Tag Archives: spam

A Piano From Germany With A Colorful Past

Parrots and pianos live long enough to experience human history – my piano has 120 years of birth, death, business twists, war, hard times, and relationship endings

Gebr.Schulz baby grand klavier

By Stephen Pate – My piano has a colorful history. Built by a 120-year-old German company founded with Steinway who survived two World Wars, it was sold to a German ~~Canadian~~ who skipped town without paying.

Updated 3/8/2012 by Christoph Schulz – see end note

He shipped it to Canada and didn’t pay the customs duty in Halifax either. The piano was sold to a musician who traded years later to a music dealer. The dealer jacked the price up and traded it to me while stiffing me for an additional $7 grand.
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Nuance more persistent than a bill collector and less fun than HAL

What do supper time phone solicitation and voice activated software have in common

Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet, recognize the late Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen in this fun 1956 movie? (picture MGM)

I’ve been a lifetime fan of voice activated computers and robots.

As the owner and occasional user of Dragon Naturally Speaking, Nuance believes I’m fair game for email spam and supper time sales calls to upgrade.

Naturally Speaking is the reigning king of voice activation software, or so I’m told. Nuance, the developer, is driving me nuts with spam sales email and now the pushy, phone sales person right at suppertime – arghh!

It won’t work. I’m not upgrading since the program fails to deliver the promise of voice activated artificial intelligence.

You and I are the best illustrations of voice activation and I’ll acknowledge a fair amount of artificial intelligence.

Getting your computer to respond to word commands is right out of science fiction. Try Robbie the Robot in B film The Forbidden Planet, a 1956 sci-fi film. Robbie could respond to voice commands from Dr. Morbius played by Walter Pidgeon. The idea was so cool that I pestered my mother to get me a Robbie Robot toy. Guess what? Robbie didn’t respond to voice commands. Continue reading →

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New phishing attacks with out-of-office and change-my-email messages

Clever new attacks simulate emails with moderate level of important information but no alarming key phrases

Phishing illustrations PC1 News

People started getting phony emails this week that attempt to establish contact through benign messages. The older scams promise millions of dollars in lost money, sex, dates, or jobs.

This new round of phishing is different: the messages are low key and don’t contain anything that would raise alarm bells. Replying to get more detail can open up your system to phishing or trojan attacks.

Here are a few received in in the past 4 hours. None of them are from people I know but they do raise one’s curiosity which is the point: to hook you innocently into replying.

Email Change

Steve Rich has changed his email address due to excessive spam after having the same address for 15 years. Please, go to the website and contact the office via the contact directory on the top header, , (you will get general email address where you can request Steve’s new email) or, call the office at 973-458-1188 or Steve’s cell phone to get his new email address.

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Spam from China and Russia skyrockets

One in six are replying to spam email offers, only rarely are they from Nils Ling

Spam up 300% over May

With story from Computerworld

Something happened on the Internet on June 22nd when Internet spam started an historic rise. Since then spam from China and Russia has flooded websites with denial of service attacks and email.
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Spam attacks on increase – shields up!

Spam attacks have increased apparently around the time of Michael Jackson’s death.

Michael Jackson Mirror.co.uk Getty picture

There are reports of major US government installations being hacked. Denial of service and Trojan attacks seem popular.

At NJN Network we are getting 200-300 spam attacks a day. Loads of fun clearing out the garbage. Sometimes the spam filter deletes real comments so if your comment doesn’t appear, please submit it again.

It is always prudent to keep the old virus checker up to date, especially now.

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Looking for my Chinese cousin Steve in all the wrong places

There were only teddy bears

I’m not against better sex, but I have my own way of figuring that one out.

Nonetheless, every day I get hundreds of offers for live sex, video sex, email sex, sex aids, Viagra etc. Email spam filters catch them.

I was deleting 260 sex offers from my Gmail account today. Noticed most of the emails were Chinese. Continue reading →

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Censorship or spam

NJN Network tries to be as open as possible. We allow uncensored comments but do block some comments. Is that hypocritical? We hope not but it’s always wise to err on the side of the angels, meaning to do good not harm.

The site managers have a spam guard. If you want to sell Viagra, weed, xxx porn or whatever, the software deletes the message before we see it. Since we changed servers in February the filter blocked 668 spam messages, allowed 1,044 valid messages and made 46 mistakes. Mistakes are messages where we disagreed with the filter.

It allows the Editor to review the dubious ones which are normally something to do with aggregator sites that link to every story with a popular word like “Britney” or “Obama”. Those spam sites are get-rich-quick schemes. The site has an automatic link generator that posts comments on thousands of sites a day trying to build traffic without original content. Millions of these useless sites are set up. Google bots ignore those sites. We ignore them too.

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