Today I got an email saying "Somebody has a crush on you". Although my first impulse was "
spam" and my drifted towards
Alt+D, something to do with chemicals took over and made me read it. That, and the spelling on subject which actually
didn't have any spelling errors! That alone discounts huge part of the spam out.
Turned out that if the email spoke true, someone had written my (personal, one I usually don't use in usenet postings / form logins / www boards) email on that site. Well, with the sure paranoia of someone with one spam too many in his inbox, instead of clicking on the link I opened up google search and looked for it. And sure enough, spamcop mailinglist mentioned it as potential spam, countless blogs growled about it and I even saw one CrushLink posting in a mailing list. Not to let this (and this node) discourage me, I proceeded to venture to the said web site, with caution. And indeed, it asked me for more emails. Not for a second considering to actually type in someone's email address (not that I know any...), I wrote up some fake emails. The site which, they say, is collecting emails at first accepted them but rejected them again pretty quickly. So, I growled, let it have emails! I headed to hotmail.com. At first I created an account manually, but soon I realized that is ineffective. Or maybe not, but when I grow up I plan to be a perl ninja, so I went ahead to write a slithering perl horror that would create those users automatically for me. And sure enough, after a couple of curious quirks (what? CGI fields "name" and "name=" are different?) I got myself a script that could spunk out new email accounts within seconds.
At this point, I returned to crushlink.com to list some accounts and get those damned hints. My first hint, acquired earlier, had been "the first name of person has 7 letters". Damned useful. Now, as I fed the damned machine more emails, it started to go sluggish. The curious thing was, it wouldn't respond to my new email listings in 10 minutes, but after I hung up my dialup and reconnected in a different IP, it connected fine, only to freeze again when I tried to refeed those emails. Might be just my imagination, but I smell h4x0r-detection here...
As I'm writing this, I've been trying to connect to that site for 20 minutes, and now it suddenly gave me the front page, but the "members sign in link" gave me a "no response" after a long wait. Curious.
Ah well, I must wonder, though, if my perl hotmail horror was illegal. Maybe I should bother reading the license agreement? I read one microsoft license agreement and my head still hurts. It was kind of curious too - apparently, the license for windows nt workstation forbids more than ten inbound p2p connections on some basic services. Hihi...
Meanwhile on crushlink, it opened and offered me a new hint. This new hint consisted of a multi-framed page with one page being a sign-up form to some form and the other frame saying I need to signup to "jobsonline.com" to get the hint #2. I have a bad feeling about this... but what the heck. Introduce Mr. Teufelkunst Schattentanz, an accountant from new york. ... and of course they have to have complete street database of USA. But I'm not giving up! After some friendly help from an american player in batmud, I got through. And for what? "The last name has 8 letters". Sheez! This is getting on my nerves. Admittedly it's quite pathetic that I spend so much time to pursue an imaginary secret admirer designed to get me to view banners and sign on sites I don't need, but hey...