danbower's comments

danbower | 8 years ago | on: Amazon's Fake Review Problem

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.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R7J38CTD1MNT0

[2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:amazon.co.uk+sohant85...

danbower | 9 years ago | on: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are from Nigeria? (2012)

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.

danbower | 9 years ago | on: Hackers claim to have 427M Myspace passwords

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.

danbower | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Blacklist Forbes?

I didn't downvote you but I'll give my thoughts.

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.

danbower | 10 years ago | on: The 'bogus boss' email scam costing firms millions

> 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.

danbower | 10 years ago | on: Birds that fear death

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.

They really are wonderful.

danbower | 10 years ago | on: User:82.148.97.69 – This is the IP address for the entire nation of Qatar

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooredoo

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