www.WhosWhere.com selling access to my employer's passwd file

[Gus]

On Sat, 27 Apr 1996, Sentiono Leowinata wrote:

> I wonder how they can get the e-mail address? Our finger daemon are 
> blocked. Many un-broadcast e-mail addresses (the account never send any 
> e-mails to anyone) are in the database. How?

It's a sad fact that many unscrupulous(sp?) writers of WWW pages use 
non-visilble "on load" HTML to record what the web browser thinks the 
email address of the person browsing the page, and, I presume sell this 
info to the junk email producers.

Part of the WhoWhere archives could have come from such sources. (personally 
my address in netscape is stop.stealing at addresses.you.CENSORED)

If one really set ones mind to it, I guess that grepping through mailing 
list archives for addresses, and using a webcrawler to search for MAILTO=
would lead to many thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of addresses.

On the plus side, the search engine will not let "*","\*","?*" and so be 
used, and there are no real matches for "root", apart from stuff like 
"Bob Root" etc.

--
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