College Student Receives Email of the Lost 318
dots and loops wrote to mention an eWeek article that's something of a life lesson: Don't be too smart for your own good. The article tells the tale of a college student who cleverly chose null@vtext.com as his cellphone email address. He's been getting thousands of wayward emails and text messages since 2001. From the article: "Initially, the content of the messages was innocuous, he said. It was things like don't forget to drop the car off at baker's and to call mom at 781-XXX-XXXX, stuff like that, Bubrouski wrote. The problem worsened in mid-2002, when Bubrouski's phone began channeling what he claims were dozens of messages from an e-mail address used by General Motors' then-new "OnStar" system. The messages quickly filled up the memory on his cell phone and contained diagnostic response to tests on a beta version of OnStar. 'Basically, peoples' cars were sending messages to my phone, Bubrouski wrote. "
You think it's bad *now* (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot just put your email address on their home page. Unscrambled.
Hmmm...wonder what a variant of the Slashdot effect is going to do to a cellphone?
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually quite serious. I have had one story posted on Slashdot, and because I didn't have a homepage, the editors put in my unscrambled email address. The story was copied and pasted verbatum by countless sites all over the next.
That address was almost rendered unusable. Only the bayesian span fliters in thunderbird salvaged it. Still, it was pretty irritating to see an address I had been quite careful with destroyed because the Slashdot editors didn't consider carefully what they were doing.
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
You mean, because you didn't consider what you were doing.... You entered your e-mail address, they didn't go look it up and enter it for you. You should have considered the fact that, if the story was accepted, it would be posted, but you failed to consider that. It is not the editor's place to go and edit someone's e-mail address or home
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:4, Interesting)
If I can do it with a mIRC script, you bet an e-mail harvest is already doing it with a more dedicated tool.
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
And that stinks. We need a better solution to the spam problem than carefully hiding email addresses from the world.
My current "solution" is to run spamassassin, which gets most of my enormous amounts of spam with a fairly low false positive rate. But it's only a stopgap solution -- something more permanent is needed.
I wish I knew what it was.
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
The odd thing is this: I have one address that I carefully managed. I only gave it out to family and friends. I have another address that I use on all web forms, email lists, etc.
Which one gets ALL the spam? My carefully managed address. The other one gets maybe 1
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Still, it was pretty irritating to see an address I had been quite careful with destroyed because the Slashdot editors didn't consider carefully what they were doing.
Your fault. Everybody knows that the /. editors don't know what they're doing, so your first (and last) mistake was not using a throwaway email address.
his complaint is legitimate (Score:2)
Well, how nice for you that your life is so simple and your needs are so modest. However, many other people cannot use a white list.
His complaint is legitimate: it is exceptionally rude for Slashdot editors to manually unscramble an E-mail address and put it into a story.
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Well... (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Sell crazy some place else, we're all stocked up here.
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Not that silly. In many countries calls from home telephones are free. Calls to mobiles and whatnot are also free, indeed why not, I'm just calling a number. The mobile telephone recepient chooses to answer the call. Why not let them take the mobile network side of the call? It isn't dumb, it makes sense. Call to switch is free, when it reaches switch it is in the domain of the mobile teleph
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
I don't think you are charged if you don't read it.
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:5, Insightful)
That explains why he kept the account for 5 years.
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
https://www.vtext.com/customer_site/jsp/aboutserv
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
No you don't. Only if someone else is paying for it under the condition that you always answer it would you be obligated to answer. And that's still your choice to enter such a situation, and you aren't even paying for it in that case, the other person is paying to be able to reach you.
Plan : bankrupt Verizon (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Re:You think it's bad *now* (Score:2)
Fault (Score:3, Insightful)
"There's no way that this should be happening. No e-mail system would ever do that," he said.
Verizon should be rejecting messages with improperly formatted addressee information, not forwarding it to an account, he said.
Bubrouski agrees.
"I'd have to say Verizon is at fault. Sure, service providers make mistakes, but Verizon shouldn't be accepting messages from no one to no one," he said.
It's safe to say Verizon is at fault, but perhaps not in the way everyone would think. How could they let someone have an email address of 'null'? NULL is generally a reserved keyword in most places where it is used; apparently the designers of Verizon's email system forgot some basic computing. Could someone sign up for 'root@vtext.com'? I would hope they would be smart about avoiding problems like that in the first place, though in the end it's true that their email system must be pretty poor if it allows messages with malformed header information to be received.
Re:Fault (Score:2)
No, it's not safe to say. I very strongly doubt it, in fact:
That's because it was probably our little mobile group at Disney (owner of ESPN and ABC), oops. We took content such as sports stories and sent it out to all kinds of mobile devices, including cell phones and SMS devices.
If we ever screwed up during our testing (bugs? what bugs?), we could very easily hav
Re:Fault (Score:2)
I know of someone who created their personal email for their family member as nospam@ a domain and they don't get any :) someone must be doing a s/nospam//
In-Band Signaling (Score:2)
The problem goes deeper than reserved keywords. They apparently didn’t understand the concept of “in-band signaling [wikipedia.org]--the sending of metadata and control information in the same channel used for data,” instead of using separate channels. Using unescaped, reserved keyw
wrong (Score:2)
Unlike "root" or "postmaster", the address "null" has no special meaning in an E-mail system.
Re:Fault (Score:2)
Re:Fault (Score:2)
Re:Fault (Score:2)
In at least one case it was faults in the services sending the messages that were addressing them to him:
I don't suppose there's much Ve
Re:Fault (Score:2)
Here's an idea: (Score:2)
Re:Here's an idea: (Score:2)
Re:Here's an idea: (Score:3, Informative)
He likes getting all these texts.
He blocks the most voluminous senders and reads the rest for giggles.
Re:Here's an idea: (Score:2)
RTFA? You must be new here.
Re:Here's an idea: (Score:2)
Yeah, you'd think that after 5 years, he'd think of that one. Guess some people are a little slow.
Re:Here's an idea: (Score:2)
RTFA: Getting rid of his vText account would stop the stream of unwanted SMS message problem, but Bubrouski said he enjoys reading the messages he receives, and blocks companies and individuals when the volume of SMS they're sending him gets too high.
Talk about your security breach. (Score:2)
Medical information? Credit Card & Social Security numbers?
Shit is going to hit the fan in 5
Why is confidential info sent as email? (Score:2)
If anyone I did business with sent me confidential info over email, and it wasn't encrypted, I'd be royally ticked, and sue them for being so negligent about protecting my info.
Re:Why is confidential info sent as email? (Score:2)
He could have chosen "None" (Score:2, Interesting)
Some smart *ss decided to get a vanity plate that read "NONE". It seems that whenever a police officer or parking commisionair issued a ticket for a vehicle without a license plate, they would write in "NONE" where it said plate.
Then the clear entering the ticket info, would (of course) enter the same thing into their system.
The result was hundreds of tickets being issued to him, for various offenses (parking, speeding, etc.).
Re:He could have chosen "None" (Score:2)
Clever. Of course, this could be used to his advantage too -- since there would be a flood of them, any tickets that he himself got would also say NONE, and so he could probably get the entire stack dismissed all at once, both the not-his ones and the really-his ones. (The court system is unlikely to expect him to pay for tickets that weren't issued to him, though they might make him jump through som
Re:He could have chosen "None" (Score:2)
Re:He could have chosen "None" (Score:2)
Re:He could have chosen "None" (Score:2)
Vehicle tag fun (Score:2)
Be careful of your chosen names!
stupid BBS tricks (Score:2)
So if you created a user named "All", most messages in echomail and most messages in local boards would be flagged as new to you. Once sysops figured that out they usually created the user All and that was the end of it.
People predicted this ages ago... (Score:2)
Re:People predicted this ages ago... (Score:2)
If you RTFA you'll find that he was getting many of these messages because dumb techs at various companies testing messaging services were deliberately sending their stuff to his null@ email address on the incorrect assumption that there was no such user. If they'd had a clue, they would have used something RFC2602-compliant - null@example.com, for example. That's what it's for. (Personally I don't see why he shouldn't have null as a username, if he wants. It's not as if it gives him admin rights or anythi
I wonder if he chose (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I wonder if he chose (Score:2)
Re:I wonder if he chose (Score:2)
Yeah, a long time ago. Guess you're too young to remember...
car spam (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if he even thought about this before he got that address.
Now the question is - can he sue for textual harassment?
"null" (string) vs. null value? (Score:2)
str = "null" and
str = null
mean two completely different things. Somewhere along the line, they must be converting null(value) to "null"(string), which seems like a dumb thing to do.
Re:"null" (string) vs. null value? (Score:2)
In C, if you try to print a null string with printf, you get the text "(null)" out, which is arguably better than crashing. It's probably something like this causing the spurious messages to the null@ address.
Signs or more to come.... (Score:2)
Still, there's going to be a ton of companies that don't know what they're doing, or who they're hiring; problems like these will only continue to surfac
Another good username (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Signs or more to come.... (Score:2)
It's highly likely that most of the emails he's receiving DO have the To: and From: headers set properly. This comment [slashdot.org] is probably very close to the true source (if not the true idea of the source) of most of the messages he's been receiving. It could also come from java programs, where if you print an unitialized string it just prints the four characters n, u, l, l
Sounds like a version of the vanity plate legend (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like a version of the vanity plate legen (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like a version of the vanity plate legen (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like a version of the vanity plate legen (Score:2)
The vin number, usually visiable on the dashboard unless we are talking something very old. IIRC the tickets reflect the plate if visiable, the vin, and color. And I believe, not having much experence with this, a car if parked on a public street needs to be ticketed to be towed.
Subtle plug for TCPA on page 3 (Score:2)
Great!
test cluster vs testcluster.com (Score:2)
Until I finally shut off DNS to it, every day or so there would be some Windows Active Directory system out there trying to update my DNS servers. I'm guessing "testcluster" is a popular name for a new Windows clusters.
For example:
query: _ldap._tcp.pdc._msdcs.testcluster.com
query: _kerberos._tcp.dc._msdcs.testcluster.com
query: 6c91d860-bf0b-4bd9-b0f3-2a368934fe0e._msdcs.testcl uster.com
query: _ldap._tcp.DomainDnsZones.testcluster.com
Similar Situation Here (Score:2)
Anyway, I have a standard response that I send back to people letting them know that they mistyped the addresses. In about two years of this, only 3 or 4 times has anyone bothered to thank me for letting them know they screwed up.
And one time, some idiot actually replied to my message and kept talking as if he was talking to his friend! Talk
WTF are the developers thinking? (Score:2)
All that said, why are the developers of these programs using it? I can only assume it is them sending messages to this address as I doubt any clients would. Whatever happened to sending you email to example@example.com? Even better set up an email account that just dumps into a bit bucket on your domain and use that. Regardless of the method why allo
Great idea! (Score:2)
Re:Great idea! (Score:2)
Reminds me... (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me... (Score:2)
Just Like Woz!! (Score:2)
Apparently, he always wanted a phone number with all the same digit, like 444-4444. After he got one, he discovered the horrible truth... he got tons of calls followed by hang-ups. As the story goes, he couldn't figure out what it was, until one day he heard someone yell in the background, "Jimmy - you hang that up!" (or something like that). He was getting little kids! Of course, they grab the phone and press the same number over and over.
Re:Just Like Woz!! (Score:2)
Off topic rant about null (Score:2)
In the world of software design, "Null" is commonly used to represent "no value" or "0."
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
Null is commonly used to represent "no value" or the absence of data. In programming, zero is discrete and specific data. Zero is data. Null is the lack of any data.
Okay so this isn't exactly a programming or data base design article but these things are important. I work in a support department and do you know how hard it is to explain what NULL is? Misinformation should not be
Re:Off topic rant about null (Score:2)
printf("Why won't this print?\r\n");
}
Why not just change the email address? (Score:2)
Years of this? Why not just change the address?
same thing happened to me (Score:2)
Great career choice, Mom (Score:2)
My therapist is buying a boat.
Ah, that takes me back. (Score:2)
Then, one day, around 1996, I stopped getting non-delivery reports....
I've never had the courage to try and figure out who I dumped 10,000 identical e-mails onto...
What did you do that for!?!? (Score:2)
Well, at least I didn't mention that I was working for Soft-Switch at the time. She may not connect me with email that came from them....
Reminds me of "uucp@aol.com" (Score:2)
On RISKS, a few years ago, someone wrote up his experiences as"My life as uucp@aol.com" [newcastle.ac.uk]. Pretty funny:
So how many of you slashdotted his phone? (Score:2)
Channeling? (Score:2)
Wow. A cell phone ter'angreal.
I feel sorry... (Score:2)
*ahem* (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a smart man (Score:2)
Eric
View the XML for any Amazon product [ericgiguere.com]
which reminds me (Score:3, Informative)
Whoever smithj@telus.net is should be glad.
Remember folks, example.org,
Yes, smithj@telus.net should be glad. (Score:2)
Re:Yes, smithj@telus.net should be glad. (Score:2)
I will hyperbolically metaphorize this with being a school crossing guard for 20 years, and then suddenly pushing a bunch of kids under a truck
Re:Yes, smithj@telus.net should be glad. (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be more like deciding one day to switch out your stop sign for one that says "Race to the end of the block, $1000 prize"
Re:Not a smart man (Score:2)
I am guessing that the OnStar beta system actually sent the message to "null@vtext.com"
If such a name is going to cause problems, Verizon should not have permitted him to choose that name.
Re:Not a smart man (Score:3, Interesting)
-nB
Re:Not a smart man (Score:2)
And I started getting text messages to root@. I changed that quickly.
Re:Not a smart man (Score:2)
Re:same thing happend to me (Score:2)
So don't use it!
Re:Nothing worse than outsmarting oneself (Score:2)
Just look at some of the high profile mishaps--SAT t
Re:Mods: FFS Let's kill another urban legend! (Score:2)
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/noplate.asp [snopes.com]