Hacking for Christ

Mugs Wanted

One important component of phishing scams are "mules" - people who accept transfers from hijacked accounts and export the money abroad, either by further bank transfers or by going to the ATM and then slipping wads of cash into brown envelopes. Such people are often recruited by spam or websites offering job opportunities - "Work From Home", "A Few Hours A Week", "Lucrative Rewards", "Financial Managers Wanted" etc.

I recently received an email in this vein:

Hello! I am Simon Nicolas, a general manager of international company IFSD Inc. (http://www.ifsd-company.com) and I have a favorable offer for you.

Now it is a little about our company. We are engaged the organization of plans of reception of payments for private persons and the companies. Our services are demanded by those who has requirement to accept remittances from clients in other countries.

Our company conducts wide international activity; we work with the organizations and private persons from the various countries worldwide. Our activity constantly extends, we enter new services, we expand staff of employees we open representations of the company in the territory of the various countries.

In connection with constant expansion of our international activity we feel necessity of new employees in the territories of the various countries. Now we have announced a set of employees on a post "the Regional Financial Manager".

Working on this post, our colleagues produce work with the bank transfers and the checks. Our clients are private persons and the companies of the different countries and for simplification of remittances we use our Regional Financial managers.

The functions of the Regional Financial Manager:
- reception of bank payments on a bank account
- transfer of money resources to our representatives in other countries

The scheme of work is those: the Regional Financial Manager receives money resources and informs us on this. We in turn at once enroll the necessary sum on the account of our client. It allows you to save a lot of time - now the client does not need to wait for reception of money from abroad. As such scheme allows you to save money. From the sum of each transaction lead through you our company pays 5 %.

The basic requirements:
- age of 21-60 years
- access to the Internet, e-mail
- opportunity to work not less than 3 hours per day

It is your really favorably chance to earn!
Start to work right now! For the beginning with us you need to fill works only labour agreement

---
Best regards,
Simon Nicolas.

http://www.ifsd-company.com

However, what amazed me most was the quality of the website. It's a very slick Flash-based number. I would almost think this was a real international organisation, if the slightly dodgy English and over-vagueness didn't give it away. And despite saying their main office is in Miami (and even giving phone numbers, which are probably redirected or VoIP or somesuch), the WHOIS info for the domain has it registered with a Fastmail email address to a PO Box in Amsterdam. Phishers get more slick every day.

Their employee login ("Account" link, top right) has a "register" option! If anyone wants to register, have a poke around and let us know what they find, that might be quite interesting :-)

Euro OSCON Registration

It's the last day for "early bird" registration at Euro OSCON - a saving of 170EUR. If you go, you'll find Axel and I there, and perhaps some other European Mozilla people as well. Axel is giving a talk on "Mozilla as a Development Platform". Oddly, he's on the Linux track - perhaps because they didn't have a more suitable one.

Personally, I think it's unfortunate that the conference fee is so high, even with the discount, but I can only assume that it reflects the true cost of putting it on. I'm looking forward to the next FOSDEM, though :-)

BitTorrent in Firefox

Don't get your hopes up too high yet, but...

New Newsgroups

We've finally finished all the paperwork, and are glad to be able to say that Giganews have kindly offered to host the new Mozilla newsgroups. Giganews are one of the largest Usenet providers, with over 10% of all Usenet posts coming through their servers, and we're very happy to have them taking care of this for us.

I've lost count of how many times we've done this, but I sincerely hope this is the last. Please give your final comments on the list of new groups. Before commenting, please read the questions and replies in the previous three discussions. Please note that in the new world we will have much greater control of groups, including creation and removal, so do not be concerned that the list needs to accommodate future as well as current requirements.

Reinventing Things Worse

Have you ever noticed that sometimes "the next big thing" is a reinvention of the current thing, but worse?

Newsgroups have been around since the dawn of the Internet. They are a well-understood mechanism for distributing threaded discussions in a decentralised way around the world. You can choose a client which suits you, and have a consistent interface to many different groups on different topics.

However, a few years ago, web forums started becoming popular. Because they didn't require another installed client or an open port on a firewall (ridiculous firewall port policies are a rant I'll save for another day), people started using them instead of newsgroups even though you didn't have consistency of interface across boards, you had to create accounts everywhere, the search was worse and so on.

Now, I read n.p.m.seamonkey and see the following:

As a reminder we will eventually phase out posts to this newsgroup in favor of the developer blog:

http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/

Please be sure to check there for the latest news!

A blog is even worse than a web forum - there's not even any threading, just a simple linear discussion, and the search usually isn't as good. Additionally, only those who know the password can post, which is far less egalitarian. If that becomes our primary development announcement mechanism, the power to speak gets concentrated in the hands of a few. Developers are perfectly capable of using NNTP - our project even makes an NNTP client! If you want to access a message on the web, you can use Google Groups or Gmane. So why do we continually reinvent our communications mechanisms worse than before?

Away (Yet Again)

I'm going to Norway until the 25th, for a proper, relaxing holiday. Any Norwegian Mozilla people within travelling distance of here who might like to meet up, email me at my personal email address before tomorrow morning :-)

Estonian and Icelandic

I have a large spreadsheet containing data on what percentage of the Internet population speaks which language. If I tell it which localisations we have in preparation for Firefox 1.5, it tells me we will be able to provide software in the native language of 95% of the Internet population. This compares with 92% for Firefox 1.0.

If I then tell it which localisations have registered projects for Firefox, it tells me that when all of them produce a language pack, we'll have covered 99.93% of the Internet population. Estonian and Icelandic are the only two languages in my list that we don't have a localisation team for.

(The 99.93% figure isn't actually strictly accurate, because my data excludes a large number of languages whose populations are too small to register individually, but collectively may make up a significant proportion of the net population. But hey, if they speak Catalan, Basque, Irish, Gujarati, Armenian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Albanian, Afrikaans, Asturian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Frisian, Kinyarwanda, Khmer, Singhalese or Welsh, we've got them covered anyway.)

Kudos go to the Mozilla Localisation Project staff for a truly Herculean effort of coordination and management.

Obtaining Beer Using Thunderbird Signatures

Amusing bug report of the week:

Thunderbird by default is setup to grey out signatures. I have discovered it is possible to subliminally program people by modifying my signature. Because by default they are greyed out people don't pay much attention to them. I have admittedly only had limited success so far - free beer - however I feel a sustained campaign with the right subject could have excellent results.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Find someone who you communicate with frequently.
2. Rewrite bits of your signature to implant suggestions. (Important to keep it roughly the same shape).
3.

Actual Results:
Target bought me beer.

Expected Results:
I would reconsider greying out signatures by default.

Mozilla Foundation Forms Taxable Subsidiary

I'm back, and rather tiredly working through the large backlog of almost 1000 non-spam Mozilla-related emails.

As you all will be aware, the big news during my absence was the formation of a new taxable subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, called the Mozilla Corporation. When it became clear that continuing with our current structure could jeopardise the Foundation's non-profit tax-exempt status, several options were examined and this was seen as the best way forward. I was honoured to be invited to be part of the Advisory Committee which helped the Mozilla Foundation board to steer its way through the complicated legal, organisational, financial, ownership, communication and other issues involved.

As Frank Hecker's blogpost mentioned, he is the new Director of Policy for the Foundation, and I am staying with the Foundation rather than moving to the subsidiary with the rest of the current Foundation employees. In fact, I was hired by the Foundation last month with exactly this in mind. We are joined by Zak Greant, who I believe I met briefly at EuroFoo 2004; all three of us currently work part-time.

Some of you may not bet too familiar with Frank's previous work for the project, which has been rather behind the scenes. He and I have collaborated in the past on the CA certificate policy and other security and policy issues, and I have great respect for his clarity of analysis. He is exactly the right person for the job, and I'm very excited to be working for him.

Frank is currently offline for personal reasons, so I don't want to start making grand statements about the future activities of the Foundation. However, one area we hope to turn our attention to sooner rather than later is the issue of governance. Now that the Foundation and the Corporation are separate, it gives those of us in the Foundation a chance to step back and look at things such as the role of mozilla.org staff. In the near future, we hope to establish a mechanism within the community for having those very important discussions.

It seems that most of the questions about the formation of MozCo have been answered over the past few days; however, if any still remain that you think I can answer, feel free to ask them here.