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What's up with the spam topics my god for a while I was like I'm in the wrong site

It seems automated weirdly and it seems to be some guy from india ....
Feel so proud of my country now XD

Anyway to stop such insane amounts of spam from ever happening?
Like some posting restrictions for new users

As a user, you can click the "Report this post" triangle. An administrator or moderator will be along to clean up the mess.

We usually have a bit of a gap in moderator/administrator coverage in the wee hours of the morning until the early risers among us wake up. This morning's mess of SPAM messages was posted starting at 3:01 AM EDT. Global moderator Captain Ned dealt with them all with extreme prejudice at 6:17 AM EDT. I managed to remove one of them just a few minutes before he got here. Maybe TR should recruit a couple more European or Asian moderators. 3 AM on the U.S. east coast is 9 AM in most of Europe and 3:30 PM in India.

The moderators do a great job getting the junk out fast.

Like JAE said if you see spam notify them and it is gone in a jiffy. That is if they don't get it before you can notify them.

killadark wrote:

Anyway to stop such insane amounts of spam from ever happening?
Like some posting restrictions for new users

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=91785
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=88531
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=79585

It's been discussed to death already.

Hey Damage,

Did you get a call from someone with an east Indian/Pakistani accent saying he was from MS and do what he told you to do to your windows machine??

My mom actually did this about 4 months ago, basically resulting in a format, and man they must have called my place about 3 times in the past 2 months.

Holy cow. They're actually selling black magic/voodoo stuff now? This beats the fake visas, hands down! ☺

anotherengineer wrote:

Hey Damage,

Did you get a call from someone with an east Indian/Pakistani accent saying he was from MS and do what he told you to do to your windows machine??

My mom actually did this about 4 months ago, basically resulting in a format, and man they must have called my place about 3 times in the past 2 months.

No, uh, wow. That's bad.

There we go, all that forum spam is nuked good job. I'm glad Canada finally passed some good strict anti-spam legislation, however since it only governs what is sent from this country, it probably isn't going to amount to much.

Who would have guessed 20 years ago, a forum spammer would have been a job, I guess it beats being a farmer in 'some' countries.

anotherengineer wrote:

Hey Damage,

Did you get a call from someone with an east Indian/Pakistani accent saying he was from MS and do what he told you to do to your windows machine??

My mom actually did this about 4 months ago, basically resulting in a format, and man they must have called my place about 3 times in the past 2 months.

I was getting calls from those a-holes almost twice a week back in May-June.

If I have time, I'll try to keep them on the phone as long as possible. For example, one guy I kept on the phone for almost 20 minutes pretending that I thought he was referring to my house Windows; almost had to admire his persistence... Another fun one is to just keep asking "Can you repeat that?" until they get frustrated and hang up.

Or if you're prepared, you can do what this guy did: http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsu ... lls_today/

My parents got one of those calls recently. My son too.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/05/14 ... microsoft/

We need to educate people more.

just brew it! wrote:

Or if you're prepared, you can do what this guy did: http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsu ... lls_today/

My parents got one of those calls recently. My son too.

That man deserves a medal. Or a beer. Or something.

cphite wrote:

anotherengineer wrote:

Hey Damage,

Did you get a call from someone with an east Indian/Pakistani accent saying he was from MS and do what he told you to do to your windows machine??

My mom actually did this about 4 months ago, basically resulting in a format, and man they must have called my place about 3 times in the past 2 months.

I was getting calls from those a-holes almost twice a week back in May-June.

If I have time, I'll try to keep them on the phone as long as possible. For example, one guy I kept on the phone for almost 20 minutes pretending that I thought he was referring to my house Windows; almost had to admire his persistence... Another fun one is to just keep asking "Can you repeat that?" until they get frustrated and hang up.

I got a call from one of those Butt heads trying to tell me my computer had a virus or some crap. I went along knowing I had no virus and this guy must have thought I had 1 Computer not 4. Since I caught him with a long pause when I asked so which of my 4 PC's on my IP address "that I did not give him" has this virus and what is my IP address how do you know about it from where ever you are? He could not answer so I then I called him some some choice random curses and hung up on him.

I feel sorry for the people who fall for this scam.

I wonder what they do if you tell them you run Linux? Do they still follow their script and try to get you to bring up Event Viewer?

Good show, though sadly the inability to troll those chumps is one of the (few) drawbacks of screening one's calls.

NovusBogus wrote:

Good show, though sadly the inability to troll those chumps is one of the (few) drawbacks of screening one's calls.

One of my few joys as an old fart is that when I hang up on anyone like this I'm doing so on an old Western Electric 500 rotary dial phone. One can achieve an impressive slam-down on this baby without worrying in the least about damage to the phone.

Over this summer, the ringer on said phone has served as a remote wake-up alarm for the teenager. It's a sound completely out of her knowledge.

One of my co-workers (another old fart like us) has his cellphone ringer set to a classic rotary dial phone ring. And he has it turned up all the way. First time it rang I did a double-take, it was pretty realistic. But after a few days it got old. Been thinking of asking him to turn it down...

just brew it! wrote:

One of my co-workers (another old fart like us) has his cellphone ringer set to a classic rotary dial phone ring. And he has it turned up all the way. First time it rang I did a double-take, it was pretty realistic. But after a few days it got old. Been thinking of asking him to turn it down...

Cell phone has the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker, the scarf dude) theme as the ringtone. Never have to wonder whose phone is ringing when in a crowded room full of regulators.

Keep the old rotary phone for long-term power outages. Don't know how they do it, but when power is out, landline phone stays up. And the RBOCs want to ditch the dedicated POTS system and move it all to the data side. Fie on them. One of the few things we have that works and they want to pitch it.

Captain Ned wrote:

Don't know how they do it, but when power is out, landline phone stays up.

Traditionally I believe this was done with lots and lots of batteries at the CO. Not sure if they still do it that way or if they just tie into the UPSes that run the electronic switching equipment. I regret not having hung on to my last rotary phone. There is still one corded phone in the house that does not require any external power though (a ~20 year old GE 2-line phone), so like your rotary phone it does continue to work during power outages. While it post-dates the rotary dial age, it is old enough that it has a selector switch on it to allow use of pulse dialing for (now all but non-existent) phone systems which can only handle the old school signaling.

Edit: One of the first jobs I had out of college was at GTE (which later became Verizon). A few of the older engineers still had stepper relays from the old electro-mechanical telephone switches on their desks as souvenirs of a bygone age. Pretty cool how the switching for an entire telephone network could be done entirely with relays, and phones that could do little more than interrupt the circuit at a controlled rate (typically 10Hz) to transmit the phone number data to the CO.

Ah. I remember when I got that kind of call, I said, "Hey, I also noticed your computer is infected with a virus as well. I work with Norton anti-virus. Could you open up "Run" to open Event Viewer? "

There was a pause for a few seconds and then a hang-up.

I just checked a wiki and found out 9-1-1 was invented in 1968. You'd think in the days of rotary phone they'd use 1-1-1 but I guess that's better than 9-9-9.

ThatStupidCat wrote:

I just checked a wiki and found out 9-1-1 was invented in 1968. You'd think in the days of rotary phone they'd use 1-1-1 but I guess that's better than 9-9-9.

9-9-9 is the emergency number in some countries/cities.

The problem with 111 as an emergency number is that it is too easy for an intermittent short (e.g. overhead cables blowing around in the wind) to end up dialling 111 by accident with loop disconnect dialling. This would tie up resources that may be needed for real emergencies. Also with 999 you can dial it blind on a rotary phone by feeling for the finger stop, putting your middle finger in the hole next to it (0) and then your index finger goes in to the 9 automatically. Repeat 3 times and your connected to help.

Central Office equipment still operates on -48V with a large bank of batteries providing the power and the electricity supply feeding the batteries, so basically a giant online UPS. This is why landlines and DSL are still available when the power goes out. In the case of remote DSLAMs they either feed power from the CO along with the signal, or they put a UPS in the cabinet along with the DSLAM.

...and just to complete (maybe?) this little diversion into telephony trivia, the ring signal on a POTS line is 90 VAC, since it needs to be capable of directly operating an electromechanical bell in spite of the voltage drop from the resistance of several miles of fairly thin wire. You can get a pretty nasty jolt from 90 VAC! (And because of this, it has always amazed me how thin and flimsy modern modular telephone cords and jacks are.)

Sorry, got to keep going with the POTS trivia
Your mention of the 90VAC jolt reminded me of this urban myth about the dog that knew when the phone would ring:
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ulti ... 001085;p=1

just brew it! wrote:

...and just to complete (maybe?) this little diversion into telephony trivia, the ring signal on a POTS line is 90 VAC, since it needs to be capable of directly operating an electromechanical bell in spite of the voltage drop from the resistance of several miles of fairly thin wire. You can get a pretty nasty jolt from 90 VAC! (And because of this, it has always amazed me how thin and flimsy modern modular telephone cords and jacks are.)

Yeah, I learned that the hard way a few times while rewiring 'live' lines in the basement.

I don't mean to bump another thread talking about spam, but kudos to whoever cleared out this morning's mess. I checked out the "Hot Forum Threads" page, and almost every single one was spam. Someone earned his/her spam busting merit badge.

JAE and FlyingFox had to deal with it last night and given the volume it was no small amount of work.

So are they just bots? How do they get through the filtering system?

Wren wrote:

So are they just bots? How do they get through the filtering system?

Cheap labor. Spammers use automated systems to pay Asian sweatshop workers a fraction of a cent per CAPTCHA cracked.