figby.com

I used to joke that once viruses and phishing attacks learned to use correct grammar and no obvious typographical errors, we’d all be in trouble. Well, phishing has reached that point, according to Matt Haughey. He has a picture of a very realistic PayPal scam message.

This reminded me of what I do when I get messages like that: I just glance at the “To” address and then throw them away, because I can easily tell they’re fake. Why? Because I use a special email address for each company I do business with, and if I get a “Paypal” message that isn’t sent to the right address, I know it’s a scam. Only Paypal knows the address I use. I do the same with different addresses for other companies. Here’s an old article I wrote explaining the idea.

What we need is an easy way for users who don’t have unlimited email addresses handy to detect phishing attacks. Paypal and Citibank and other commonly-scammed companies should set something up, even if it means offering email addresses themselves. It makes more sense to me than each of them offering their own browser toolbar that tells you whether you’ve really reached their site.

Everybody talks about the technorati top 100 but until Robert Scoble pointed them out, I hadn’t paid attention to the other lists:

• feeds.scripting.com top 100
• Feedster’s top 100
• Bloglines’ top feeds list

The cool thing about the last two is that I’m on them. No, not this site, sadly. The quotes of the day page at The Quotations Page is #41 at Feedster and #10 at Bloglines at the moment. Not a weblog as such, but as my busy web servers can attest, it’s certainly a very popular RSS feed.

I recently switched to the Sony-Ericsson T610 phone from T-Mobile. It’s a great phone, it lets my Palm handheld get online via Bluetooth, and you can’t beat the price. However, there is one thing that annoyed me terribly. While the phone comes with about ten choices of ringtones, only one of them sounds like a ringing phone. You have a choice of a number of electronic tunes that sound like video game noises, or cheesy musical selections that sound like MIDI demos circa 1980.

Fortunately, T-Mobile has around 1000 ringtones available for purchase and download. They have extra-cheesy MIDI versions of all the latest pop hits and an astounding collection of classics ranging from Bohemian Rhapsody to Theme from Knight Rider. Unfortunately, not a single one of them sounds like a ringing phone.

Since my wife has the same phone, we really wanted two different ring sounds. Fortunately, after an extensive Google search, I found this page at my610 with four nice professional ringtones. Since it was hard to find that page amongst all of the cellphone and ringtone dealers, I loaded the title of this post with keywords. Maybe it will help someone else restore sanity to their T610. Presumably these will work on some other phones as well.

It seems that if you mention GMail, you get comments from people looking for invitations. I laughed at the comments on Simon’s post until I posted a brief link to a GMail-related service and the same thing happened. 40-odd people begging for invites and I wasn’t even offering any.

Well, since I’m a glutton for punishment, here goes nothing: I actually have three Gmail invites to give away, assuming anyone cares anymore. They won’t be going to any of these people or to anyone who begs in this thread. I will give them to the first three people who link to this post on their weblog and post the URL in a comment here. Yes, it has to be a weblog. Your weblog, not mine or some other innocent party’s. If you set up a weblog for the sole purpose of getting a GMail invite from me, I won’t disqualify you, but I do reserve the right to laugh at you.

Update: One invite sent so far. (James, it’s on the way.)

Update 10/27/04: Two invites sent. One left. (Christopher, it’s on the way.)

Update 10/31/04:Three invites sent. (Hector, it’s on the way.)

THAT’S ALL FOLKS. Thread Closed.