Mon, 12 Jul 2004
Anatomy of a 419 Scam
The Register has a great story on the Anatomy of a 419 Scam. The 419 scam is most commonly known as the Nigerian Email scam, which most people have run across in their INBOX at one time or another. The initial contact email usually tells the receiver that they may be in line to inherit X million dollars, as someone has died and left no heirs. The catch, of course, is that you'll need to send them X thousand dollars to establish a bank account into which these funds will (never) be deposited.
This article illustrates a variation on this theme, and comes complete with the emails sent to the mark, as well as his responses. The result is, of course, not good. Furthermore, the article goes on to illustrate why these scams are so popular - because they work, and law enforcement doesn't seem to want to do much about them.
posted at: 10:30 | path: /computers | permanent link to this entry
Python Development with Eclipse
As reported here earlier, Eclipse 3.0 was recently released to the computing public. While Eclipse is viewed primarilly as an integrated development environment for the Java programming language, it is actually far more flexible. The Eclipse Foundation has positioned Eclipse as a general purpose IDE, where plugins for each supported language are needed to cater to the language's specific needs. Therefore, the Java IDE is a separate package from Eclipse, etc.
To develop in Python with Eclipse, read through this article, from the folks at IBM developerworks. It discusses how to download and install the Python IDE plugin, and then goes over some of its features. Very cool!
posted at: 10:14 | path: /computers/programming/python | permanent link to this entry