Saturday, January 17, 2009

A Very Original Spam

As annoying as spam usually is, I was somewhat tickled to have received an email from a "Mark Madoff" who was interested in obtaining my help in sheltering $45MM in an offshore account from the authorities. Full text below:


From: "Mr. Mark Madoff" <mark@blminvestments.com>
To: <undisclosed recipients>
<no subject>

Hi

I looked up your contact details and I am contacting you because of the urgency this situation demands.I am
Mark Madoff son of Bernie Madoff founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. My father is currently
involved in a $50 billion Usd swindle with investors and the U.S government has decided to confisticate my family
empire worth billions of U.S dollars.

We need your assistance to help us receive and conceal 45 million Usd ($45,000,000,00)from one of our family
offshore accounts as we are currently under pressure from the U.S government to give up all family assets. For
your efforts my family is willing to compensate you with 35% of the total funds. Note also that we have to be
careful due to the huge nature of the funds.I will update you with more details as soon as I confirm your
commitment to this deal.

Should you be interested please send me your details via email to enable us work on this together. @


1:Full Names
2:Occupation:
3:Private Phone Number:
4:Current Residential Address:

Regards
Mark Madoff
N:b
Look up the below links to understand the urgency of the issue.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=4432249

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081212/bs_nm/us_madoff_arrest

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/December08/madoffarrestpr.pdf


'blminvestments.com' exists as a server, but there's no website, and I tried connecting to port 25 and couldn't get a proper SMTP response (but perhaps my knowledge of how to do so is out of date...). Here's the whois data from http://www.robtex.com/ (which appears to be a niftly little toolkit for resolving domain name and IP info:

Registrant:
BL Investments
P.O Box 9137
Coral Springs, FL 33075
US

Domain Name: BLMINVESTMENTS.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
BL Investments jeff@blminvestments.com
P.O Box 9137
Coral Springs, FL 33075
US
954-344-4700


Record expires on 29-Apr-2009.
Record created on 29-Apr-2003.
Database last updated on 17-Jan-2009 12:12:32 EST.

Domain servers in listed order:

WINNT.NETWORLD-INC.COM 208.249.244.1
NS2.NETWORLD-INC.COM 208.249.244.2


So, it looks like there's possibly some real people in the US on the end of this particular spam. Not sure if there's an upside to following up further, but still, it was amusing.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Updates on open positions at Netflix

Couple of minor matters:

1. These positions will all be available to apply for at jobs.netflix.com some time soon.

2. Because of this change, someone else will be doing the hiring for two of them.

I'll be looking for a configuration and release engineer in the next 30 days or so. The test automation engineers will be hired by the new functional QA manager (who hasn't yet been hired).

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Eloise and Lucy Trying On Glasses

Here's a couple of Eloise and Lucy, but they're sideways. Not quite getting the use of the cameraphone 100% yet.



Isaac in glasses

A picture of Isaac while we were out waiting for an eye exam to be over.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

New Job, Old Job

We've made some organizational changes at work recently, and instead of managing the entire Web QA team, I'm not focused on what I'm calling the Operational Quality team.

We're going to be focused on the downstream functions formerly handled by the whole WebQA team. Anything to do with building, deploying, configuring and monitoring the production website and supporting middle tier applications will now be handled by me and the new team. The rest of the WebQA team will be focused more intently on functional testing, performance testing and preventing bugs from making it out of the lab in the first place.

I think this is a great opportunity to focus more intently on filling some gaps in the Experience Chain.