Source
Automatically imported from: http://commons.somewhere.com:80/rre/1996/notes.html
Content
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.
notes
``` Some RRE notes.
As a periodic reminder, you can unsubscribe like this:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: unsubscribe
Note that the -=-=-=-=-=-= banner at the top of almost every RRE message gives the address for an autoresponder that can provide instructions for unsubscribing and much else.
One person complained about my rant against the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He was right, sort of. It's a matter of writing. I try to do the work for this list quickly, but good writing takes extra time. The WSJ editorial page is conducting a smear campaign. At the same time, my writing improves as I get rid of adjectives and adverbs. For example, just now I dropped "reckless" before "smear" and the sentence got better.
I'll be in San Francisco and environs on September 4th and 5th. Let me know if anything cool is going on then. I particularly want to talk to people who are doing political work on the Internet.
Finally, I've been plagued lately by the schemes of feeble people who abuse the Internet. Here are some of the stories. Maybe you'll be amused.
One day I get a message telling me that someone has placed a link to a set of my students' term papers on a page advertising "free term papers". I was incredulous, but it was true. I complained about the practice of encouraging people to steal my students' work, and I got back this feeble message promising to erase the link but saying, in effect, anyone else could do this as well. He signs his message, "in solidarity".
I get a message from someone on AOL that reads, in its entirety, "who?". I respond, "huh?". Then I notice a URL in the header of the message. I plug that URL into lynx (yes, I use lynx at home) and find a page of "celebrity e-mail addresses" that had been posted by an enthusiast of autograph collecting. I am not making this up. Thinking that anybody who regards me as a celebrity desperately needs to get a life, I send a message asking to have my name taken off this page. The guy replies by agreeing to do so but claiming that he got my address from a book -- I think he meant an actual printed book -- of celebrity e-mail addresses. Then he tells me how much he loved reading my book "Human Experiences", a mangled version of the title of a book that has not yet been published.
And then I get another message. "Dear Phil", it starts, and launches into this tale of woe about how this guy is unemployed and needs to feed his family etc. Oh no. But then, over the course of twenty lines, the message metamorphoses into a multi-level marketing pitch. He's a reseller of long-distance telephone service, and wouldn't you know that celebrities and members of the Dallas Cowboys (if I remember right) are making money and enjoying something-or-other percent discounts. Okay, so what do you do when you get a message like this? Here's what I do. I save it to a file, then concatenate that file to itself a few times (using the Unix cat command) until the file is about 180K bytes. I mail the file to the sender of the message five or six times, and then (very important) I let go of my feelings of anger and helplessness about spam and carry on with my life. (If the person is mailing from an ISP, I also send a copy of the message to the postmaster at the ISP.) If the person is a spammer, and if many people respond similarly, then justice will be done. If the person is not a spammer then they'll just have a small mess to clean up.
Finally, just today, I get a message from someone who is assembling a (paper) mailing list of people interested in conservative political causes. He claims to have gotten my name from a conservative mailing list where I posted something. (Not likely.) Now, at least this guy is halfway honest about what he is doing, even if it is spam. Is he making money selling this list? He doesn't say, but he'd be a fool not to. Will I send him back a megabyte worth of copies of his message? I haven't decided yet.
Phil ```
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.