Just rant

Today I'm going to rant for a while. So if you don't want to read me ranting you're free to walk away and come back at another time.
My first rant is about something I've been talking about in a previous article (Email and us) but this merits an encore.
This week I've received yet another mail with a Power Point presentation. I made a rule never to open one of those, I just delete them. And it's not because I think they may be a security risk, I do it because I know it's a waste of time. Of course I receive a few work related PP files, but I can tell easily because I know the source, I requested them or I've been told the they were sent to me previously.
I don't know why people feel that a message is more valuable because is presented written in a nice 3D font, with colors, sound effects and animations. It's not. If the message is crappy, meaningless, stupid, nothing will make it better.
But this case was somehow different. The subject was "We have to stop Israel!" and the content was just the PP file that I didn't open. Because it was from an employee of a company we buy supplies from and sent to my work account, I felt compelled to answer with "We have to stop spam!"
And he answered with "It seems that the bombs are not falling in your home". That was when I almost lost it, but I remembered what I wrote and applied my own rules (don't answer in anger, don't answer if you don't have to) to the case and dropped it.
I understand that there's a war there, I'm aware that it's a terrible thing and I agree that the war has to be stopped. But that's not the point. The point is that I don't want to get this garbage in my mail account and I have the right to draw the line and say it.
And the real problem with these people is that they trully believe that they have a higher sacred right to send anything. Just because they're talking about life and peace and harmony, their message is more valuable than animated puppies.
I can write for a long while about how wrong is to put one's right over someone else's. Besides, it doesn't matter. The message has no value, the sender is not fighting for peace, he's not a saving lifes.
It's a whole neew breed of "fat buttocks" warriors. They think that having the Internet they can reach millions and make a difference. And they're doing it, they're annoying millions. Sitting comfortably in front of a computer, they spread THE WORD around and most of the time is not even their own WORD. They use any hot issue to justify a spam crusade. This is something that satisfy their pathetic emotional agenda and that's all the satisfaction they'll get. Because it's not about the issue, it's only about filling their inner void.
So, here's my rant to them:


Wake up!! You're doing nothing!! You're just sitting in your fat posterior forwarding Powerpoints. The israeli government won't stop the war just because you filled its mail box. Hezbollah probably doesn't have one. The phone companies won't lower the prices no matter how many messages you send. Neither the oil companies. Fidel Castro is not resigning because you ask nicely on a message. It's not going to happen. If you take an hot issue from the news, it doesn't make sense to try to bring awareness to the general public. If it's in your newspaper, it's in mine too. If you're watching it on tv, I'm watching it too. And if you really really want to do something about it, go get active on it, do something, move you rear out of that chair. If you want me to listen, at least show me that it's worth enough to make you move away from your bag of chips.


My second rant is about Gmail. My mail account was "disabled" (whatever that means) and I can't use it anymore. It's not a big deal, the only purpose for that account was to catch scams, spam and phishing. The material that feeds this blog. But it pissed me off all the same. This is not the first account of this kind that I loose, it's maybe the fourth or the fifth. I can only guess but I think they're closed because someone reported them in violation of the TOS (terms of service). And it's easy to report them, all their traffic is related to scams, phishing, etc, and the identity of the user is fake. Obviously, the complainer is one of the scammers. And they have very good reasons to do that, I'm expressing them on my rant to Gmail:

Hey! From that mail account over one hundred phishing servers were reported, almost all of them were monitored until their closure. With mail address taken from the phishing messages or from files on the phishing servers, many dozens of potential victims were warned. Over three hundred mail accounts of scammers were reported and closed. And from this mail account, fake checks and transfers for over one hundred US dollars were ruined. Nice work Gmail!

The last thing is what I regret the most. I had two scammers sending fake checks to me and a couple more that were about to enroll me. Every time they write a check with my fake name, they have to pay for that check and there's no way to recover it. It's almost impossible for them to get it back and if they do, my name is on it. Every cent on that checks is one cent they won't get from someone else.
Also I was on the verge of shutting down a fake bank used for lottery scams, Financial Alliance something. I wasn't shutting it down myself, I was in contact with the domain name registrar and the hosting service trying to make them understand the problem. I've just checked and www.fiall.com is gone.
Not bad after all. The account is dead now but it died in the middle of a fight... and it won that fight!