Archive for the ‘WTF Was That?’ Category

Beats me how the hell so many spammers get my email address.  I’m pretty good about flying under the radar.  I usually use a junk Gmail account when I want to sign up for something that I think has the potential to haunt me down the road.

I do a lot on internet marketing so I’m always signing up for free reports about generating traffic, promoting affiliate products, search engine marketing, etc.  A few weeks ago I used my real email address to sign up for something from a “reputable” marketer and within hours I was getting tons of crap in my inbox.

Reputable marketers use optin measures to send you stuff. You submit your name and email, get a reply message back from the auto-responder that contains a link to click to verify that you requested the information. It keeps marketers from manually putting you into their list without your permission. It’s responsible permission based marketing.

I started noticing that all the destination websites in these where-the-f*ck-(I’m trying not to say fuck so much)-did-this-f*cking-email-come-from had the same little banner down on the bottom of their pages.  I traced it back to a very evil viral list builder called www.viralurl.com  (don’t even go there)  It’s the proverbial anti-Christ of spam spewing marketing.  Here’s how it works…

You sign up for this viral url thing to protect your affiliate links so people can’t circumnavigate your links by stripping out your ID so you won’t get paid your commission on a sale.  Well, I got news for you dumbasses who buy into that shit.  Circumnavigation is easy.  All you have to do is figure out the destination page and go directly to the target site in another browser because your other browser already got cookied.  Or you can find the cookie on your computer and delete it. 

Anyhoo, so someone goes to your page and they see this little banner on the bottom of your page (and yes, they’ve already been cookied from that, too) and they click on it and then watch the little video and go “Hey, I need that!”  So they sign up for it and THAT’S where the spam begins.

You see, every one who signs under you and who signs under them and who signs under those losers – on down through FIVE levels – you get to email them.  No optins, no permission, no nothing.  You’re just straight up automatically in their list.  It’s f*cking evil.  Get the shovel.

So, it’s CA budget time again and we have a $19+ BILLION deficit.  Since the dumb asses in office can’t figure it out and will just come up with some new voodoo virtual bookkeeping method, I think it’s time for the general population of CA to come up with creative ideas.  Here’s mine.

You remember cash for clunkers? Dealers gave customers a discount and the federal government reimbursed the dealers?  CA could do something similar. We can call it “Don’t Let The Door Slam You On The Ass On Your Way Out”.  It would be a mass exodus from CA campaign good all summer long.  Anyone willing to leave CA, go to your local moving van company and move out of state for free.  CA will directly reimburse the moving co up to [insert some $figure here]. 

No self-movers allowed.  No U-Haul type of thing.  It’s got to be a moving van company doing the move so CA can verify that you really packed up your shit and left the state.

Do you have an idea? Leave a comment.

I’ve got the strangest problem with the keyboard on my PC that just cropped up since yesterday.  I’m on a Dell running Vista.  The keyboard is wired, not wireless.  When I type in an email, Word, or text editor, I have no problems.  But when I type in a web based application like WordPress (like I’m doing now writing this post), or filling in online fields like a form or a search box, or leaving a comment on someone’s blog, my keyboard, including the spacebar, skips.  So I end up with sporadic missing letters and spaces.  It’s like it’s stuttering.

I have scanned my computer to death with McAfee and Spybot Search & Destroy.  This computer is clean as a whistle.  McAfee and Windows are all up to date.

Has anyone experienced this problem and were you able to figure out what was causing it?

UPDATE:  I found the problem.  I was infected, infected, infected to the max with Trojans.  I also started having problems with redirects on Google when I clicked on a listing.  Turns out I had a Google redirect virus.  I ran MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware and now both problems are solved.