Well the situation does seem quite bad when you see people who leave fake reviews become brazen enough to actually advertise their services on Amazon itself [1]. I reported this review about 10 days ago and it's still up. The email address provided appears on hundreds of product listings [2]. When they can't even filter out nonsense like this I can only assume they put zero effort into tackling fake reviews.
...this is sad in the instance you describe because the actual seller did not request that 'advert for reviews' and it now marks their product as 'fake'. Yet the actual seller is legit and doing a great job according to 'fakespot'. Sample listing:
419 eater is a site dedicated to exactly that. The general idea is to act totally clueless about everything. They want a scan of your passport? Request instructions on how to use a scanner and do everything wrong. Some people take this a lot further and get scammers on "safari" - a long and expensive trip where the scammer believes they'll be meeting their victim but instead just waste their time and money.
There's a couple legendary ones on there where the guys have gotten the Nigerians to ship heavy boxes over to USA/UK/Canada and cost them hundreds of dollars in postal fees
There's one where they (possibly) managed to kill the scammer. Or at least convinced him to rent a car and drive to a war-torn muslim-majority country and carry a note into a bank that said, in arabic, "mohammed rapes underage dogs". There was a This American Life about it.
That was genuinely upsetting listening to how desperate the scammer was getting. These guys, sure, steal money. But... That's cruel and unusual, for any person.
Probably. That was certainly the tone the interviewer took in that radio show. That was my first time I've seen someone do something "for the lulz" and then be confronted by a rational adult and asked to discuss the consequences of their actions.
That's why the memory of the episode stayed with me for so long- that show is from 2008.
In the same fashion as knodi123, I would laugh a real lot about John Boko if I didn't suspect that the scammer delegated the realization and the costs to a very poor relative.
I managed to register a Yahoo account when I was a child with the password of 'poo'. Login still works although unsurprisingly I do get a notification of suspicious activity on the account.
Firstly there's been quite a few articles posted to HN that aren't even technology related, let alone being of proper substance, yet are still of interest to HN readers. For example I have fond memories reading through a bee keeping article posted here and the discussion that followed. Due to the popularity of that article and others like it, I think it's fair to say the readership isn't fixed on the idea that all articles must even be strictly technology related. Secondly you'll notice that BBC articles get posted here quite often and that's absolutely a mainstream news source.
> Very weird, not sure if a bot puts these together or if there's human involvement.
It'd be easy enough to source a list of company names and owners of the companies then generate possible domains and possible email addresses for the owners but you ultimately need to know who should receive the email. This probably involves a human digging around on LinkedIn. I have no idea what's it like to scrape LinkedIn but presumably they make it difficult. The difference between using the correct email address for the CFO but incorrect one for the owner suggests it's a bit of both.
Whilst on the bus earlier this week I was waiting for it to depart when I heard a loud thud on the roof. Shortly afterwards I heard another thud. It turned out that a crow had a large seed in its mouth, seemed to be a plum seed, and was dive-bombing the roof of the bus in an attempt to crack it. It succeeded on the third attempt.
It's the IP address of a proxy server owned by Ooredoo. Their telecoms group had a monopoly in Qatar until 2006 so a lot of traffic has gone through it. I'm not sure why this IP is prominent enough for its own page though. There was some media reports in December 2006 when Wikipedia blocked a Qatar IP but the page was created in April 2009. Is it standard practice to route all public ISP traffic through a single proxy in situations where nations wish to impose filtering?
