Surplus in inches is absolutely necessary
If they’re necessary, by definition they aren’t surplus.
When the first first Gulf War broke out, I was watching the television coverage with coworkers in the company auditorium.  There was a commercial for a pickup truck, bragging about the size of its engine.  The voiceover said “there’s no substitute for cubic [...]

… you can be almost certain that it isn’t.  For instance, spam claiming to be “legal software sales”, but offering popular commercial software for pennies on the dollar.

Lately I’ve been getting more spam for internet gambling, promising that just for signing up I’ll get $2400 free.  If there was any doubt in my mind that many internet gambling operations are completely fraudulent, this has removed it.  Assuming for the sake of argument that such an operation was legitimate, if it had so [...]

DynDNS has announced that their MailHop service will no longer generate NDRs (Non-Delivery Reports, commonly known as bounce messages).  They point out that this is technically a violation of RFC 2821 section 3.7.  I’d observe that it violates section 3.6 of RFC 821, which is the current SMTP standard, as RFC 2821 is still a [...]

I’ve started receiving spam text messages on my cell phone.  They are stock tips, obviously for illegal pump-and-dump operations.  It doesn’t appear that there’s any way to get rid of them, short of either having the carrier block all text messages to my phone, or changing my phone number.
I suppose I’m lucky to have had [...]

Last month I wrote of receiving a death threat by email, which turned out to be an extortion attempt that was making the rounds as spam.  The FBI issued an advisory about this scam in January.
CNN now reports that the FBI is investigating these scams:
The FBI has received more than 100 complaints about the so-called [...]

I just received this death threat by email. I can’t imagine that anyone would actually be willing to spend $650K to kill me. I’m guessing that it’s an attempt at extortion; otherwise there would be no point to let a victim know that a contract has been taken out on him. [...]

Yet another 419 scam.  No, there isn’t a lottery for Linux users.  And there aren’t any lotteries that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who have not purchased lottery tickets.  The scammes count on their victims being so dazzled by the idea of winning money as to completely forget common sense.
The reason these [...]

It continues to amaze me that anyone would fall for 419 scams (advance fee fraud).  Normally I don’t even bother looking at the few 419 emails that make it through my spam filter, but today I happened to read part of one.  Surprisingly, it admits in the very first paragraph that many people lose money [...]

I’ve been receiving 419 (advance fee fraud) email from Nigeria and other countries since 1998, and anyone with the slightest bit of common sense recognizes these emails as scams.  Normally I don’t give them a second thought, but today I was surprised to receive one from someone claiming to be a North Korean citizen who [...]