Clueless Comcast
Comcast's e-mail filters, that they claim actually exist, didn't catch this phishing scam.
It has come to our attention that your Comcast Verification details records are expired. This requires that you update your Comcast Profile records immidiatley. Failure to update your records will turn out in account termination. Please update your records within 48 hours. Once you have updated your account records, your Comcast account will not be terminated and will continue as normal. Failure to update will result in Terms of Service violations, termination of service or future billing problems. Please click here to continue. (scam web site at domain fcq.unc.edu.ar deleted)
So, as a comcast customer, I sent the message to their abuse drop box, and got the following bounce message:
The email that you have submitted to abuse@comcast.net does not appear to contain a Comcast IP address. The abuse@comcast.net address is only for the investigation of incidents of network abuse regarding Comcast subscribers.
Why don't they update their freaking IP address lists? And how in the hell do they let comcast-targeted spam through their servers?
What a pain in the ass. Why anyone spend the time to send another message to a black hole about the spam is beyond me.
I suppose that they've reduced staff at the abuse desk and they're simply spending too much money on annoying commercials that endlessly market to existing customers services that they already have.
I'm surprised that this one made it through the spam filters
...but that really shouldn't be surprising, because comcast has no spam filters. (If they say they do, then their spam filters are horribly misconfigured, or else they're simply lying. Anyway, check this out.
URGENT BUSINESS ASSISTANCE.DEAR SIR/MADAM,
YOU MAY BE SURPRISED TO RECEIVE THIS LETTER FROM ME, SINCE YOU DO NOT KNOW ME PERSONALY. I AM PRINCE DEVID MOYO SITHOLE THE FIRST SON OF CHIEF DAN SITHOLE, WHOWAS RECENTLY MURDERED IN THE COURSE OF THE LANDDISPUTE IN ZIMBABWE. I GOT YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION FROM A DIRECTORY IN SOUTH AFRICAN TRADE AND INFORMATION IN JOHANNESBURG HENCE I DECIDED TO (blah blah blah...)
I did a double take, then a triple take, because I could have sworn I'd just gotten a spam from someone who's name was Shithole.
Stop molesting little boys, you FREAK!
I miss Wesley Willis already. Even after his passing earlier this year, his music retains its topicality through this wonderfully accurate portrait of Michael Jackson.
Thanks to Rev. Norel Pref for sharing this with us in alt.binaries.slack.
Homage to Fraud
Recently I've been entertaining my interest in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, whose barbarous practices in the Middle Ages I find fascinating. Now I know where Dave Sim got some of his inspiration for Church and State.
I am reminded of the Church's medieval roots by the recent beatification of Mother Teresa by Pope John Paul II. This incredulous event is nicely summarized in an article on Slate, from which I quote:
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?