Osama Has Not Been Captured (Yet)

Scott Hardie | April 22, 2004
Today, a site user received the very first piece of spam sent to anyone through this site (to my knowledge). John Gunter received a message from a "Carlton Shannon," news@cnn.com, announcing the following:

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Hey, Just got this from CNN, Osama Bin Laden has been captured! Goto the link below to view the pics and to download the video if you so wish: http://209.151.89.106/ "Murderous coward he is". God bless America!
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John didn't visit the site, but he did a whois lookup and discovered that EZ Web Hosting provided the account. He got them to shut down the guy for spamming, so the site should be dead now. All the same, I don't like the idea of my users getting spam. If you have received spam through your celebritygoogame.com address, please let me know so I can take action, and do beware of anyone spreading news about Osama. Thanks.

Jackie Mason | April 22, 2004
[hidden by request]

Steve Dunn | April 23, 2004
The older people in my office have only been using the internet for a couple years. They're always forwarding those dumb hoax messages, like the one where the police have supposedly issued a warning that you shouldn't flash your high beams at another car on the highway because there is some kind of gang initiation where they'll kill you for that. I am forever telling them to disregard those things, and they always look at me warily, like I'm an excessive risk taker.

Actually they DO think I'm an excessive risk taker... mostly because I flew to LA three days after 9/11 and went to Vietnam in the middle of the SARS scare. Because, I suppose, I figure if you're going to hit the death lottery, it doesn't really matter where you're sitting.

As Nas so eloquently put it...

Life's a bitch and then you die
That's why we get high
'Cause you never know when you're gonna go.

Scott Hardie | April 23, 2004
I'm tempted not to say so, since two of the authors here send them to me with good intentions, but those email-forwarded warnings are usually false. Virus alerts are the most common kind, but there are ones like "don't use your cell phone at a gas station, it could trigger an explosion." Doing a little research will quickly show most of these to be hoaxes or urban legends.

On spam: A half-dozen times today, I have gotten blank messages, with no subject and no body. These are coming from nonexistant addresses at Yahoo and Hotmail. Anybody know what up?