Scam Or Not?

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
4) Just because it is from a big, well known company does NOT prevent it from being a scam!

Ditto on this. here is a scam I could have fallen for if the scammer had not been so greedy.
It was (well claimed to be) from my ISP (sympatico.ca) claiming my account was not up todate. The kind of message you get when say your Visa expires and they don't have the new expiry date.
So I click the link and get to a Sympatico page (a fake one but very well done). The only thing that triggered the warning flags were that the moron asked for some very personal info the the ISP would never want (ie PIN number, drivers license etc) Had he just asked for the Visa I may have fallen for it.

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by DavidG:
It's hard not to be paranoid when MS sends you the F#$&*#^ thing 100 times!! I also got it multiple times. Why the heck would they do that??

They send it to everyone on their lists once. However, apparently, it's possible to get on their lists more than once. With the number of addresses they have, and the fact that removing duplicates is an O(n^2) operation, I can understand why they do.

[Thermodyne]

Read this before patching...

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11124

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Jack Simth:

quote:

---

Originally posted by DavidG:
It's hard not to be paranoid when MS sends you the F#$&*#^ thing 100 times!! I also got it multiple times. Why the heck would they do that??

They send it to everyone on their lists once. However, apparently, it's possible to get on their lists more than once. With the number of addresses they have, and the fact that removing duplicates is an O(n^2) operation, I can understand why they do.

---

The biggest software company in the world that has written some of the most complex programs can't remove duplicate addresses from a list??? What's wrong with this picture.

[Krsqk]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
I always strip MSN and MSMessenger off all my systems at the earliest opportunity. Microsoft tries very hard to stop you doing this (for example, on XP messenger has no uninstall function) but if you're determined there's always a way...

Yeah, like searching the registry for every occurance of "Messenger" I finally got those dratted Messenger popups to stop.

[Fyron]

Umm... ever opened "msconfig" from the run prompt? Or perhaps the Services Manager from the Admin Tools? msconfig can control what programs start up with Windows. The Services Manager can control when Windows services (such as Messenger) start. No registry editing needed (at least, not manually ).

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by DavidG:
The biggest software company in the world that has written some of the most complex programs can't remove duplicate addresses from a list??? What's wrong with this picture.

They could, it's just a matter of the computer time required. The standard algorythm for removeing duplicates goes something like:

code:

---

for(i=0; i<max; i++)

{

for(j=i-1; j>=0; j--)

{

if(entry(i) == entry(j))

{ 

clear(i)

}

}

}

---

If they have 10^9 entries, the statement

code:

---

if(entry(i) == entry(j))

---

gets run, at most (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... + ((10^9)-1) +(10^9)) times - roughly (10^9)^2, or about 10^18 times. As it is almost impossible to hold 10^9 e-mail addresses in live memory at once (if you allow, say, 100 bytes per entry, that works out to 10^11 bytes - about one hundred gigabytes - of RAM for a single project; not likely), disk access times need to be used for dealing with the entries. If you then assign a disk acess time of, say, 10^-6 seconds per entry, and multiply that by the number of entries accessed (roughly 10^18 accesses) you get an estimate on the amount of time the algorythm will take: 10^12 seconds. That's roughly 16,666,666,666 minutes, 277,777,777 hours, 11,574,074 days, or 31,688 years. Throw 10,000 machines at the task, and it still takes a little over three years (actually, more than that, due to communication time between them). It isn't that they couldn't, it's just that it would cost more resources to eliminate the duplicates than doing so would save them.

Granted, there are several ways to shave time off of the above analysis, but that just gives a general idea of what it would take.

[Fyron]

You do not have to load every single address into active memory at once. In fact, with that loop, each address is deleted from active memory (essentially) after it is checked against the one you are comparing it to.

[ August 22, 2003, 01:00: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
You do not have to load every single address into active memory at once. In fact, with that loop, each address is deleted from active memory (essentially) after it is checked against the one you are comparing it to.

Apparently you missed the numerous disclaimers:

... goes something like:

rather than "is"; my note at the bottom

Granted, there are several ways to shave time off of the above analysis, but that just gives a general idea of what it would take.

and the

at most

to indicate it was a worst-case (for that algorythm, worst-case = no duplicates) analysis.

In the worst case, the Last entry checked must be checked against every other entry, and so all must be available (in memory, or accessed from the disk). The point was to give a general idea of what was required, not the exact algorythm needed. Things would be further complicated by the likelyhood that it isn't a matter of a single database of addresses being worked with. There are a zillion (exaggeration) assumptions in my analysis, and several valid shortcuts that could be built into the algorythm. It's an estimate to support what I said that DavidG had doubts about, not an exact analysis for that particular number set.

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Jack Simth:

quote:

---

Originally posted by DavidG:
The biggest software company in the world that has written some of the most complex programs can't remove duplicate addresses from a list??? What's wrong with this picture.

They could, it's just a matter of the computer time required. The standard algorythm for removeing duplicates goes something like:

---

Well I'm not going to dispute your math (frankly I didn't take the time to really understand it ) But I have MSN Messanger at work. I signed up for the service and provided my e-mail adress to MS exactly ONE time. And yet I got that message 10 times. Face it MS got something screwed up. Other corps with large databases seem to get things OK. (like Symantec)