A clever and witty short film by Albion Gray:
Mugged from Albion Gray on Vimeo.
Pink Trombone
It sounds a bit rude, but Pink Trombone is actually the auditory equivalent of QWOP. See if you can get it to say something intelligent.
(via JWZ)
Mona Lisa: reimagined
Using a new app (presumably incorporating Google’s Deep Dream code), someone has created dozens of different versions of the Mona Lisa based on the styles of other painters or on random photographs.
The results are amazing.
He’s a Russian Spy
Here’s a brilliant bit of music that deserves a bigger audience.
Shot in Liverpool, Exmoor and Berlin. The song is performed by There’ll Always Be Diseases (TAB-D) and is available as a download single. The video features Boz Hayward, (who wrote the song in January 1979 when he was a 13 year old school boy punk) and a few of his old friends on a reunion in May 2015. More info on russianspy.co.uk
Welcome to the spam factory
Does this text message look familiar to you?
Been involved in a car accident in the last 3 years that was not your fault? Then you can claim compensation, to find out how much click www.ur1.click/********
I routinely forward messages like this to 7726 (which spells out “SPAM” on the phone keypad) in the hope that the mobile phone operator will do something to stop it. It never seems to be particularly effective, though. The same old URLs like www.accidentinjuryclaim.so seem to keep cropping up no matter what.
However, ur1.click was new to me. According to whois, the domain is registered in Panama, and its IP address (104.219.250.52) is assigned to a US web host called Namecheap.
I decided to have a quick poke around on their web server, and discovered that the spammers are publishing a lot more information than they probably intended to — all their spam messages and phone number lists are publicly accessible. I don’t want to link directly to this content, but I can tell you that it includes dozens of CSV files containing many thousands of UK mobile phone numbers.
Inside the spam server:
Here’s an excerpt from one of these CSV files (with some digits replaced with asterisks):
79663840**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b94** or to optout reply STOP" 77531043**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b93** or to optout reply STOP" 79806446**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b92** or to optout reply STOP" 75530413**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b92** or to optout reply STOP" 74192985**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b91** or to optout reply STOP" 75405329**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b90** or to optout reply STOP" 74053775**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b90** or to optout reply STOP" 79444301**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b8f** or to optout reply STOP" 74321371**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b8f** or to optout reply STOP" 75438700**,"Is your debt causing you stress and anxiety? For expert advice on managing your debt visit www.ur1.click/767b8e** or to optout reply STOP"
The digits at the start of each line are the phone numbers that these messages were sent to, without the initial zero. (I searched for my own number in these files, and sure enough it was listed there next to the message I’d received earlier.) There were over a quarter of a million more records in the file shown above. Another file contained messages for 764,532 numbers, promising each and every one of them £2886.21 “for the accident you had”. That amounts to a grand total of £2.2 billion in unclaimed compensation payouts. Yeah, right.
As you probably guessed already, anyone who follows one of these ur1.click links will be redirected to another site. After following the first link in each CSV file, I obtained this list of target domains:
claim4pi.com (192.64.116.30) claimpinow.com (192.64.116.30) energysaver.deals (162.213.255.133) freedebttoday.com (162.213.250.36) injury.center (199.188.206.216) injuryaid4u.com (192.64.118.154) reviewteam.info (111.90.147.108) solarsaver.today (162.213.255.134) urclaim4ppi.com (192.64.116.30)
The domain reviewteam.info is hosted in Malaysia somewhere, but all the others are hosted by … surprise, surprise … Namecheap. So Namecheap are not only hosting a rather large SMS spamming enterprise, but are also hosting most of the websites that are promoted by this spam.
I emailed Namecheap’s abuse contact about this three days ago, but nobody replied and nothing has been done. So I can only assume that Namecheap are perfectly happy to continue supporting their spammy clients.
Conclusions
- If you get a text message containing a link to www.ur1.click, forward the message to 7726. Don’t follow the link.
- Avoid these domains:
- claim4pi.com
- claimpinow.com
- energysaver.deals
- freedebttoday.com
- injury.center
- injuryaid4u.com
- reviewteam.info
- solarsaver.today
- urclaim4ppi.com
- Don’t host your website with Namecheap. Find somewhere reputable.
Tagged with: spam
Tom Harper defending his journalism on CNN
Last weekend, an article by Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times alleged that files leaked by Edward Snowden had been decrypted by the Russians and Chinese, endangering the lives of Mi6 agents in those countries.
When asked to back up his claims in an interview with George Howell on CNN, Harper basically admitted that there was no evidence to support any of the claims they had made, and that they were simply reporting what they had been told by the British government.
But if this is the government’s official position, then why did they need to use “anonymous sources”? Why aren’t there any ministers queuing up to validate the claims made in this article?
Here’s the original CNN interview. I’ve put together an executive summary, which you can watch here:
