Capt Mark Frank Email Received 16 March 2009

Received at my 'yahoo.com' account, you can clearly see that I must have been BCC'd or something. The grammar/punctuation doesn't appear to be all that great. So I decided to dig a little on the email file by first looking at the underlying source information, which revealed the following:

~~~~SOURCE~~~~

From - Mon Mar 16 17:13:51 2009
X-Account-Key: account2
X-UIDL: ABQmvs4AAKlKSb5IHw5/Emvq0EQ
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
X-Apparently-To: removed'at'yahoo.com via 206.190.38.20; Mon, 16 Mar
2009 05:37:51 -0700
X-YMailISG:
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X-Originating-IP: [208.47.184.3]
Authentication-Results: mta353.mail.re4.yahoo.com from=embarqmail.com;
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Received: from 208.47.184.3 (EHLO mailrelay.embarq.synacor.com) (208.47.184.3)
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DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; d=embarqmail.com; s=s012408; c=relaxed/simple;
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Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:37:46 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mark Frank <char7348'at'embarqmail.com>
To: captmarkfrank'at'gmail.com
Message-ID:
/1127301481.13432231237207066775.javamail.root'at'md24.embarq.synacor.com
Subject: Crew Member Needed Urgently
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_Part_629234_298161876.1237207066773"
X-Originating-IP: [41.219.211.135]
X-Mailer: Zimbra 5.0.11_GA_2696.RHEL4 (zclient/5.0.11_GA_2696.RHEL4)

------=_Part_629234_298161876.1237207066773
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello,

My name is Capt. Mark Frank, i work with Bridlington Yacht Club located in
United Kingdom. I came across your profile and decided to mail you regarding a
job offer. We are seeking for crew member. If you are interested send me a mail
along with your resume.

Hope to hear from you soonest.
Best Regards
Capt. Mark Frank
------=_Part_629234_298161876.1237207066773
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello,


My name is Capt. Mark Frank, i work with
Bridlington Yacht Club located in United Kingdom. I came across your profile and
decided to mail you regarding a job offer. We are seeking for crew member. If
you are interested send me a mail along with your resume.

Hope to hear
from you soonest.
Best Regards
Capt. Mark Frank
------=_Part_629234_298161876.1237207066773--

I'm curious. Is there really a “Capt Mark Frank” or a Bridlington Yacht Club in the UK? What is Embarqmail? What do these IP addresses correlate to and does it all add up? Not that I want to email this guy, but if it was genuine I would want to help him out and respond. But I am guessing this email is bogus. Let's check it out....

Tools: Google (of course), traceroute, & whois.
1. First I did I search based on Yacht clubs in Bridlington: Yacht Clubs do come up in the search, but nothing directly correlating with Bridlington.
2. Search of captmarkfrank'at'gmail.com comes up with nothing concrete.
3. Search of char7348'at'embarqmail.com brings up a spreadsheet of contact information for a club of some-sort located in the state of Ohio at this link:
www.nationalitpa.com/documents/appendc.doc.xls
4. A search of Embarqmail.com brings up a broadband Internet Service Provider in Ohio as well. Still missing a solid connection to the UK here and things are not adding up.
5. I searched the IP addresses highlighted in blue above and the most revealing was 41.219.211.135, results:

whois 41.219.211.135
% This is the AfriNIC Whois server.
% Note: this output has been filtered.
% Information related to '41.219.211.0 – 41.219.211.255'
inetnum: 41.219.211.0 – 41.219.211.255
netname: ORG-SA57-AFRINIC-20050513
descr: Assigned to Lagos dial-pool customers
country: NG
admin-c: NS4-AFRINIC
tech-c: CM9-AFRINIC
status: Assigned PA
mnt-by: STARCOMMS-MNT
mnt-lower: STARCOMMS-MNT
source: AFRINIC # Filtered
parent: 41.219.192.0 – 41.219.255.255
person: NAVNEET SINGH
address: Plot 1261, Bishop Kale Close, off Saka Tinubu
address: Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria
phone: +234-1-804-9370
fax-no: +234-1-811-0301
e-mail: navneets'at'starcomms.com
nic-hdl: NS4-AFRINIC
source: AFRINIC # Filtered
person: Catalin Miclaus
address: Plot 1261C, Bishop Kale Close, off Saka Tinubu
phone: +234-7028000733
fax-no: +234-1-8110301
e-mail: catalin'at'starcomms.com
nic-hdl: CM9-AFRINIC
source: AFRINIC # Filtered

6. So basically we've established that the email is bogus. I figure the goal here is to get more personal information via a resume. It would appear that someone's email address is being spoofed or even hacked.
7. Where to go from here? Respond from a bogus email with a bogus resume and see how long I could keep this going? Write a blog to inform others? Or just hit delete? Anyone else have any more info?

Linux Saved My Laptop

So you've read my previous post about my P.O.S. laptop. I recently tried to resurrect it and ended up trying out SuSe 11.1. I'm all thumbs with this distro, but I have been impressed with the way it has handled this challenging hardware environment. I managed to order the recovery discs for my laptop and it wouldn't even reload Vista. I did get SuSe 11.1 to install on the computer and it managed to work with my difficult WiFi card. I still favor Ubuntu, but that distro has had problems with my laptop hardware and I don't blame it. Even when I install Ubuntu I have to work some magic to get that notorious Atheros WiFi card to work. With SuSe 11.1, it seemed to work with it right out of the box. I still have to figure out how to navigate this flavor of Linux. I won't spend too much time... since Ubuntu still reigns... but Linux just kicks ass!!!

Compaq Presario V6000 (junk)

So I bought this laptop on sale at BestBox about 9 months ago. I think that I have lost 9 months of my life working with this thing. At first I blamed the installed OS (Vista) for it not booting properly, rebooting or not booting at all. I have since installed several iterations of my favorite OS (Linux) and now I am facing similar problems. I have replaced the RAM, hardrive and operating system. I am now faced with erratic booting and CRC errors which completely halt the system. I have looked for BIOS updates which are provided by HP-Compaq for systems that have Microsoft Operating Systems on them. So my guess is that I just have bad hardware, which for a laptop the options of replacing parts become quite limited. I have had problems getting the built in WiFi (Atheros) card to work with my favorite OS. So the bottom line to this rant is to NOT purchase this type of laptop. The hardware seemed so promising when I bought it. Dual core, NVIDIA, 2GB of RAM.. would be more mobile computing power than I needed. My old IBM Celeron lasted for three years solid.. it was slow, but dependable. This one is fast but fails.

Bukowski Quotes

Charles Bukowski is an inspiration to all of us:

"(Drinking) gets me out of the normal person that I am. Drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now."

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I finally purchased a new laptop in March. My 2005 IBM laptop was in dire need of replacement. When I purchased the IBM laptop it was bottom-of-the-line at just over $900.00 Intel Celeron D processor at 2.2Ghz, and mayb 256Mb RAM, which I had upgraded to 1Gb. The Intel Celeron D processor turned out to be a disappointment towards the end of 2007. It choked all the time and couldn't handle most of the applications coming out. So I purchased a Compaq Presario V6000 on sale at the local big box company. AMD Dual core, 1Gb of RAM, Nvidia graphics card. Should be Linux friendly. I probably should have brought a live distro to test it out. When I went to install/run Linux I ran into 'problems' with the WiFi card. The card is an Atheros AR5007. Didn't work right out of the box with Linux. So I immediately had to start looking for community support. I haven't had the time to fully research and figure out a solution to the problem. Looks like I will have to use the NDIS wrapper approach, which I haven't used before. In the meantime I have used Innotek's (Sun's) VirtualBox to run Linux without too much fuss.

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Independent Hip Hop Festival: Paid Dues. Saturday, March 22, 2008 at The NOS Events Center San Bernardino, CA.

General Admission: $40.00

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