I hope you have some good savings banked up, because that's totally sexist and out of line!

It was more like a KAPOOYA.

I doubt it. Most of these are automated scanning from compromised machines in general, not this guy's one project, and from what I gather, the "census" was more polite about the number of login attempts. I've been getting random scans for years and I don't foresee them stopping anytime soon.

Their entire "business model" revolves around suing John Does. They wouldn't hesitate to sue an AC.

Do you, you... Feel like I do?

It's a bug, whether that's admitted to or not. Articles from the mysterious future are supposed to be visible to paid subscribers only. Turns out, though, this varnish shit is kinda tough.

This is actually a soft warning tactic I've encountered in many corporate and education scenarios. They'll identify folks using a lot of transit, and send them a notice along the lines of "hey, we noticed you're using a lot of bandwidth... Maybe you've got a virus or something?" These notices work particularly well in cases where someone's been found to be downloading gigs of porn on the office computer, etc. The user realizes he's being watched, says "yeah! that must be it! I gotta virus!" and suddenly the behavior stops.

I'm not defending the ISP you mention, just saying this tactic is pretty common. It's their way of asking you to knock it off, without accusing you of anything.

That's what it sounds like to me, too. An identity thief wouldn't be having all of these email notifications etc. being sent to the victim's address, he'd have created an account on Yahoo or something to receive those messages without the victim knowing. The porn site registrations are a pretty good sign that this is "revenge spam." Someone just wants to annoy the heck out of submitter.

As an aside, anytime Apple updates their Terms of Service on an iOS device, there's always a button for "Send these terms via email." That form performs no check on a) whether the address entered belongs to an Apple ID, or b) whether you've already emailed the terms. So, you can easily have Apple spam someone's mailbox with as many copies of their TOS as you're willing to waste time on. Last time I did this, each click of the send button actually generated two emails... One about the TOS and one about the game store, or something.

I think it's mostly phishing attacks. It's really unbelievable the number of people who fall for that shit.

Our organization has about 3,500 email users and every once in awhile a phish campaign will make it through our filters to a large portion of the user base. Without fail, a dozen or more users will fall for it and have their accounts used to pump out spam. What's maddening is that the same individuals continue to get phished over and over, even after repeatedly being educated not to ever give out their passwords. They see some tech-jargon looking email and their brain just shuts down. I'm at an enterprise full of generally intelligent folks - I can only imagine what's going on in the brain of your average Yahoo user.

One of the funnier and somewhat more subtle compromises we experienced was a spammer who targeted our corporate webmail interface. He phished several accounts but didn't directly send spam like most of them do. Instead, he logged in via webmail and placed various porn and boner-pill advertisements in those accounts' signatures. As a result, some of our employees were unwittingly sending out porn ads appended to their legitimate business emails for awhile...

This guy, Toni Harp, is also a woman...

Hi Gene, I just want to say thank you for your wisdom in this thread. 78 and Slashdotting, I love it. We need more like you!

Heh. Some years ago, BlackPlanet.com (basically "MySpace for African-Americans" at the time) actually hotlinked an image on a site of mine into their templating system. It wasn't just random users, this pic was built straight into their publishing platform, meaning tens of thousands of users were selecting this particular image on my server to be part of the theme of their BlackPlanet page.

Didn't take them too long after my RewriteRule to rehost it on their own server.

Really? So we're going to see buildings destroyed, thousands murdered? The hyperbole is way out of hand on this one.

It was Gawker...