I got an email from a close friend of mine that had the following subject.

Forward this message to any 10 of your friends and you will get free bonuses worth Rs. 5,995/-

The bonuses might have been real, because all the said bonuses were eBooks such as the “Hacker’s Black Book”, “100 Google Hacks”, “.NET codes” etc. and were promised to be sent as soon as the messages were sent.

I guess you are thinking how the person issuing the bonuses can track the forwards being sent. Thats easy if you fall for it, the email goes like this…

Its simple. To get your free bonuses worth Rs. 5,995/-, all you need to do is forward this message to any 10 of your friends (write their email in “To” field) and as 11th email, write our address, vyom.gifts@gmail.com. We will send you free bonuses worth Rs. 5,995 (to see your bonuses, scroll down this mail.) Please note that we check all the mails and your free bonus request will be processed only when you refer 10 of your friends.

In turn, your friends can also forward this mail and get all the bonuses…. its a great win-win game!

So now, you have sent an email having 10 legitimate email addresses and with a Carbon Copy to the scammer. The scammer can turn into a spammer any time! And what a way to collect email addresses. After a few hours after getting this forward from my friend, Some one totally unrelated to me sent me a copy. She got it from the copy that my friend sent and just copy-pasted the addresses again. Damn.

The also have an FAQ in their mail and one of them goes like this!

3. My friends might be annoyed by this mail.
A. No. Your friends will thank you for this! Believe me. They will love all the free bonuses, because they will also get these, absolutely free of cost. Its a win-win game. So, forward this mail now to 10 of your friends.

We try our best to stay away from the inevitable spam that is likely to be generated by signing up for newsletters at websites who do not prominently display their privacy policy by not registering our email addresses with them. And our friends do the stupid part and help the spammers in their adress harvesting methods by following such lowsy instructions. Damn.

I had a few issues with my Airtel telephones account and I logged into my Airtel Account and tried to send a complaint through a form provided onsite. Apparently, the form was just a mailer of sorts and guess what I got as an instant reply!

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at airtelbroadband.in.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

< care.tamilnadu@airtelbroadband.in>:
The users mailfolder is over the allowed quota (size).

Try WordPress.com, its a very good publishing platform and is the freely hosted option of one of the largest self hosted blogging software in the world. Go to WordPress.org to download and install on your own server!

It has a lot of built in features that Blogger(this blog runs on) doesn’t possess! Such as built-in trackback and categorisation of entries. You can also add pages to your blog, making it a small website in the progress!! There are also templates that rock onsite!!

This is from the WordPress.org website!

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

2005 was a very exciting year for WordPress, as it saw the release of our 1.5 version which was downloaded over 900,000 times, the start of hosted service WordPress.com to expand WP’s reach, the founding of Automattic by several core members of the WP team, and finally the release of version 2.0.

Best of all, its open source!

Some WordPress blogs in action:
Xavier Roy’s Journal (Self-hosted)
All in a day’s work! (Kishore’s Blog on WordPress.com)

I got back my mobile phone that got screwed today after waiting for nearly an hour and a half in the waiting hall and two weeks in total. A bluetooth problem that had to be rectified at Hyderabad. Baa.. What a day!

The estimated time for delivery was “1 day” in the Job sheet. They informed that it would take more time as they had to send it to Hyderabad to meddle something and see if they could get it to work. Today, I went over, after nearly fifteen days, and waited half an hour to get the mobile. And surprise of surprises, the software hadn’t been updated and they just gave it to me just like that! Imagine! They did the same thing the previous time when an Ass by name Madhu was there. He came out and started shouting when I opposed without even trying to find out the reason. That time around, I wasnt sure about the latest software version. But this time around, I had a few friends of mine who had recently purchased the same handset and hence could compare the version with theirs and could find that mine was old, over a year old.

Then I had to wait for another 45 minutes to get the software updated and they apologised saying that they overlooked it since the handset came from Hyderabad.

Now here is the funny part. They had a notice of sorts stuck near the delivery counter that had the numbers and email addresses of The Regional, Zonal and National Managers for any grievances. I noticed it the first time I went there, but now it was missing. I requested that information, but the Girl at the counter said that type of information cannot be revealed!! Ha ha ha! I tried visiting the HCL Infinet site, but there is no way to connect with the managers, Maybe I am looking at the wrong site, who knows anyways!

I came across fd’s Flickr Toys during one of my sojourns online! It has a lot of tools for everyone(including non-flickr users) like creating Calendars, CD Covers, Magazine Covers, Motivators etc from your own photographs! You can even make your own Movie Poster with correspoding titles and credits! Pretty cool huh? Though you can do all of them yourself with an image editing program, these tools do the work in a jiffy! Its fun!

And for flickr users, it has tools such as Scout – used for finding your photos in the explore pages, A Favorite Finder – used to find a user’s photos faved by another user and more! Visit http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr for the complete list!

Well, atleast indirectly! i made my choice and voted today! It was over in a minute with the Electronic Voting Machine letting out a loud beep which I wasnt expecting! I assumed that it would be a small, discrete beep, but apparently, the polling officers in the whole area too are supposed to hear I think…

But anyways, and they kept a big stripe of indelible ink! To prevent me from voting again! This one looks ugly and draws from the first joint in the finger right upto the nail tip! Talk about art! Then I was on my way back home! Contented and rather satisfied to exercise my right! I feel great!

Finally, I will be allowed to vote in the general elections to be held tomorrow!! Though the legal age permissible for a Citizen of India to vote is 18 and I’m 20. This is the first elections that are taking place after I have reached the magic age!

The funny thing now is, I have to decide on whom to vote for and I dont have a clue! I dont know what each one of the parties will do?! Call this plain ignorance, but frankly, I have to devote sometime from now on to decide on the right party(from all of the wrong ones) to cast my vote for. Or I can chose not to exercise me vote but that would be a shame! I have the right to vote! And I should exercise it!

It has become more of a marketing gimmick than a legitimate show of care for the citizens with all the parties competing to give the citizens their share of perks! All of that can be left out and instead, education, a much needed service for the lesser few must be provided free of cost right upto college. Its only because of the lack of free education facilities that poor people tend to drop out of school and go to work. So what about their children, they may study for a while, but will be eventually sent off to work to support the family, so the end result, The rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer! This can be avoided by letting them study as much as they want to and to be able to support themselves in a more rewarding way.

According to Rule 49-O of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, if an elector whose roll number has been entered in the register of electoral rolls in Form 17A, decides not to vote, a remark to this effect shall be made against the said entry by the Presiding Officer and the signature and thumb impression of the elector shall be obtained against such remark

As for my decision to vote, it depends on whether the “no-vote” option too is by ways of a secret ballot.. Sigh!

You can decide not to vote - from The Hindu dated Apr 04, 2006.
‘O’ Podu – Social Awareness Movement about the 49-O Rule.

After reading about the recent attack on an anti-spam website, I have begun to think whether the fight against spam is worth it. I agree that spamming is a pain in the butt, on the other hand, do people read the spam that they recieve? I personally just trash email that I identify as spam and most of the time, they are so obvious. And especially, the Spam Filter on my Yahoo Box does a pretty good job of identifying the spam and ‘frying’ them as promised! But still, its pretty annoying with all the time wasted in identifying and deleting unsolicited email.

What do the perpertrators actually get from these? When people stop responding to spam email or ignore it all together, would the spammers get what they wanted? Business? I am of the view that spammers will thrive only until gullible users endorse or fall into the traps that the unsolicited emails announce, such as medication or instant money. Once everyone starts ignoring them, maybe the spammers would pack up and go home.

Retaliation for Antispam Success?