In the queue, Part 2

A somewhat different spam appeared in my queue this week:

“Nancy Hopkins” is really in love with her initial capitals, isn't she?

I did find a company called County Line Energy; it purports to be an “Oil and Gas exploration” outfit, in Alberta.

The home page looks like our Nancy created it.

Any road—they’ll have to do without my investment.

Linking into the weird, Pt. 2

I was telling a friend of mine about the two strange LinkedIn invitations I’ve had recently and something occurred to me.

I should start a new LinkedIn group that combines the two areas that these people thought I’d be a “fit” for:

“Working Moms for Security and Counter-Terrorism”

Especially for mothers of two-year-olds.

Linking in to the weird

Speaking of questionable solicitations, as I was yesterday, LinkedIn has got somewhat weirder. I think it’s because if you’re in a group with someone, you can send them messages for free (without buying a premium subscription).

The invitation to a security & counter-terrorism group was kind of strange, because I have no bleeding idea what it is about my LinkedIn profile that would lead anyone to think I have experience or even interest in that field. Except that I mention that my research concentration is in military history—but that is kind of a tenuous connection at best.

However, even stranger than me in a terror community is the invitation I got from some chick wanting me to join a group called Working Moms for Healthy Living:

Now, trust me—there is absolutely nothing in my LinkedIn profile that would lead anyone to connect me with working momdom.

& given the choice between counter-terrorism & working mothers, guess which group I’d pick?

In the queue

Ah, the new year is starting out well for the spammers & phishers. Thank God even lame-ass AOL can detect them & shunt them off into the junk mail folder. (Hey—after AOL assimilated Netscape emails I was stuck with them. It’s not like I volunteered.)

 
 The “Priority Mail Postal Service” is an old pal, more or less—can’t decide whether it wants to be the USPS or FedEx, so going for both:

Interesting that they didn’t bother to steal the actual FedEx logo, which is:

(Note the difference in the font, the colors and the space between Fed & Ex.)

The one from “MailBox Alert”, slugged “New e-mails in your mailbox” was, um, different:

Kind of a change to be addressed as “Gentleman!” (Although—do you suppose they’re tracking all the spam I get for penile enlargement aids?) & nice to know I have 15 more “fresh” messages. Do you suppose they mean fresh as in “recent” or fresh as in “frisky”?

One could also speculate about the offers. But, sadly, I won’t be contacting administrator Natasha.

If it were Boris, now…

If a man answers

Here’s a vertical market that apparently wasn’t featured at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show: mobile phones with a privacy feature enabling the user to keep calls from specified callers out of queues, logs, etc. They’re called “infidelity phones”, and they apparently are well known in Japan.

The technology—which is actually oldish—is the subject of blogs among the use-‘em-&-lose-‘em” set. It’s essentially an earlier version of privacy settings that allow the user to shunt calls from various people—other mistresses, wives,and the like—into a never-never land so that the woman they’re with at the moment isn’t able to scroll through call logs and deduce philandering is in process.

Of course, that doesn’t do anything to hide the evasiveness, lies and general scumminess that forms the basis of men who need such privacy settings. Those are even older technologies that should be easily picked up on by anyone with the most basic bullshit detection systems.