The Substantially Similar Weblog

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog entry detailing some of the problems I’ve had with U-Haul. Just a few minutes ago, I received two additional comments, one from “jen”:

i think you people need to relax and realize that we are all human and so mistakes can be easily made also we all know computers are all ways having problems so i think you people need to stop whining and move on with your life

and one from “ange”

cry me a fuckin river

Interestingly, these are actually both the same poster—here are the entries from my server logs:

 205.241.11.6 - - [19/Jan/2005:16:06:44 -0500] "POST /weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html HTTP/1.1" 200 33399 "http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0)" 205.241.11.6 - - [19/Jan/2005:16:07:52 -0500] "POST /weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html HTTP/1.1" 200 33563 "http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0)" 

The person got to my site by doing a Yahoo search for “u-haul” (hey, I come up #7):

 205.241.11.6 - - [19/Jan/2005:15:58:02 -0500] "GET /weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html HTTP/1.1" 200 12184 "http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=u-haul&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0)" 

Most interesting, however is the identity of the IP address block—here’s the result of ‘whois 205.241.11.6’:

 Sprint SPRINT-BLKF (NET-205-240-0-0-1) 205.240.0.0 - 205.247.255.255 UHAUL, Inc. SPRINTLINK (NET-205-241-11-0-1) 205.241.11.0 - 205.241.11.255 

So apparently a U-Haul employee pretended to be two anonymous/pseudonymous posters to say, “Give U-Haul a break, they’re not so bad.”

I recently received this message from “Captain DeStefano” at my Northeastern University email address. He has this to say:

My name is Captain DeStefano. I am the Marine Corps Officer Selection Officer here in Boston. The reason that I’m mailing you is because I want you to be aware of an awesome summer training program called the Platoon Leader’s Course (PLC).

Interestingly, this is an opt-out spam, and apparently I’ll continue to receive them unless I “click here”:

This email was sent to you to assess your interest in U.S. Marine Corps Aviation. If you prefer not to receive future emails, click http://usmc.marines.com/unsubscribe or copy and paste this URL into your browser. Please review our privacy policy at http://www.marines.com/privacy_policy/default.asp

I wonder if the Marines actually harvested all of the @neu.edu email addresses on the web or from some third party source; or if Northeastern willingly turned them over, for fear of reprisal under the Solomon Amendment, which has been used to threaten educational institutions that receive federal money if they refuse to let military recruiters on campus.

In either case, it strikes me as inappropriate and vaguely desperate. The email is clearly directed toward current undergraduates—I wonder if they actually emailed all graduate students as well as law school alumni with active email addresses such as myself?

(I can just see the slashdot headline now: U.S. Military Resorts To Spam For New Recruits).