That frood Ken Ambrose sassed:
> > Just out of curiosity, if you're a member of the Portland Linux User
> > Group, what made you decide to ask here, where you are completely
> > unknown, and where your message wasn't really appropriate? I don't
> > think it is very suprising that many here thought it was SPAM. In
> > many ways, it was.
>
> Okay, I'm sorry to be a bore, here, but
> 1) If Derek had done a little more work before posting his spam warning
> (eg. checking a search engine Near You), none of this would even be
> a thread.
No that isn't true. Just because there really is a CCC college,
doesn't mean it wasn't spam. My question about CCC was intended to
indicate that I have no knowledge of such an institution (and was
actually curious what it was), and also to suggest that people in this
area would have generally no reason to have heard of CCC, further
clouding the already dubious nature of the e-mail itself. It is the
message itself (i.e. mostly the headers and questions that were asked)
that led me to believe it was spam.
I'm obviously not alone...
> 2) The guy's doing work for a class. He's a Linux user, and a fan.
> Linux has a reputation for a *helpful* user community. Was he
> mistaken? Where else would you have preferred he send the e-mail?
> Microsoft, perhaps? (I'm sure they'd *love* to fill him in on the
> ethnography of Linux hackers/users.) Just 'cause someone goes to
> school out west certainly says nothing about where they hail from.
I want to stress here that he came off as a spammer. I give no aid to
spammers. I get enough spam as it is, especially when you consider
that I receive anywhere from 100-400 e-mails a day. Roughly 5% of
that is spam, and most of it comes from mailing lists. This list
isn't bad at all in general -- If you really are interested in seeing
what I'm talking about, try the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) or
any of the more popular security or firewall-related lists.
Another thing to consider is that private companies often pay colleges
to collect such information. We have no way of knowing that this
information will not end up in the hands of some spammer once this
assignment is completed.
At the very least, this assignment puts pressure on students to collect
information about people that they may not want collected. Especially
in this case where no anonymous means of providing the information was
provided, I don't think it's fair to ask students to do this. I still
have no intention of replying. And yes, I AM paranoid. See Mike L's
post.
--
We sometimes catch a window, a glimpse of what's beyond
Was it just imagination stringing us along?
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Derek Martin | Unix/Linux geek
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Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu
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