cryptoanarchy.wiki

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1996-04-29 - Re: www.WhosWhere.com selling access to my employer’s passwd file

Header Data

From: Gus <angus@bmsysltd.demon.co.uk>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: a508b9290fd05ccac21e16e3bb4b6301f48e75f188a904f185dc21be70e2343d
Message ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.960428235747.1082B-100000@bmsysltd.demon.co.uk>
Reply To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960427180844.11803B-100000@bud.peinet.pe.ca>
UTC Datetime: 1996-04-29 09:17:14 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 17:17:14 +0800

Raw message

From: Gus <angus@bmsysltd.demon.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 17:17:14 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: www.WhosWhere.com selling access to my employer's passwd file
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960427180844.11803B-100000@bud.peinet.pe.ca>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.960428235747.1082B-100000@bmsysltd.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Sat, 27 Apr 1996, Sentiono Leowinata wrote:

> I wonder how they can get the e-mail address? Our finger daemon are 
> blocked. Many un-broadcast e-mail addresses (the account never send any 
> e-mails to anyone) are in the database. How?

It's a sad fact that many unscrupulous(sp?) writers of WWW pages use 
non-visilble "on load" HTML to record what the web browser thinks the 
email address of the person browsing the page, and, I presume sell this 
info to the junk email producers.

Part of the WhoWhere archives could have come from such sources. (personally 
my address in netscape is stop.stealing@addresses.you.CENSORED)

If one really set ones mind to it, I guess that grepping through mailing 
list archives for addresses, and using a webcrawler to search for MAILTO=
would lead to many thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of addresses.

On the plus side, the search engine will not let "*","\*","?*" and so be 
used, and there are no real matches for "root", apart from stuff like 
"Bob Root" etc.

--
Gus <angus@bmsysltd.demon.co.uk> |-|PGP Fingerprint = 73 83 C0 EA 2E A6 00 3E
http://www.thepulse.co.uk/angus  |=|(Key on request)  08 B1 19 0D 8B BE 87 B9
CIS 100545.720                   |+| "Linux - You know you want to." | "fuck"
|Advertising/Promotional email will result in a campaign of hatred and abuse|

Thread