Spam Gallery – Episode 2

This was an email from “GMU Support” sent a few weeks back, phishing for GMU student usernames and passwords.  Originating email address was: adouthit@siu.edu and reply-to was: y.inc21@yahoo.com.  Never give your username/password over email to anyone.

RE: Verification

Att: User,

You are required to reply to this email with the below details within 48 hours:

GMU Username:
Password:

Failure to comply will lead to Account Termination.

GMU SUPPORT

Spam Gallery – Episode 1

I’ve been getting a lot more spam and phishing emails lately.  Something must be awry with the Gmail or GMU spam filters.  So, I’ve decided to start posting those email here for everyone to see.  I’ll tag these posts with “Spam Gallery”, so you can view them all by following that tag in the tag cloud below.  Feel free to email the sender and spam his inbox.   Enjoy….

RE: Thanks and Good Bless You

From: Zuma Hazan

Thanks And God Bless You.
I am Mr Zuma Hazan.
The Director incharge of Auditing section of Bank of Africa (BOA) in
Ouagadougou,Burkina Faso .I need your urgent business assistance in transferring an
abandoned sum of ($19.3 Million) dollars left by a deceased customer of my bank
immediately to your account.
If you are interested and ready to partake in this great business opportunity,kindly
send your profiles to me including your Name,your private telephone number for easy
communication.I will send you full details on how the business will be executed and
also note that you will receive 40% of the above mentioned amount if you agree to help
me execute this business.My private email(mrzh100@yahoo.com).

May the almighty God be with you at all times.

Respectfully.
Mr Zuma.

Follow @GMUISOM on Twitter

We’ve started a new Twitter feed for the Information Systems and Operations Management department at School of Management at GMU.  Follow us @gmuisom.  We’ll be posting links to interesting articles on technology and business, as well as posting announcements about the department, program, school, events and local tech news.

Google Sidewiki

Google just introduced a new enhanced feature for the Google Toolbar called Sidewiki.  The tool allows users to add comments and links to any webpage.  So, if the page you’re looking at mentions a topic, but doesn’t have a hyperlink to more information you can add a link that other Sidewiki users will see.  Sidewiki also automatically posts entries from related webpages in the Sidewiki panel to provide readers more information.  This could be a very useful feature for extending information and content.

From Google’s perspective it’s likely a strategy to harness human collaboration to identify relevant sources of additional information and potential related webpages, which will help improve their pagerank and search algorithms.   Also, it could be used as an in-browser advertising panel and a haven for spammers, which will be very annoying for users.  It would be nice if you could install Sidewiki without the full Google toolbar plug-in, and I find it interesting that Sidewiki only works with Firefox and IE through the Google toolbar and can’t yet be installed in Google’s own Chrome web browser.

From the Google.com/sidewiki page if you access it with Chrome – “Sidewiki is currently a feature in Google Toolbar (in Internet Explorer and Firefox), but when Google Chrome supports extensions, we will work on building it for Google Chrome, too.”

Social Media is Not Anonymous

Here’s a great example of how easy it is to get fired for making comments about your employer online (word of caution, there are a few obscenities in this video).

Three important lessons can be learned from this incident by employees and employers.

1. Employers that use social media know how to find out when people talk about them online.  Blog buzz sites, social media search engines, tags, hash tags, and Google make it very easy to find out what is being said about a business online.  Don’t assume that no one will read your Tweets or look at the photos you post on Facebook.  The whole reason you put these things out there online is for people to see them.

2.  Social media reveals more personal information than users think. It was pretty easy for CPK to find out who this employee was and where he worked.  People have multiple online identities, and they are often linked.  Bits of information from each account can be aggregated to reveal identifying information.  All it took for CPK to find this employee was to link his Twitter account to his YouTube account which pointed them to Long Beach, CA.  Don’t assume anything you do online is anonymous.

3. Employers and businesses need to be aware of the consequences of disgruntled employees or ex-employees that use social media. The protagonist end his video by encouraging his friends and followers to badmouth CPK online [UPDATE - The original video went on to ask his viewers to tweet about CPK.  He quickly updated his video to remove that part - possible from CPK legal threats??].  If the employee that is fired has enough social media clout or by chance their video goes viral, as this one did, the employer may have a PR nightmare on their hands.  Its no wonder many organizations are starting to consider social media policies very carefully.

The Merlion Cometh

Still in Singapore, and I spent yesterday at the touristy Sentosa Island.  I took the cable car option to reach the island, which was great!  The cable car started on Mount Faber and crossed over the harbour front into Sentosa.  Views from the cable car were breathtaking.  Here’s a tip if you ever take the cable car, pay the extra S$3 for the all-glass gondola.  Not only is the view better, but they have a separate queue with hardly any wait compared to the standard cable car.

Cable car ride over the harbor and construction of new Universal Studios.

Sentosa Island is pretty much a tourist trap, which is great if you’re looking for something to do in Singapore besides go to shopping malls.  The island boasts a 37m tall statue of the Singapore Merlion icon.

The Merlion overlooks Sentosa.

Yep, the Merlion is half lion, half fish.  However strange that sounds, the statue is quite impressive.  Other attractions on the island include a luge ride, the Tiger Beer Sky Tower, and a few history and wildlife exhibits.

I spent most of my day on Sentosa at the beaches on the southern part of the island, where I had a nice lunch of fresh young coconut, papaya, and dragon fruit.

Siloso Beach sign on Sentosa.

Fresh papaya and dragonfruit.

The southernmost point in continental Asia is also on Sentosa Island.  Which is a claim I’m not quite sure about, since Singapore is an island and Sentosa is another island south of Singapore, but I guess they’re only separated from continental Asia by small straits and harbours.  Anyway, you can take a suspension bridge across a lagoon to a small island that looks out over the sea where dozens of ships park south of the Singapore harbour front.

Sign for the southernmost point in continental asia.

Ships parked south of Sentosa.

Sentosa is definitely worth the trip.  Cab fare in Singapore is very cheap, only about S$0.60 per km, so getting to the cable car station on Mount Faber should be under US$25 from anywhere in Singapore.  There are plenty of attractions to check out on the island and just relaxing on the beach is a great option too.   The midway cable care stop at the harbour front is right next to Vivo City, the largest shopping mall on Singapore.  So, if you want to get back to shopping after a day at the beach you can get your fix easily.

How Math Class Should Be

July in Singapore

Singapore River Eating and Shopping Area

I’m a few days into my trip to Singapore to visit my good friend and colleague Kim Huat Goh at the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University.  The flights here weren’t too bad, a 12-hour flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo and then 7 hours from Tokyo to Singapore.  The scare for H1N1 is quite high here in Asia; airport officials used heat (infrared) cameras to scan all passengers as we went through immigration at Changi Airport in Singapore to see if anyone was running a fever and I must have signed at least three different forms during the trip certifying I didn’t have any flu-like symptoms. Even the country’s mascot has been given a flu mask.

Singapore mascot wearing flu mask.

Singapore is beautiful: very clean, very tropical, very urban, and a unique mix of Asian and western culture.  Starbucks is everywhere.  Everyone speaks English, so there’s no trouble getting around. The weather is hot and humid, not ideal for a a guy from Minnesota, but not too oppressive either. Oh, and they drive on the left here – I wasn’t expecting that and my cab ride from the airport at 1 AM was a little nerve racking at first.

My first two nights I stayed in the Pan Pacific Orchard Hotel, in downtown Singapore.  Orchard Street is the shopping district and it is basically a multiple-mile chain of shopping malls, hotels, and restaurants – and all of the shopping malls seem to be packed with patrons all the time.  The population density is extremely high in Singapore, about 4.5M people in an area about the size of Minneapolis+St. Paul city limits.

Although this is a working trip, I plan to do a lot of site seeing over the next week and a half.  I’ve been to the Botanical Gardens and taken a boat ride up the Singapore River.  Items on the agenda include: Night Safari, Tiger Beer Brewery Tour, trying a Singapore Sling, and hopefully gettting to a S.League game or two.

Google Wave

Google just announced a new communications tool they have in development called Wave.   From the description, Wave will integrate email, social networking, multimedia sharing (photos, maps, vids, etc.), online collaborative work, document creation/management, and instant messaging into one fluid interface and work environment.  The features look pretty slick and this may be an interesting way to change how people stay productive using the social web.  There are still a lot of details to be revealed and the demo looks like a proof of concept video, but the idea is very interesting.

I also like the name Wave, I think they are playing on wave-particle duality of photons and other quantum particles.  Maybe a subtle way to say communication and collaboration on the web has traditionally been like particles, fairly static and asynchronous, but Wave will change things to make it more fluid and wave-like.

Tony Hawk Ride

Activision is releasing a new skateboarding game this fall called Tony Hawk: Ride, and what’s so special about this new game?  The controller: it will be a wheel-less skateboard that contains two accelerometers and captures the player’s actual movements to control the on-screen action.  Just like Guitar Hero and Rock Band gave people with no musical talent the ability to experience rocking out, Tony Hawk: Ride will let people with no skateboarding experience shred.  Pretty cool concept and from the video it looks like it will be fun.  The game costs $120, a little more than a decent deck for actual skateboarding.