Technology

UPDATE 2 9/4/08:
Got a copy and pasted brush-off letter from the Newegg support person. My reply went to the sender as well as to a couple of other Newegg email addresses I have stashed. Brush-off reproduced in full:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Newegg.

We are aware that there is always some room for improvement, which is why we value your thoughts. Rest assured that your feedback will receive the attention it deserves and Newegg will continue striving to offer high quality products at low, affordable prices and only the finest in customer service. Please allow us more time to process your issue. Our related department will write back to you directly for this issue once they finish processing it.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please visit our FAQs page. If you still need assistance, please feel free to email me directly and I will be happy to assist you.

Thank you,

Ruby Luo

UPDATE 9/4/08:
Finally got a reply of sorts from Newegg. Not sure how to parse the key portions, as the English is broken in exactly the wrong part:

Reference number: {redacted} Please use this ticket number in any correspondence with Newegg.com.

Subject: Newegg.com - >(Mail #{redacted})*

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Newegg.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Due to the large volume of the emails. We should have not processed your email yet. We will not release the contact information to any other party. Please forward the entire email to us and we will do further investigation for it.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to let us know.

Sincerely,

(Newegg Tech's Name)

UPDATE 9/2/08:
Still no reply from NewEgg, but hits on other fora suggest that I'm far from being the only person thus mistreated. So I used their customer contact link to inform them of such:

I emailed "abuse@newegg.com" over 24 hours ago, and didn't receive so much as a bot reply. Since nobody monitors that email address, I decided it was time to contact you here.

Your webform does not contain sufficient space for me to post specific details of my complaint. Fortunately, I posted a blog entry on the subject, which contains all the details you'll need. The short version is that some dickwad in your organization sold the email address I ONLY use for NewEgg purchases to a spammer calling himself "*******.com" Anyhow, here's the URL:
http://www.taupehat.com/index.php/tech/2008/09/01/newegg_hacked

Put it on Digg, of course:
http://digg.com/security/Newegg_Hacked

And apparently I'm not at all the only one who one of your employees whored out to a spammer:
http://tinyurl.com/newegg-hacked

In short, you guys have a problem. Ignoring it, or blaming the messenger, will only make it much, much worse. I expect a reply tomorrow.

The following is an email I am sending to the newegg abuse team. Will report how they reply if/when it happens. For the record, I really like newegg.com, and it sucks that this has happened to them. However, I've found that posts like this one seem to work better at getting an actual human to reply. Some abuse desks are pretty bad about doing their job.

Oh, and I'm also munging the spamvertized domain to avoid giving the pricks any free advertising. Assholes. Needless to say, I never authorized Newegg to give my email address out to anybody, and have never done business with the spammer, nor will I.

Dear abuse team,

The following email was sent to an address which I have ONLY ever used to do business with newegg.com. As the sole user of taupehat.com, I wildcard the address and use that method to see who spams me.

In this instance, I'm pretty sure newegg.com had no direct involvement in the spam run, but I am positive that your company had indirect involvement, as the spam run was targeted at tech users, and used my newegg-only email address as its target.

IN OTHER WORDS, YOU HAVE A LEAK. SOMEONE SOLD MY ADDRESS (AND WHO KNOWS HOW MANY OTHERS) TO A SPAMMER.

Read more! »

OK, here we are in 2006, and things still haven't improved a bit. The rest of the rant still holds. Seriously, if you send me an app and it needs Win98-style filesystem permissions (IE: none), I'm sending it back with a "don't buy" recommendation to management. Enough is enough.

With the recent trend toward educational standards initiatives such as NCLB (The Federal No Child Left Behind Act), and similar legislation in many states and local jurisdictions, public school districts are faced with an increasing demand for data collection, storage, and management. At the same time, the potential benefit of a technology-based curriculum is becoming both more apparent and with the explosion of personal computing in the last decade, much more accessible. The opportunity is here, the need is here, and a carefully balanced approach to using technology in the classroom is what schoolchildren deserve.

Read more! »

[UPDATE 10.30.06] Due to improvements in technology, I don't really have a need to do this any longer. On the other hand, I'll leave this post up for posterity - a look back at just how bad things were getting. I still get a ton of background noise from these bums, but it's really just that anymore. No more email spam, no more referral spam (nor a referral block), and most importantly, no more database thrashing trying to keep up with the deluge. Good riddance!

It's hard to be happy about doing this, but at this point, I've reached a limit. I've heard the debate rage about which networks generate the most spam, and perhaps it's different for large organizations. I don't know. What I do know is that about 80% of the email and blog spam I've been getting is coming from APNIC address space. I also get a fair amount from the Carribean.

Read more! »

So, for those of you who see nothing here but a really ugly white page with text, I'd like to officially welcome you to Microsoft-Free Friday. Supposedly, there should be an informative message that tells you what's up, but somehow PHP is getting through the mod and pushing text out. Oh well.

So why am I doing this? Lots of reasons. First off, I don't have this page up to make money, so I'm not losing any by doing it. Mainly, though, I'm running this mod out of antipathy for Microsoft in general, and Internet Explorer in particular... believe me, there are plenty of better, faster, more secure, and more standards-compliant web browsers out there. By now you'd have really had to crawl out from under a rock to not know that. Oh, and to those who say, "What about websites that are IE only?" my reply is simple: when I encounter such a site, I go elsewhere, right after sending a pointed email to webmaster@ that domain telling them that I've just clicked ads/spent money at a competitor's site. Money talks, you know the rest.

This is the danger of summertime blues. I'm bored, and so I wrote code. Was it useful code? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that. It's a new cowfile, used for cowsay which, if you don't have it, is probably essential to the making of coffee at 11PM when you really ought to be getting some sleep, or otherwise annoying people on IRC. To use this Work Of Fine Art, simply download this file, and copy it to /usr/share/cowsay/cows/ or wherever your cows are kept. OH YEAH!