Charles on… anything that comes along

(The following is the text of an email sent to MCI’s abuse department… more in hope than expectation.

Hi, abuse people at MCI.com.

My blog keeps details of people who try to post crap.
This is one of dozens of attempts - very annoying to me - using one of your customers whose computer is clearly compromised. (There are many similar attempted posts from other networks. Therefore this one is being used as part of a bot network.)

Please trace this machine (should be obvious from the IP and time of posting) and GET IT FIXED.

Your customer is contributing to online fraud, theft, possibly IP theft and for all we know the murder of kittens by not having a secure system. As I’ve now warned you, it’s your responsibility too. I would email the infected customer but there’s no way to work out their email from their IP. The email here is of course a spoof.

Your urgent response most appreciated. And this and your response will be blogged - we all live in the public eye, after all.

—begin forwarded text—

>X-VirusChecked: Checked
>Subject: [Charles on… anything that comes along] Please approve: “”A full house of dysfunctionality”: why we all hate automated answering systems”
>Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:32:42 +0100
>
>A new comment on the post #102 “”A full house of dysfunctionality”: why we all hate automated answering systems” is waiting for your approval
Author : カジノ米国オンラインカジノ (IP: 208.252.68.66 , 208.252.68.66)

[I hope this isn’t something very rude in Katakana; if it is, please tell me and I’ll remove it - Charles]

>E-mail : bartlett_john@bloginc.com [faked - Charles]
>URL : http://www. asdfhost. com/ members/ megafungames/ casino_us_online_casino.htm [Spaces put in to break the URL, but just so you can see where this junk points to - Charles]
>Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=208.252.68.66
>Comment:
>Hello, I just wanted to say you have a very informative site which really made me think, thanks very much! Have a nice Day!!
– end forwarded text –

One of 27 spam posts, all with roughly the same content, posted from a number of different machines in the US and Europe in the course of 3 minutes 6 seconds at 8.33am today.
Bot nets are depressing for a number of reasons. First, they’re so widespread, which means getting rid of them will be hard. Second, the ones I’m seeing are in Europe and the US; it’s not Far Eastern machines being compromised. Third, it’s so damn unnecessary, if only Bill Gates and the bunch at Microsoft had grown up with the same inbred suspicion of users as the people who wrote Unix.

Maybe it’s like convenience food; this is convenience computing. And now we get the SuperSizeMe result: a sort of computing obesity where we can’t lose the weight of the old rubbish, which stops us running after the people nicking our possessions. Something like that.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Is Plaxo on OSX any good? Or, indeed, any use? (6 April 2006; score: 52.61%)
• BT customers scammed by Trojan diallers still have to pay up.. while BT pays the scammers (7 October 2004; score: 47.89%)
• Apple's Address Book: its search was already broken. And now mine has *completely* broken (9 May 2006; score: 45.69%)