2. September 2010 by admin.

Marine Groups, and others probably, on LinkedIn - are being infiltrated by Fake Users with Fake Lives … in order to Spam!

An original story By Alan Spicer of Alan Spicer Marine Telecom - 09-01-2010

——————————————————————————————–

I am a member on the contact and connection (social networking) site called LinkedIn. There are also groups on LinkedIn that you can join either automatically or after being approved by the group owner or a moderator. I also run a group on LinkedIn called “Marine Telecom (Communications)”. I’ve been on there for quite awhile (User since August 19, 2004) well that would be 6 years. I am also a member of a lot of groups on there, most of them Marine and Telecommunications related.

I’ve noticed recently, as have other group members of marine / maritime groups, that there is an influx of users that join a group with the sole purpose of posting spam discussions. These are discussions that have nothing to do with the charter or purpose of the group where they post these discussions. But also lately I have noticed, as have others, that the members that spam are not real people.  They are not who they say they are. In fact some of them have multiple identities that are all used to perpetrate their spam attempts.

Morpheus, in the movie The Matrix, told Neo - “Welcome to the Real World”. The reason that I quote that is because many of these spammers are creating their own fake worlds or lives on LinkedIn. Now there are some online games where you can be a virtual person (The movie Avatar) in a virtual world. You can have a job, or a business, … you can buy property and own real estate. You can spent virtual money on virtual things, funded by real money that you pay into your account. My brother even owns a yacht in one of these virtual worlds. Real Yacht People out there, imagine that? You didn’t have to spend millions of dollars on a real yacht. I’m sure my brother got his for a few dollars of spare change.

Anyway the point being that these users on Linked in create real sounding names … many of them sounding almost too real. One today almost sounds like “Daisy Duke” from that TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. Her supposed name is actually “Dixie Ford”. Her web site http://www.computertipsntricks.info/ seems legitemate enough … it actually has some real content and web applications that seem to work. Even a whois Internet Domain lookup tool that I used to look up *their* own domain name. Which is registered to someone in Jaranwala, Pakistan. So you see they are creating fake web sites for their profiles, fake companies, fake employment - work - or business histories, etc. etc. Things and people that don’t really exist … not in the REAL WORLD. Only in the fake matrix of LinkedIn.

Maybe this is a trend … in general … in Social Networking? With these forums and Facebooks and Myspaces, etc. being used to create non-real persons and non-real lives … in order to “Social Engineer” their way into peoples Friendships and Groups in order to feed the masses SPAM (Read: Matrix: In order to turn a human being into one of these [a BATTERY].) They must be getting paid by someone to do this? Or why else would they go to so much trouble to do all of that? It would interesting for someone to take a case study … pick a fake person … and find out what it is they are spamming about. Then track that back to who paid them to spam about that.

Anyway I would be interested to hear comments from others about this. I am trying to keep my group spam free. Which means being a little bit harder on new member applications that I receive. But if you don’t have a life … if you don’t have a history … and especially if you don’t have a boat, don’t captain a boat, don’t work in marine at all, then chances are you don’t belong on my Marine Telecom Group … or on any marine group for that matter.

Oh, also, I just found this: http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/03/27/how-to-report-abusive-behavior-on-linkedin/ while searching with google.com to see if I could find any more talk about these fake LinkedIn users.

How to report abusive behavior on LinkedIn

Reid Hoffman March 27th, 2009

From the day we launched, LinkedIn has been about helping professionals build and maintain trusted relationships online. Over the past six years, we’ve seen millions of professionals gravitate towards this concept and members are signing up for LinkedIn in unprecedented numbers.

Today over 37 million professionals on LinkedIn believe that bringing our real-world professional relationships online will help all of us work smarter. While the network grows rapidly, we want to make sure that we preserve the user experience – for every user – by maintaining the integrity of the site. Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that a very small number of users tarnish the experience for some members of our community.

This extremely limited but abusive behavior violates our Terms of Service.  This includes examples such as not using a real name/person as the profile owner, falsifying info, creating fake profiles, trying to use someone else’s account, massively inviting people they don’t know, and using the data in a way not authorized or intended by LinkedIn’s Terms of Service.  This behavior, though infrequent, strikes at the very root of a trusted professional network.

We take these violations very seriously and will not tolerate this behavior. We’ll be contacting these users with a warning and any subsequent violation will result in the restriction or the termination of their account.

Moving forward, we’ll continue responding to complaints of abuses. We’ve also created an email address for you to report inappropriate behavior. Please email us, should you notice abusive behavior on LinkedIn.

And thanks for making LinkedIn a great network of professionals.  We really appreciate it.

* Alan Spicer’s additional note - That email address is: abuse @ linkedin.com. Which is quite different from the online “Customer Service” contact method that I tried previously… and met with disappointing results over my report. They didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about at all.

Note: abuse email addresses used to be pretty common for web sites. Through: http://www.abuse.net/ you can find the abuse contacts for a lot of web site domain names. That is if they have registered on there. Another old abuse contact has always been “postmaster” … but from having been a domain “admin” or “root” user guy before - I know that the “postmaster” mailbox often gets ignored most of the time because it just gets too much email traffic. (By the way I should be *good* in www.abuse.net for my domains such as wifiyacht.net and marinetelecom.net, and have been for *years*.)

—

Alan Spicer

Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net - http://www.wifiyacht.net

communications @ marinetelecom.net

+1 954-683-3426

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2. September 2010 by admin.

* This looks reminiscent of the US NASA Apollo Space Program … with a space craft designed to drop back down from space and deploy parachutes for a water recovery landing.

http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?number=886061620

Today SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) announced their Dragon spacecraft has successfully completed a high altitude drop test, meeting 100 percent of test objectives.  This is the last in a series of tests to validate parachute deployment systems and recovery operations before the craft’s first launch.

During the August 12th test, an Erikson S-64F Air-Crane helicopter dropped a test article of the Dragon spacecraft from a height of 14,000 feet, roughly nine miles off the coast of Morro Bay, California.  In a carefully timed sequence of events, dual redundant drogue parachutes deployed first to stabilize and gently slow the craft before three main parachutes, 116 feet in diameter, further slowed the craft to a picture perfect landing.  From there, recovery ships successfully returned the Dragon and parachutes to shore.

While Dragon will initially be used to transport cargo, the spacecraft was designed to transport crew and the parachute system validated during the test is the same system that would be used on a crew-carrying Dragon. 

—
Alan Spicer
 
DBA Alan Spicer Telcom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom
Computer Services, Wired/Wireless Networking,
Cell/Sat/Landline Communications, General Consulting…
Marine, Business, Small Office and Home Office (SOHO)
 
* Cost Savings and Integration of Multiple Internet Technologies
on board Sail and Motor Yachts * Documentation, Operating
Instructions, and Support after the Sale *
 
* http://www.marinetelecom.net/
* http://www.internetforyachts.net/
* http://www.wifiyacht.net/
* 954-683-3426
 
Mobile Internet! Step up to the HSPA 3G Fast Internet!
 
Ericsson W35 released in the USA. This you’ve gotta SEE!!
Better looking presentation than W25 (you might not want to
hide this one in the Doghouse!) + High Speed Upload which
the W25 did not have.
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Ericsson_W35/ 
 

Livewire: Access Controller (Service Selector):
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Livewire_Service_Selector/

Posted in Satellite Voice and Internet | No Comments »

2. September 2010 by admin.

* Satellite needs a reboot? A Windows Update? Well sort of … And you think your computer has problems? Imagine if it was out in space? and you couldn’t just call Alan Spicer to fix it!

http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?number=1593012507

The European Space Agency has reported the GOCe satellite has been troubled with such a difficulty since July. GOCe is designed to map the gravitational field of Earth, but has been unable to send its collected data to receiving stations. A patch is currently being worked on to correct the telemetry problem and the hopes are for a radio link to be installed by next month. GOCe has already completed two-thirds of its mission, with many of its science objectives already completed. The satellite was launched on March 17th in 2009.

The ESA describes GOCE as “the Formula 1″ of satellites due to its avant-garde design — it is a five-metre (16.25-feet) craft that is arrow-like in appearance, rather than the usual boxy dimensions. The satellite possesses stabilizing fins as it orbits Earth at an altitude of just 250 kilometres (156 miles) where there is still a lingering atmosphere. This is not the first difficulty for GOCe, which actually had a primary computer chip failure in February of this year. This required a switch over to the backup computer.

http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/display_weekly.cgi

—
Alan Spicer
 
DBA Alan Spicer Telcom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom
Computer Services, Wired/Wireless Networking,
Cell/Sat/Landline Communications, General Consulting…
Marine, Business, Small Office and Home Office (SOHO)
 
* Cost Savings and Integration of Multiple Internet Technologies
on board Sail and Motor Yachts * Documentation, Operating
Instructions, and Support after the Sale *
 
* http://www.marinetelecom.net/
* http://www.internetforyachts.net/
* http://www.wifiyacht.net/
* 954-683-3426
 
Mobile Internet! Step up to the HSPA 3G Fast Internet!
 
Ericsson W35 released in the USA. This you’ve gotta SEE!!
Better looking presentation than W25 (you might not want to
hide this one in the Doghouse!) + High Speed Upload which
the W25 did not have.
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Ericsson_W35/ 
 

Livewire: Access Controller (Service Selector):
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Livewire_Service_Selector/

Posted in Satellite Voice and Internet | No Comments »

2. September 2010 by admin.

* More satellite steering problems … this time military …

 http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?number=1978149695

[SatNews] The maneuvering plan for AEHF-1 may well have to be altered, after the AEHF-1’s propulsion system seems to have thrown a kink into the spatial works.

Launched on August 14th, this satellite experienced a problem when its thrusters were fired in order to boost the bird into its assigned testing orbit. All of the subsystems and the satellite itself are stable and up next is a plan by the engineers to perhaps rework the boosting process for the AEHF-1, which is the first of four such spacecraft. Set to replace Milstar, this Lockheed Martin Space System’s satellite is going to handle most of the extremely crucial communications for the U.S. military.

http://www.satnews.com/cgi-bin/display_weekly.cgi

—
Alan Spicer
 
DBA Alan Spicer Telcom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom
Computer Services, Wired/Wireless Networking,
Cell/Sat/Landline Communications, General Consulting…
Marine, Business, Small Office and Home Office (SOHO)
 
* Cost Savings and Integration of Multiple Internet Technologies
on board Sail and Motor Yachts * Documentation, Operating
Instructions, and Support after the Sale *
 
* http://www.marinetelecom.net/
* http://www.internetforyachts.net/
* http://www.wifiyacht.net/
* 954-683-3426
 
Mobile Internet! Step up to the HSPA 3G Fast Internet!
 
Ericsson W35 released in the USA. This you’ve gotta SEE!!
Better looking presentation than W25 (you might not want to
hide this one in the Doghouse!) + High Speed Upload which
the W25 did not have.
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Ericsson_W35/ 
 

Livewire: Access Controller (Service Selector):
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Livewire_Service_Selector/

Posted in Satellite Voice and Internet | No Comments »

2. September 2010 by admin.

I think that Non-Tasked NOAA Flight (Earl8) - that while it was not tasked, seemed to fly patterns over Hurricane Earl, and now the eagle seems to have landed in Tampa, Florida.

Google Earth screen shot showing Non-Tasked NOAA Flight (Earl8) flew some patterns over Hurricane Earl…

… And later seemed to have landed in Tampa, Florida

—

“We copy you down, Eagle., You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

(that’s actually an excerp from Nasa Communications during the Apollo Lunar Landing. But then again we often joke about The Eagle has Landed in a lot of situations.)

 Interestingly… that’s an awful lot of dropsondes and data for a “non-tasked” flight. We thank you! NOAA Earl8 … “She sure was a good ship!”.

—
Alan Spicer
 
DBA Alan Spicer Telcom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom
Computer Services, Wired/Wireless Networking,
Cell/Sat/Landline Communications, General Consulting…
Marine, Business, Small Office and Home Office (SOHO)
 
* Cost Savings and Integration of Multiple Internet Technologies
on board Sail and Motor Yachts * Documentation, Operating
Instructions, and Support after the Sale *
 
* http://www.marinetelecom.net/
* http://www.internetforyachts.net/
* http://www.wifiyacht.net/
* 954-683-3426
 
Mobile Internet! Step up to the HSPA 3G Fast Internet!
 
Ericsson W35 released in the USA. This you’ve gotta SEE!!
Better looking presentation than W25 (you might not want to
hide this one in the Doghouse!) + High Speed Upload which
the W25 did not have.
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Ericsson_W35/ 
 

Livewire: Access Controller (Service Selector):
http://www.marinetelecom.net/Livewire_Service_Selector/

Posted in Main | No Comments »