Appliance Repair Wisdom for the Ages

Thursday, March 04, 2004

One gauge of a website's success is when hacks and feebs start spoofing your site. "Spoofing" is when some semi-literate, pimply-faced, pencil-necked geeks send out spam fraudulently representing themselves as an established website with which they have no relationship whatsoever. Happens all the time to the big boys like Pay Pal and Yahoo. Well, I guess Fixitnow.com has finally made the Big Time...or at least big enough to get on some punk's radar screen. I received this email today:

If you get this same email, or something similar, purporting to be from Fixitnow.com and asking you to open the attached ZIP file, please report it to your email provider or ISP and then delete it. Do not open the ZIP file--it's a worm. It is not from Fixitnow.com, it's from scum-sucking losers in Malaysia or some other third-world pisshole.

More fun facts to know and tell. If you get an email from Fixitnow.com, it'll be from me, not "The Management." How lame is that? I mean, does anyone in Ameedica really sign their emails, "The Management." Second, there ain't no "Management" at Fixitnow.com--there's just me, Samurai Appliance Repair Man, and Mrs. Samurai. Period. Further, I would never have any reason to send along an attachment called "info.zip." Finally, Fixitnow.com is a do-it-yourself appliance repair website. My expertise and interest is in helping you fix your major home appliances--I couldn't care less about viruses in your email and I sure as hell wouldn't waste my time sending you email about it.

Y'know, you'd think the internet has been around long enough that people would know better than to just dutifully open attachments "'cuz the email said to." But, I guess there are enough ignoramuses out there to keep the virus breeders and worm farmers in bidness. Now read and learn the Samurai's Cardinal Rule for Email Safety: never open an attachment from anyone, even people you know, unless: 1) you've asked for the file and are expecting it and 2) you scan it with an up-to-date virus scanner before opening it. Good web-based email providers, like Yahoo Mail (my personal favorite), have built-in virus scanning and automatically scan all incoming email and attachments prior to downloading. The internet is a big, mean, dirty neighborhood--lock n' load before you surf.

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