Month: December 2007
I just received this mail from a friend:
Dear friend
Welcome to stwoxy.com ! We are one of the largest electronic distributors and wholesalers in Beijing China. We offer qualified digital products: Motorcycles?TVs, Notebooks, phones. PSP, projectors, GPS, DVD, DV, DC, MP3/4 and so on, which are of world famous brands, such as Sony, IBM, PHILIPS, NOKIA, DELL and so on. All our items are brand new from the manufactures and they come with 1-3 years’ after service. These days we are expanding our overseas market, and every item is sold in extremely low price. Such chances should never be missed, ladies and gentlemen, do come to stwoxy.com! you will surely have a big surprise! We are looking forward to hearing from you!
It was sent from a HTTP connection into GMail, and was delivered from there using valid DKIM, Domain Keys and SPF signatures. In addition, it was sent to all the addresses in his address book. In other words, this was no run-of-the-mill impersonation spam — for this one, the spammer obtained my friend’s username and password somehow, logged into GMail, scraped the address book, and then sent spam via GMail that way.
My friend says he didn’t access GMail using a desktop mail client, but did have his Google password saved in his web browser (a pretty typical configuration). My theory is that some virus/malware has infected his desktop machine, captured the saved-passwords file from the web browser configuration, and used that to log into GMail. Alternatively, it could also be a guessable username and password which was picked up via dictionary attack, I guess…
This is the first case I’ve heard of where spammers are actively stealing user account authentication tokens, in order to take over the accounts for spamming. (We’d long predicted it, of course, since it’s a natural response to “pay for mail” schemes… but since there’s no widely-used pay-for-mail system available yet, it’s premature!)
It seems this is not just a GMail thing, btw. Here’s a report of the same thing happening to some French guy via HotMail last month (or in english). I don’t speak Dutch, but this forum post looks like it might be the same situation.
If you’re curious, here’s a copy of the spam, delivered to a Yahoo! group; it appears these spammers aren’t too sophisticated in terms of the text they’re sending, since they haven’t morphed that text, HTML, or even the domain in the link yet. It’s just the malware that’s sophisticated, at this stage.
Recently, after a flurry of annoying user interface issues, I’ve switched my RSS reader from Liferea to Google Reader. Interestingly, it turns out that Google Reader actually fits better with the traditional UNIX user interface concept, I’ve found.
What triggered this was an upgrade from Liferea 1.0.x to 1.4.4 as part of Ubuntu Gutsy; this brought with it a lot of changed behaviours, such as ‘drag-and-drop of feed URL to HTML view no longer subscribes’, and one crucial UI issue, ‘”Skim through articles” only works with ctrl+space’.
I’ve been a long-time UNIX user, dating back to the days where curses-based interfaces were the norm. As such, I tend to drive commonly-used applications using keyboard commands where possible. (This isn’t a purely UNIX thing; Windows has the phenomenon of the keyboard-wielding “power user”, too.)
Liferea was attractive, since it offered the ability to skim through articles quickly by just pressing the “Space” key; simply press space to page down, or to skip to the next unread article if at the end of the current one. Unfortunately, Liferea 1.4.x breaks this, and it wasn’t going to be fixed, since apparently a GNOME app shouldn’t behave this way:
GTK explicitely does implement
as a key binding for several of it’s widgets. Rebinding means to break the default behaviour for such widgets (tree views, buttons, input fields). [….] Liferea as a web-browsing application should behave like any other web browser and like every other GNOME/GTK application as much as possible.
Now, I don’t know if it’s GNOME’s fault, or what, but for a UNIX desktop app to break with UNIX UI conventions, that’s a bad move in my opinion. I gave it a bit of argument in the bug tracker, but eventually gave up as I clearly wasn’t getting anywhere. :(
Instead, based on recommendation from friends, I gave Google Reader a try, and quickly figured out its extensive collection of keyboard shortcuts. Now, I’m skimming through my feeds in even less time than it took with Liferea, simply by hitting “ga” to go to my “all unread items” list, then “j”, “j”, “j” to skip through the postings one by one. Sweet!
It’s interesting to note that other Google web apps use the same concepts; Gmail also has a hefty set, and can be driven using them in a manner very reminiscent of the classic UNIX mailreader, Mutt. So, despite being designed with end-users in mind by extremely clever professional user experience designers, these apps still find space for power-user keyboard operation. Take note, GNOME.
Anyway, I’m not too bothered. Google Reader brings other benefits, such as fixing this bug: ‘please add ability to go to previous entry in Unread feed’, avoiding ‘constant memory leak requires daily restarts’, and, of course, the utility of being able to track the same set of feeds and keep track of which items I’ve read in two places (work and home).
If only it was open source ;)