/keziefoodscouk-are-cheeky-bastards/ regarding the way their registration page uses javascript to fake you signing up for their newsletter, even when you explicitely unchecked the “subscribe to newsletter” box.
As i stated in my earlier post, i wrote them an email complaining about this horrendous behaviour. A few days later, i got a reply:
From: "Wendy Biggins" (wendy@kezie.com)
To:(MY ADDRESS)
Subject: RE: March Offer
Can you deal with this one!!!!!!
-----Original Message-----
From: MY_ADDRESS [mailto:MY_ADDRESS]=20
Sent: 03 March 2007 10:04
To: wendy@kezie.com
Subject: Re: March Offer
How dare you send me this unsolicited mail.
Your registration form uses javascript to recheck the "subscribe to
newsletter" tickbox, even if it's explicitely been left unchecked.
I was planning to make a purchase from your company, and i went through
the registration form while intentionally leaving the newsletter option
unticked as i don't like to receive floods of junk mail. When i clicked
submit, the newsletter box got automatically ticked by javascript within
the page. This is an illegal and incredibly insulting act, and caused me
to immediately stop placing an order and go elsewhere.
I want my details removed from your system IMMEDIATELY, or else i will
be
forced to report you for sending of unsolicited commercial email.
I also suggest that you modify the ridiculous policy of tricking people
into subscribing to your newsletter, as this highly offensive and
underhanded act will certainly cost you more customers than just me.
This looks like a pretty stupid screwup… It’s obvious she tried to forward this to one of her colleagues, but fucked up and hit reply instead of forward…
I did reply, to let her know of the mistake but have since not received anything back. How very rude of them.
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