August 18, 2003 – 12:00 am
“Mars will shine brightly. It will look great in a telescope. It will not kill you.”
However, this has not dissuaded the usual suspects from proclaiming the end of the world when Mars enters opposition.
December 26, 2002 – 12:00 am
L. Ron Hubbard –pulp writer and general cultural menace– sends Seasonal Greetings from Beyond the Grave.
When my friend M. gave me a tour of Hollywood, he pointed out that most of the area’s downtown was owned by the Church, and that making “Free Keith Henson” wisecracks would bring on the security bulls faster than taking [...]
November 15, 2002 – 12:00 am
My buddy Ward Willats got an email purporting to be from “PayPal” claiming that one’s account was disabled until you logged into “paypal-ebay.com” and reset it. Heh.
Ward scryed into the headers of the email, and says:
…and it is a fraud — look at the headers, it came from the mailserver ‘casino-fun.com’ and ownership of the [...]
More like this: scams
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November 14, 2002 – 12:00 am
I got another phone call today from the outfit calling itself the “Domain Support Group”. This time they were claiming that they had ‘important information about changes on the Internet’ and they had been unable to send email, so would I give them my fax number. Yeah, right.
I figured that other people must have been [...]
More like this: scams
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October 13, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via L A Morse ] Baiting “419″ scammers has become the Internet’s favorite spectator sport (that, and posting fake personal ads then publishing the responses). In this round, a researcher from Miskatonic University gets in over his head, but not with the scammers.
“The last thing he saw, as the fraud descended upon him, was [...]
“Keith S. of Teaneck, NJ ignored this letter. He was eaten by Wombats. Mary L. of Oregon, WI forwarded this letter to ten friends and won the Powerball jackpot, but was assaulted by her angry, former friends who fed her to rabid stoats in Stevens Point.”
CSICOP, those joyful debunkers of hokum, run a site full [...]
September 1, 2000 – 12:00 am
The GOP are now running ads with the “Gore Invented the Internet” hoax again. Now the Democrats aren’t above dirty pool, but I’m tired of this. As several independent people have mentioned, this is a fabrication. Gore never claimed to invent the Internet, and Vint Cerf, one of the guys who did invent the Internet, [...]
March 14, 2000 – 12:00 am
Bob Park writes a weekly column for the American Physical Society’s site on matters relating to skepticism. His disclamier: “Opinions are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be.”
January 13, 2000 – 12:00 am
[ via Red Rock Eater ] The Direct Marketing association’s global opt-out list won’t stop spam, says Privacy Digest moderator Lauren Weinstein. Legitimate companies know better than to spam and the illegitimate ones don’t care. Worse yet, he says, a clever spammer can lease the the opt-out list from the DMA and use it to [...]
January 3, 2000 – 12:00 am
So, according to professional doomsayer Gary North, the US was supposed to be in flames today. Sorry, but it looks as if the Y2K bug was either fixed, mitigated, or just not as bad as we thought. To be fair, Dr. Helen Caldicott was just as sure that all the world’s nuclear reactors were going [...]
October 21, 1999 – 12:00 am
Remember how the Church of Scientology was alleged to have ordered its members to buy the trashy SF novels of founder L. Ron Hubbard in bulk so they could claim his books were best-sellers? The SF Channel reports that “The Omega Code,” a B-movie bankrolled by Trinity broadcasting is doing so well in limited release [...]
January 31, 1999 – 12:00 am
More evidence that the biggest Y2K problem is religious zealotry. Mr. North has a history of trying to start hysterias and panics.
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December 15, 1998 – 12:00 am
On a new category of suspcious email messages purporting to come from long-lost friends and family:
“For the sake of argument, then, let us say that I have now identified a new category of online scams. Some people will respond to this by blaming the medium. The Internet, it will be held, is not [...]
Resources on Amway, the original Multilevel Marketing Scam.
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