Scam Or Not?

[DavidG]

It's hard not to be paranoid when MS sends you the F#$&*#^ thing 100 times!! I also got it multiple times. Why the heck would they do that??

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
4) Just because it is from a big, well known company does NOT prevent it from being a scam!

Ditto on this. here is a scam I could have fallen for if the scammer had not been so greedy.
It was (well claimed to be) from my ISP (sympatico.ca) claiming my account was not up todate. The kind of message you get when say your Visa expires and they don't have the new expiry date.
So I click the link and get to a Sympatico page (a fake one but very well done). The only thing that triggered the warning flags were that the moron asked for some very personal info the the ISP would never want (ie PIN number, drivers license etc) Had he just asked for the Visa I may have fallen for it.

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by DavidG:
It's hard not to be paranoid when MS sends you the F#$&*#^ thing 100 times!! I also got it multiple times. Why the heck would they do that??

They send it to everyone on their lists once. However, apparently, it's possible to get on their lists more than once. With the number of addresses they have, and the fact that removing duplicates is an O(n^2) operation, I can understand why they do.

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Jack Simth:

quote:

---

Originally posted by DavidG:
It's hard not to be paranoid when MS sends you the F#$&*#^ thing 100 times!! I also got it multiple times. Why the heck would they do that??

They send it to everyone on their lists once. However, apparently, it's possible to get on their lists more than once. With the number of addresses they have, and the fact that removing duplicates is an O(n^2) operation, I can understand why they do.

---

The biggest software company in the world that has written some of the most complex programs can't remove duplicate addresses from a list??? What's wrong with this picture.

[Krsqk]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
I always strip MSN and MSMessenger off all my systems at the earliest opportunity. Microsoft tries very hard to stop you doing this (for example, on XP messenger has no uninstall function) but if you're determined there's always a way...

Yeah, like searching the registry for every occurance of "Messenger" I finally got those dratted Messenger popups to stop.

[Fyron]

Umm... ever opened "msconfig" from the run prompt? Or perhaps the Services Manager from the Admin Tools? msconfig can control what programs start up with Windows. The Services Manager can control when Windows services (such as Messenger) start. No registry editing needed (at least, not manually ).

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by DavidG:
The biggest software company in the world that has written some of the most complex programs can't remove duplicate addresses from a list??? What's wrong with this picture.

They could, it's just a matter of the computer time required. The standard algorythm for removeing duplicates goes something like:

code:

---

for(i=0; i<max; i++)

{

for(j=i-1; j>=0; j--)

{

if(entry(i) == entry(j))

{ 

clear(i)

}

}

}

---

If they have 10^9 entries, the statement

code:

---

if(entry(i) == entry(j))

---

gets run, at most (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... + ((10^9)-1) +(10^9)) times - roughly (10^9)^2, or about 10^18 times. As it is almost impossible to hold 10^9 e-mail addresses in live memory at once (if you allow, say, 100 bytes per entry, that works out to 10^11 bytes - about one hundred gigabytes - of RAM for a single project; not likely), disk access times need to be used for dealing with the entries. If you then assign a disk acess time of, say, 10^-6 seconds per entry, and multiply that by the number of entries accessed (roughly 10^18 accesses) you get an estimate on the amount of time the algorythm will take: 10^12 seconds. That's roughly 16,666,666,666 minutes, 277,777,777 hours, 11,574,074 days, or 31,688 years. Throw 10,000 machines at the task, and it still takes a little over three years (actually, more than that, due to communication time between them). It isn't that they couldn't, it's just that it would cost more resources to eliminate the duplicates than doing so would save them.

Granted, there are several ways to shave time off of the above analysis, but that just gives a general idea of what it would take.