Former reputable journalist Bud Buck is now set up as a news aggregator, re-writing and putting his personal spin on stories that were initiated elsewhere. It’s a form of imaginary journalism, somewhat like blogging, but Bud pretends he’s more legitimate by earnestly quoting the people whose voices he hears inside his head.
I’ve been deleting most of his e-mails of late, but this one was too interesting to pass up:
Massive E-mail Address Spill Threatens to Spoil Internet for Everyone
by Bud BuckThe cyber-theft of a record number of names and e-mail addresses has caused customers of some of America’s largest and most respected companies to treat certain e-mails with suspicion and even disdain. And it may have the long-term effect of changing the supportive, trusting atmosphere of Americans’ online experience.
While no account, social security or other vital numbers were compromised, online security experts warn that this incident could lead to an increase in the number of fake targeted e-mails that attempt to draw important personal information out of gullible customers. Privacy consultants recommend that people ignore any such request.
But if that attitude takes hold, it could lead to a sudden change in behavior by those who thoughtlessly and regularly share too much information.
“That’s it,” said Susan Owlish, a schoolteacher. “I loved the internet because it offered what felt like a warm embrace from companies that I previously thought of as aloof and uncaring. These criminals are going to ruin a beautiful relationship that was developing between me and Vast Bank, which holds all my checking, savings and retirement money in accounts that now total something more than 200 thousand dollars!”
“I just normally assume any e-mail that asks for my checking account number comes from somebody who really needs it,” said Derek Bloomer, a freelance writer. “I mean, that’s a lot of seemingly random digits to deal with. My number, 9456-000159, is so boring I have to look it up every time I need it. So what’s the harm in sharing it? If I can’t remember what the number is, won’t they forget it too?”
Bloomer admitted that he would be more suspicious of such e-mails in the future, but he also questioned the veracity of the entire address-theft story.
“Why aren’t they telling us exactly how many names were stolen?” he asked. “I want to know if I just lost my first and last names, or my three middle names as well – Arthur Westly Cornrow. And do they know about my inheritance?”
Derek Arthur Westly Cornrow Bloomer also wondered out loud if the whole story might be just another kind of a scam. And there are signs that this sort of distrust may be spreading among those who are habitually free with their own details and with the private information of others.
“I used to believe everything I saw on my computer screen,” said bus driver Lorna Bunion. “After all, it was in print, and I grew up with great respect for the printed word thanks to my parents, Robert and Sophie Bunion, who are rare book collectors living at 8823 Johnson Circle in a small house without deadbolt locks. I was also raised with a great respect for gold and other precious metals, but I probably shouldn’t tell you why.”
And so, the chill descends.
This is Bud Buck!
How do you decide what to delete, and what to read?
Trail Baboon 
Rise and Shine Baboons:
This is the on-line question of our time, isn’t it? I delete or ignore a lot of stuff. I’ve also set up a web-based account for commercial products/newsletters I sign up for but don’t want to bother with more than weekly. That has made me a much happier e-mailer. The personal e-mail I generally enjoy — much better than the telephone which wears me out at work.
It has surprised me greatly that I even participate in this blog–most things on-line I find tedious and not interesting. I might visit facebook twice a month because I find that more tedious and un-interesting than almost anything else. So I have my little on-line route–New York Times, Trail Baboon, Politico, Polymer Clay Daily. I also use it for work a lot to research. At night I usually don’t want to be looking at the computer, so I delete the entire experience for a walk outside, or this week PBS Civil War series.
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Wow! You visit the trail before Polymer Clay Daily. We are truly honoured.
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Now I’m going to have to visit Polymer Clay Daily to see what kind of fun that is!
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I don’t always go in the same order. Sometimes I mix it up for my daily thrill!
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Oh, when you cut loose, you really cut loose!
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You’re not a Virgo, are you? (rhetorical font here)
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Several things: I am a Leo on the Virgo cusp.
Since when was Bud Buck ever reputable.
I do really cut loose when I do my little on-line tour out of order.
I’m cuttin’ loose again this weekend with a High School Girls slumber party in Iowa.
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Morning all. Way to early to have to worry about spamming and internet identity theft.
Since I have a curious (some would say suspicious) mind, I have been wary for a long time about what we see on the internet. I apply the same rule to the internet that I do to the TV (I always tell the teenager, if you see it on TV, it’s a lie). So I am an avid snopes.com reader and have a couple of other urban myth sites bookmarked as well.
And there is the best reason to be wary… an adage we all learned early on, I’m sure… if it’s too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true.
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I use my email as a filing system. If I need to look up a conversation from a year ago I can do it by entering the name in the search. I don’t delete and I don’ t file. They are just there. If it is a group on offering fir the day I may delete it but I am interested in being able to go back and see what groipon is offering because of another project I am working on I have 50,000 e,ails in the mailbox I can pull up as needed. My own little google research pod of messages from the last year or two. Organization is for the organized. I can search and have then little card readers that hide behind my keyboard look up info as I need it. Life is good. Great twins game last night. Clyde is out there somewhere smiling at the Yankees going down
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Clyde checked in late last night on yesterday’s blog.
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“Organization is for the organized” – that’s my new motto/mantra/excuse.
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I only read messages from people I know. I never read anything from banks. At work, the State IT department is constantly alerting us to potential fraudulent messages. Since we have relatively few state employees, it is fairly easy to know if the name on a message is legit, since we tend to know one another, if only by name.
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Morning–
‘Staff Development Day’ here today… so we’re all off being developed.
Please leave a message at the tone, your bank ID and routing number, the last four digits of your social security number and one of our developers will email you back as soon as they are able.
Emails are answered in the order we feel like.
Your email isn’t important to us.
Beep!
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Beep! we have a big prize waiting for you, just call 404 1Beep!
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Hey, you are a winner!
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Good morning to all:
I do some deleting, but I haven’t deleted the delete file for a long time. Thus, those deleted messages aren’t really gone. I’m like tim and have a very large number messages in my in box.
I have a program that sends unwanted messages to a spam file, but it is no help because it sends some messages there that aren’t spam. I do have a virus protection program which I hope protects me because I am definitely not good at avoiding potential problems myself.
Now I have probably said too much and some clever person, I mean cleaver person, will probably soon be stealing all the vital information from my computer.
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I have a free email account, so I get a LOT of advertisements–about half my messages per day. So, I delete everything that isn’t from a friend, one of my Yahoo!Groups, or an organization I know I signed up for, like Vegan Outreach or Theatre Unbound. Typically I also delete things that don’t have a subject line, or a nonsensical subject; most of the time those are spam. I actually have to check on the stuff that’s in my spam folder, because the bot is pretty bad at discerning legit mass emails from the nasty stuff (at least it’s finally learned about the Viagra ads). Unlike some folks, I enjoy the online world, and it’s really frustrating that the system here at work blocks just about everything interesting…except Trail Baboon, fortunately!
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I have not one, but two, spam filters that weed out a lot of the chaff before it gets to my inbox (I can, and do, review the email caught in the spam filters periodically to make sure I haven’t missed something I need…it’s about 95% effective…more work than it’s worth sometimes). Once email hits my inbox, I have a series of “smart folders” that divide up some of the incoming mail by sender or subject matter (“whobody” mail and “anybody” mail, dividing “anybody” mail by sender type). When I was a kid I had a picture book called “Whobody There.” Although most of the storyline has faded in my memory, the difference made between “whobody” mail (from people you know and like) and “anybody” mail (junk mail, bulk mail) has stuck; “whobody” mail gets read and filtered differently, “anybody” mail largely gets ignored (unless it’s a good sale at Lands’ End and Daughter needs new pants).
When all of that is done, I still have a bunch I ignore until my “unread” email number gets uncomfortably high. It all gives me the illusion that I am managing my email, but it is all smoke and mirrors. Every now and again I try to weed through the old emails, but, like tim, I tend to be a bit of an email pack rat.
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love the “whobody and anybody” categories
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Should these also go into the B. Dict?
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yep
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hi there – and a gracious good morning to You All
at any given time, my spam folder contains all kinds of great info – on how to enlarge my Johnson, how to claim the millions of dollars that some long lost relative left for me in Zaire or the Ivory Coast. i delete those, and especially the ones that begin “dearest in the Lord” or something like that.
i also delete forwarded jokes – even from friends – if they do not contain a personal message. i’ll open anything that has goats in the subject line 🙂
there used to be a “purge” button on an email account i had – that was really fun. now “empty” is the strongest language used to get rid of spam.
OT – Steve will work on his blog today sometime, in between just being out in the glorious day. have a good one.
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Great photos! What will you name the little buckling?
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well, now you have gone and done it and let the spamiverse in on the way to your attention: Please contact me about the GOATS that await your claim in Nigeria!
Such good news about your new little guy. We have been trying to figure out what our fair Twixie would think about sharing our tiny back yard with a goat. The word “challenging” came up.
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Dale, I forgot to comment earlier on your elegant combo of issues here– the radiated water leak and the email issue! Nice job.
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Mine is easy. We have new email accounts from after I retired, and emails from friends are easily identified. Also, I do not do much communication by email. We communicate more via the private part of facebook.
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Just this week I got a message from a friend that was suspicious because it didn’t have her kind of friendly subject line. My internet safety software threw a big spooky red screen up and told me not to open it. It was malware. Some nasty worm had gotten in her email address box and was trying to replicate itself. Thank you, Trend Micro, for saving me again.
I tend toward e-mail pack rattery. I have countless personal notes from friends that I can’t throw away, even though things would have to be mighty slow around here for me to spend an afternoon reading e-mail several years old.
What feels just awful is deleting someone from my personal address books. When someone I care about dies, I eventually zap them out of my address book. But, damn, it feels like I am killing them a second time. Or when an old friendship goes stale–I really like that person but it has been five years since we spoke–I try to delete them just to make the address book more compact and relevant. But that feels bad. And it hurts when I go through my address book and find contact information for a person I don’t recognize. That generally means I met someone and had a great conversation with him or her, only neither of us followed up. And now I know how to contact them but don’t have a clue about who they are or what to say.
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“e-mail pack rattery”
another new entry for the Baboon Dictionary.
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Or a good name for our neighborhood bar.
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When we first started email back in (oh dear) the late nineties? we were on AOL, which automatically deleted old stuff after a week if you didn’t do something special, I don’t remember what now. I wish my email was set up like that now. I delete a lot, and have been trying to unsubscribe where I get repeated mass emails. Like BiB, I’ve finally stopped forwarding the cute and funny stuff, beautiful photo collections, etc., with rare exceptions.
I organize the ones I keep into a bunch of local folders (Trail Baboon is one so I have email addresses if needed), but by now they REALLY ought to go through and purge from those. Like tim, I like knowing what I rec’d or sent in certain situations… but I hope I don’t have 50,000 emails.
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Being in the pack-rat camp, I have saved lots of e-mails, including my favorite spam message:
Hello,
We acknowledge you for being our customer. Thus, we put wise you of
information and renovates between whiles.
On the strength of jottings we have, it is obvious that you may demand
an extra copy.
We make a thousand and one excuses for troubling you. Our products at low
cost are ready-for-service and our highly qualified staff will give support
to you.
It is great opportunity to save money and time.
Please browse the URL listed below to see our special offer:
[link omitted]
Yours Respectfully,
Laurentia Maeda
Support Centre
I was impressed that Ms. Maeda didn’t stop at a thousand excuses; she had the dedication and perseverance to come up with a thousand and one. Now that’s elegant.
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the sincerity of it all gets me right here.
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This is verymuch like those instructions for that cabinet we were putting together… just shorter. 🙂
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I keep my email contacts to a minimum. Makes it easier to spot spamers and spoofers.
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This interchange has made emptying my JunkMail a lot more interesting today than it normally is!
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I’m a heavy user of the delete key. I really like that key. It solves lots of problems with one quick tap.
I have three e-mail accounts. The first is a state e-mail account for work only. That account is restricted severely as far as size. This restriction forces all state employees to sit there and decide what to do with each of the hundreds of e-mails (with attached .pdf files) they receive. E-mails have replaced the traditional memo at work. It’s wise to file all of these communiques for reasons given by tim and BiR, but very time-consuming. Do you ever wonder why state employees never seem to get anything done?
I have two personal e-mail addresses. One I use for accounts and purchasing. I purge things out of that one every few months. The other one is only for friends, family, fun and festivals. I let that one pile up endlessly.
I’m with Jacque as far as limiting time in front of the computer. I spend almost my entire day at work in front of a computer and I find it a little tiring. I like to use the computer to search topics that interest me and I love this blog. I find Facebook to be overbearingly social. I recently heard about a new diagnosis called “Facebook depression.” I can relate to that one.
I’m usually not able to post until later in the day. I’ve noticed that I’m often last and have come to fear this – Was it something I said???? So, somebody, please….
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oops, turn off the italics!
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Now you shall not be the last to post today…I often don’t have much to say by the end of the day – words get used up at work (and with Daughter). It’s not you KiW. Honest. 🙂
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I think it is a “spurious correlation” and has nothing to do with you at all. I agree with you about the waste of time that memos cause for this state employee.
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When Dale was on the air, I usually only commented during the time he was broadcasting and not latter in the day. Dale still puts the new entry up fairly early in the day and I still tend to do most of my commenting then. I know that others are commenting all day long and even in the evening and I do check see what they have to say.
I think most of us are like Anna and don’t have as much to say by the end of the day. However, I bet there are a number of other ones, like me, who do check to see what late commenters are saying and are interested in reading the those comments as well as the ones earlier in the day. I’ve also noticed that there are a number of people who do comment late in the day from time to time.
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I will add that even if I don’t add anything to the commentary, I do check in to read the late-day and evening comments. Just in case tim or Clyde (or someone else) throws out a gem.
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Like Anna – I often check at night, but I am a morning person and by the time I get home from work, my energy levels are well-drained!
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Topaz.
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I’ll see your topaz and raise you a carnelian.
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Amethyst!
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i love getting to come to hear what the gang said during the day. i tend to be in the morning and late at night. not too much checking in during the day. i enjoy watching to see how the flow goes and the great comments. going back to see what clyde had to say last night. i must have checked out too early yesterday. see you all in a couple of hours.
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