For a long time now, I have been receiving junk e-mails (of a very large size, above 100K) from various ticalc.org members. I thought it was only me for a while, but just a while ago, Michael O'Brien e-mailed me and told me that he had received a similar e-mail from me not too long ago. I was thinking that possibly, the ticalc.org mailing lists may have the Klez virus (or some other similar virus). Every day, I get one or two of these e-mails. My guess that one of the mailing lists has the Klez virus goes further because sometime last year, on the little "Updates" box on the front page, it said something like "Made simple Klez filter for mailing lists", which probably means that the Klez virus was attacking the mailing lists, and they made a small filter to block out the junk e-mails.

I was 1) wondering if anybody else has been receiving these types of e-mails, and 2) wondering if anything could be done about this. If somebody were to open the attachment(s) that normally come with it, they might be infected with the virus, as well.

Anybody else have any thoughts on this?

no_one

yeah, I've been getting those too...it's really annoyiung. Perhaps the TICalc.org mailing list _is_ infected?

The list isn't infected. The viruses forge the From header. What you are getting is an e-mail from someone who has a ticalc.org member (or the list) in his address book, and is infected. Random names from his book are selected, and e-mails sent.

That's probably it. I just found it odd that almost all the e-mails that I got were from ti-calc.org members that I recognized. And I guess we have no way of finding out who the e-mails are coming from to warn them that they have a virus and it's killing us with junk e-mails.

How do you know it's a virus? The person could be sending these e-mails on purpose! *shudder*

Yep, this is one of the many reasons I like hotmail. I can easily figure out who forged the email, and how. It really comes in handy.

THe ocvious reason why it is a virus is that a picutre that could be in the e-mail as an attatchment or as a background does not load and there are no attactchments. Basically it has size with no visable means for that size.

BTW I got another e-mail titled "Background" and it was from "cmdpost" at detatched solutions. The size is ~133KB.

That's the exact type I've been getting. A random title (often an HTML tag or attribute as the subject) and a 100KB-140KB size e-mail, usually with no reason for that large of a size. Sometimes, when you open them, there's nothing. And I guess on stupid mail programs like outlook, the virus would launch or something.

Nah, it's a virus. And what does Hotmail have that other e-mail accounts don't?

Most of the things I'm getting seem to come from this type of virus:
http://securityresponse.
symantec.com/avcenter/venc/
data/w32.klez.h@mm.html
(copy+paste lines together)

I've also had plenty of other ones. It's really quite annoying.

I knew there would be an article about this eventually. Good job with the newsletter, btw, it's getting better and better every issue.

Yeah, its a nice tid bit of reading every month, though I can read it in less then 7 minutes. I always lke the humore section, but there are some things I don't know because I haven't been hanging around here long enough. Keep up the good work Joey.

I read the newsletter on my new phone via WAP and GPRS. How nerdy is that =). I just found out that google has some kind of wap-proxy, that sorta "translates" regular html-pages to wml-pages.

So now I can check out ticalc.org from wherever I am =)

Yeh that's pretty nerdy alright.

Okay... I think that officially makes you more pathetic than me. Congrats! :-) If you could only do SSH over your phone... now THAT would be cool.

The HTML version may have come out with out a hitch, but I knew it would mess up somewhere. With the bad luck that has been had with the newsletter, I am supprised that the newsletter ever happened, in the first place.

-W-

So, when are you guys going to interview me? (hint, hint)

Never. (hint, hint) j/k :)

And HOW are your programs better than mine? Look at ImpQuest and be amazed at my wonderful programming skills! ^_^

Bah! I made a font editor that somehow was ignored by the news peope... but I'm not upset, not bitter.. *grumble*

ANYWAY... I'm working on a new programming language right now... so we'll see then!

I think I remember that...what was it called again?

Never mind. I was thinking of a different program.

Were you thinking of the Java on the 68k?

NO I was thinking of the one program that let you display a string in any of the system fonts with any of the attributes applied. There was also Anglo 3D (I think thats the title) that I tried to get working a couple years back but couldn't.

I developed a new language too, Moka (can be found on the win assembly utilities), a java to c converter. Although it was very functional and efficient, it is not very popular yet... I wish you a better luck in the development tool market !