Curious Spam

[thewayne]

I've recently received four emails, three of which had the subject of "Re: Doctor Garfield Newstrom" with a different name, but all of them were from "Garfield Newstrom", or whatever the name was. Surprisingly, one of them got past Yahoo's spam filter.

I would really like to see two rules added their system. First, if the date on the message is more than X days in the future, it's probably spam. Second, if the sender's name is in the subject line, it's probably spam. I get spam almost daily dated 1/19/38, and it's because they're using a Unix system with a forged date value linked to the Unix Date Epoch Problem. It's like the Y2K bug but affects Unix systems (and maybe Linux systems, I don't know if they've fixed it yet) as they count seconds since midnight, 1/1/1970. If you subtract 1 second from that, it overflows to 1/19/2038, just like the old Apple ][ if you were using integer basic and added 1 to 32,767 it overflowed to -32,767.

Such fun!

Comments

[chirssly.livejournal.com]

They updated Linux to a larger timestamp (64 bit I think) years ago. So they're good until past the year 4 trillion. By then, there might be something better than Linux.