This one's delightfully lame:

Return-Path: (mm@charternet.com)
. . .
Received: from mail.khpb.gov.tw (mail.khpb.gov.tw [210.241.113.3])
by (redacted); Fri, 29 Jul 2011 06:56:23 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from mail.khpb.gov.tw (mail.khpb.gov.tw [127.0.0.1])
by mail.khpb.gov.tw (8.14.1/8.14.1) with ESMTP id p6T3idxM003492;
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:44:39 +0800
From: "JP MORGAN LOAN FIRM" (mm@charternet.com)
Reply-To: morganloaninvestment87001@live.com
Subject: GOOD DAY
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:44:39 +0800
. . .

To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Dear Valued Customer,

We give out loan to company and private investor Loan for credit Card,
Medical Care loan, Car Loan, Mortgage Loan, Student Loan, personal loan e.t.c. Or do
you need a loan to enhance your business, consolidate your debt.

For more information inquiries and Application, Please Contact our representative via
this e-mail. morganloaninvestment87001@live.com

Kindly ignore this message if you are not interested.
Thank You!
Dr.Dave Balkissoon.


I'm sure Dr. Dave Balkissoon at morganloaninvestment87001@live.com would appreciate as much e-mail as you all e-mail scrapers can manage to send him. Enjoy . . .

Mozilla Foundation's browser has released a new version. It better be more stable than 1.06, which is terrible.

Note to Mozilla: Opera is now a free browser, too. If Firefox continues to be flaky, I may have to try out Opera.

Here's an e-mail that the whip e-mail account received:

Return-Path: [edfcpod@walla.com]
Delivered-To: medary-medary:com-whip@medary.com
X-Envelope-To: whip@medary.com
Received: (qmail 4384 invoked from network); 6 Sep 2005 22:05:27 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO mrson1538.com) (196.207.231.49)
by dhabat.pair.com with SMTP; 6 Sep 2005 22:05:27 -0000
From: "Mr. Abu Al-Karmel" [edfcpod@walla.com]
Reply-To: karmel203ng@yahoo.co.in
To: whip@medary.com
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 23:08:31 +0200
Subject: Mr. Abu Al-Karmel(FROM IRAQ CENTRAL BANK)
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.6900 DM

Hello/Dear,

I am Mr. Abu Al-Karmel, I am working in Economic Development and Foreign contract payment Operations Department,in the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI).

My aim of writing you is to seek for your kindness assistance to allow me quickly transfer the sum of US$15.million dollars, into your account.It will interest you to know how this huge sum amount of funds came about.About two days before the United State and British, bombing began,Saddam Hussein, ordered his youngest son, Qusay, to remove the sum of US$1.billion (£640 million) from the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) The cash which was loaded on to three lorries.

That memorable day Qusay and a senior aide to the former president Saddam Hussein delivered the instruction in person to the bank's governor of the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI). And the money was removed without proper official documentations. The money was not debited. It was just remove from the foreign reserve vault. This illegal withdrawer created opportunity for our staffs working in the foreign payments department. We hastingly remove from the vault the sum of US$75.million, which we shared among ourselves working in the department,five in number. My share was US$15.million, the deal which was absolutely successfully.

Then,after the fall of Saddam,a Finance Company based in Jordan assisted me to move the fund as a Bond Deposit into Bank in EUROPE.Due to recent probe in our Apex Bank,i decided to leave and i am under cover in SENEGAL -AFRICA.

What I needed now is your "TRUST" HONESTY and TRANSPERENCY" since i would want you to receive the money into an account from the EUROPEAN Bank which i will disclose to you later on.I will also front you in any kind of investment that we might decide to enter later.

As a matter of fact,if i am convinced and with your declaration of interest in this deal,then,i will tell you the procedures to follow.For security of this transaction,i do hereby implore youto treat and maintain it with absolute confidentiality.

Please,if you are not dispose to assist,kindly destroy this letter for the sake of Humanity.

Looking forward to your urgent response.
Best Regard
Mr. Abu Al-Karmel
(karmel203ng@yahoo.co.in)

No, Mr. Abu Al-ConMan, for the sake of Humanity, I'd rather post your ridiculous spam e-mail on my web site so that all the world can see what a moron you are. Maybe if you're lucky your spam mailboxes on this page will get harvested by some nice bot and you'll be repaid ten-fold in the spam you've sent. Have a nice day. Oh, and learn how to spam in proper English, OK?

(What I want to know is...how dumb/naive do you have to be to fall for this, er, nonsense?)

Car makers look at seat vibrators to warn drivers that they're tailgating.

So, there is some method to all this buttock-shaking madness. For his part, Dr Spence is examining the possibility of vibrating other bits of the vehicle, including the seat belt, pedals and steering wheel. Spence says that one Japanese manufacturers claims all cars will be fitted with tactile warning systems by 2010, so don't say we didn't warn you.

Fark's headline: "Future cars will have seats that vibrate when the driver is following too closely. So get used to women drivers tailgating you." Okay, then . . .

My favorite security guy has some thoughts:

On those who complain about advice offered free of charge:

When I was but a wee lad (I really was young once, and did not, despite popular legend, spring fully formed from the head of Zeus) my Grandmother always told me, "If you can't say something nice, just keep your mouth shut, you stupid little jackass."

Note: The irony of that was lost on me (amid deep psychological scars) until recently.

Therefore, to the bitter, ungrateful (and fearful - did you really need to use an anonymous remailer?) folks out there, and in the spirit of my grandmother's advice, I've decided that I will personally fund the following offer:

If you find that you're displeased in any way with the service provided by the Internet Storm Center, we will cheerfully refund double the amount of money that you pay us... you stupid little jackass.

You may now return to your drab, wretched lives.

After having gotten that out of his system, Tom turns to business. He delights (possibly not the right word) in analyzing "malware" -- otherwise known as "spyware" or just as "@#$@#$@$!!!! My $@#$ computer's slow as molasses!"

AntivirusGold showed up on Joe's machine as avg.exe, 2,663,231 bytes of NullSoft installer goodness. (Note: AntivirusGold should not be confused with AVG Antivirus by Grisoft. Through an unfortunate coincidence of naming, they sound a whole lot alike. They aren't. The folks at Grisoft are good people, and I don't want any confusion about names to lead anyone to think otherwise.)

When an installer weighs in anywhere over 2MB, you gotta figure that what's going to come out the other side may not be too pretty. AntivirusGold certainly doesn't disappoint. The programmer in me could spend quite a few paragraphs enumerating the slipshod results of unintelligent software engineering, but let's just leave it at this: I have about as much respect for their programming talent as I have for their taste in color.

"So it's another poorly written piece of software," I hear you cry. "If that was a crime, Redmond would be a penitentiary."

"True," I reply, "and if these folks stopped there, then I would only make fun of them behind their backs, like I do to Microsoft."

The problem is, they don't stop there.

You see, AntivirusGold is a nasty little lying piece of software.

What did you say, Tom?

"A nasty little lying piece of software."

Got it now?

AntivirusGold does indeed act something like antivirus software. It scans through registry entries and cookies looking for the likes of Gator, Bonzi Buddy, et al. It looks through the filesystem and tries to find programs that match up (by filename only, not any type of signature) with a list of "known bad" files.

If it stopped there, then it would simply be a poorly written, ineffective spyware/virus scanner.

But there's more.

When it gets all done doing its scan, it tells you what it found and offers to remove it for you. Just like every other spyware/virus scanner...

But this one does it for a price.

Yes, you see, AntivirusGold pops up a window telling you "You are infected!", and offers to remove the "spyware" that it found. But when you click on the "Remove spyware" button, rather than removing something, it only offers you the option to register the program to the tune of $29.95.

The implication is obvious: "I found something bad on your machine, and it'll cost you three sawbucks to get it gone."

And what, pray tell, did AntivirusGold find that required removal and made it worth my hard-earned $29.95?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Using monitoring software, I watched as AntivirusGold scanned my machine.

I watched it looking for registry entries.

I watched it looking for cookies.

I watched it looking for files.

It didn't find a thing. Every query that it made for a cookie, a registry entry, or a file came back empty.

Now it's not exactly surprising that it didn't find anything. You see, AntivirusGold was running on a fresh, clean, brand-spankin' new install of Windows XP Home Edition that had never been used and never connected to the Internet.

Doh!

The only non-default software on the machine was AntivirusGold itself.

And yet, I was "infected" with "spyware."

The astute reader may draw their own conclusions.

I'm not quite sure what this is good for, but web mega-host Akamai has a Net news index up on their site.

The Boston Globe reports:

Drawing on data collected from news sites for which Akamai delivers content, from CNN and MSNBC to Reuters and BBC, the new Akamai Net Usage Index for News will track the aggregate number of viewers per minute by geography, identify the times of day when news viewing peaks in different parts of the world, and measure how much above or below the average news viewing is at any given moment.

Regina Linn at Wired is maybe too connected:

I'm guilty of disappearing without notice. By the time I realize I'm in burnout mode, I can no longer make myself e-mail my friends to say I'm taking time off from the keyboard.

And from the handful of "Where are you, are you OK?" e-mails and IMs I've received over the past week, I can see the effects of a frequent e-communicator suddenly dropping out.

People worry that something has happened to you, or that they've inadvertently offended you, when really you're just sick of typing. Days slip by too fast and before you know it, you've gone weeks without reaching out.

Leave your cell phone, pager, etc., etc. at home every once in a while, go out to a park, lay down on the grass, and stare at the clouds for a while. Or, maybe, go to the State Fair, like Snookums and I are about to do. Just a suggestion.

Google loses in court:

Google’s AdWords underwent a policy change in April 2004. Until then Google had respected requests from companies that asked it to prevent their marks from being available for sponsorship. Now Google only takes action when a trade marked term is used in the text of an ad – i.e. the trade marked term can still trigger the ad.

The policy change has seen a flurry of suits against Google – including the action filed by GEICO.

Now we can get back to "saving a lot of money on car insurance" and watching animated geckos. Ooh baby.

MIT contemplates the cheap, wireless future:

AMD, among others, has been working on very cheap, low footprint platforms for mass market wireless devices, but the latest concept that could shift the communications goal posts comes from Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, who has outlined the blueprint for the so-called Hundred Dollar Laptop (HDL), a first step towards even lower cost devices in future.

The HDL that Negroponte posits would bypass three expensive components of conventional laptops - Microsoft Windows, a traditional flat panel screen, and a hard drive. Instead it will be loaded with Linux and other open source software; its display will use either a rear projection screen or a type of electronic ink invented at the MIT Media Lab; and it will store one gigabyte of files in flash memory.

Now, put all of that computing power on a reasonably sized watch, and you've got something.

According to the plans, the settlement will rely on a curious blend of old and new technology: it will be built with the aid of robots and run on nuclear energy, but will utilize materials and building techniques reminiscent of earlier centuries on earth.

Mars might just be far enough away from the Kansas City Royals.