Milestones in the Annals of Junkmail

fdc writes: "Web pages are a great source of postal addresses for direct mailers. Judging by some of the addresses we've seen recently, it's evident that the data is harvested not by humans, but by computer programs that scan web pages for names and addresses. Several weeks ago we (the Kermit Project at Columbia University) announced a new release of our Kermit 95 communication software for Windows -- SSH, secure FTP, etc; cousin of C-Kermit for Unix (search Freshmeat). Since this was a major release, we chose a new icon for it: the Columbia crown. A web page explained that this is the emblem of Columbia University: the crown of King George the II of England (1727-1760), who founded Columbia in 1754. JUST ONE WEEK LATER guess who received a postcard from Dell."

Nope... that would be "Your Majesty".

[TDScott]

"Your Highness" denotes royalty other than a King or Queen. "Your Majesty" denotes a King or a Queen. (Source [af.mil])

Just nitpicking...

Re:Looks like a prank by someone at Dell

[banky]

actually the address is on
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95.html
most of the way down, under the "buy now" stuff

Dell doesn't harvest addresses

[peterjm]

Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies who either do the harvesting, or who buy large lists from email addressess from companies who swear up and down that they lists contain only people who asked to recieve information about this sort of thing (whatever this sort of thing may be).

Re:new techinques

[GigsVT]

I think it's the owner of someone (at) somewhere.com posts to bugtraq.

example.com
example.net
example.org

Are the RFC 2606 eserved domains you should use in examples, such as the parent post. [rfc-editor.org]

Also reserved are the TLDs: .test .example .invalid .localhost

I don't know if it's been updated since, but they don't mention the common "localhost.localdomain" that I see a lot. I guess it really doesn't matter too much, except for trash traffic to the root name servers if someone messes it up.

Re:new techinques

[fdc]

No, the point was that postal addresses (not email) addresses were being picked up, and in a fairly sophisticated manner. I believe the Web page in question is http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95.html [columbia.edu] which contains our postal address (near the bottom) and also mentions King George II (near the top). The address harvester recognized the postal address (no big accomplishment) but also picked out "King George II" as a name. Which I suppose it could be!

Re:Looks like a prank by someone at Dell

[Mike Schiraldi]

In fact, on that page, King George is not refered to as King George, but rather as "George, King of England."

Actually, it said, "George II, King of England". The harvester program ignored the "of England" part, and decided that "George II, King" looked a lot like "Smith, John". Just like it turns that into "John Smith", it got "King George II"