Replies to post #21838 on InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

OT but necessary:

Jim, it might not be someone who hates you. In fact,

most virus programs are sent by friends who have you on their email list -- when they get infected, the virus will often be the type that will self-replicate and send itself to people on that persons email list. The more people who have you as a friend, the more likely you are to have a virus passed on to you. The best way to handle this is to scan every email that has an attachment, and run a system check for viruses once per week.

Very true. I receive viral emails daily. I have filtering on this end. Emails with attachments go to a separate folder and I only open attachments I was expecting.

I should add that until Hypermart screwed up and stopped hosting my sibob.com domain name, I was also getting a seemingly infinite amount of porn and other undesirable email because someone was signing me up for these emails. I have a few enemies out there, especially among people whose penny stocks no longer trade and who had their wrists slapped at SI for swearing at "bashers". The two go hand in hand.

Anyway, what was funny was that all of those were addressed to [e-mail], an address I've never used (I've only used [e-mail] within that domain), but which I would receive because I owned the domain name. Kinda like how someone could email "[e-mail]" and I'd get it.

I should add that sender email addresses are not reliable unless you're able to match up the IP address with the domain it purports to have been sent from. For example, I just got an email claiming to be from [e-mail]. And I often get emails claiming to be from my own email address. Happens all the time. The Sender fields are very easy to spoof. Find an open mail relay somewhere, and you can send anyone emails *as* anyone. You can get an email from [e-mail] (my address) and unless the IP of the originating server is 216.63.13.30, it didn't come from me.

As for sex links, any time you sign up to a public for-fee service like this expect your porn-mail to increase exponentially. Porn sites pay people to troll these types of places -- after all, you are Internet savvy and willing to pay for access to a "hobby" site: in short, the perfect candidate for porn.

This is also true. To an extent. Including your email address in your profile is optional. I have it in mine. Some people don't. Jim does. Actually, 97.2% of the accounts here do not have an email address in their profile.

It is true that people can and do write scripts (personally, I use Perl as my language of choice for this) to troll websites to gather data. Including email addresses.

I'm not aware of it happening here, though. You have to be logged in to view profiles and a "user" stepping through profiles one at a time is going to get noticed. They'd do 20765 separate reads all in a row, hitting only profile.asp, with incremental profile numbers. And would get 582 email addresses for their efforts, many of which I'm sure aren't valid.

Of course there is always the darker possibility -- many for-fee sites have been known to give out their member-list for what Internet sites always are in need of: cold hard cash. They have even been known to do it when their official policy is that they won't.

This site doesn't and won't. Those who've known me for a long time from Silicon Investor and here (which probably isn't many people on this board) can vouch for the fact that if I say we don't, we simply don't.

Wouldn't be worth that much anyway. 20,765 email addresses is a very insignificant number.