Recently one of the bridges in my area was replaced by a new one. The new Port
Mann Bridge is, at the moment, apparently the widest in the world, and will
relieve congestion on the existing bridge, which has been a huge bottleneck for
years. (Why do I keep flashing on an old saying about "traffic expands to fill
anything made available for it ..."?)
In order to pay for it, our currently right-wing) provincial government has
formed
a "public/private partnership" with a shell corporation which gets to "lease"
the
bridge for about fifity years and put tolls on it.
I'm not sure I'll have a lot of use for the Port Mann Bridge when it gets
tolled
(except to get out to the Olive Garden, until they build one closer in). It's
been
such a bottleneck for so long that I've found all kinds of ways to avoid it.
(There
is another tolled bridge in the area, and I've only traveled over it once, in
the first
"free" week, just to find out where it was and went.) But I figured I'd get
the decal
anyway, especially since it gets you a discount, and some extra bucks
(equivalent
to about 20 free trips) to start off.
You'll have heard about the debacle in regard to the phone registration, where
some of the clerks were in business for themselves, and stole credit card
numbers.
So I figured I'd register via the Website. The process wasn't too arduous,
although
I found it odd that American Express, which I use for most of my pre-authorized
charges, wasn't acceptable. (I also found out that my password algorithm,
while it
is long, complex, and uses mixed case and non-alphabetic characters, doesn't
generate a number in all cases. Apparently you have to have a number.)
I didn't realize that I didn't get a confirmation email until this morning,
when I
checked the spam filters. There it was.
And, I have to agree. If *I* was a spam filter, I'd have said it was spam,
too. It's a
mess. Looking at the body, I can't make out anything it is trying to do (other
than create all kinds of buttons). The spam report says:
0.00 NO_REAL_NAME From: does not include a real name
0.00 BSF_SC0_MISMATCH_TO Envelope rcpt doesn't match header
0.00 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME
parts
0.00 URI_TRUNCATED BODY: Message contained a URI which was
truncated
0.00 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
Treo itself seems to use a system called Barracuda, and this system also scores
the
message as spam. (It also seems to have an AV scanner, which appears to be
turned off. Apparently Treo is not concerned about sending viruses out to
infect
other people.)
So, the Treo people don't seem to be very concerned about information security.
Which gets me thinking:
Is the bridge safe?
====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom
of thought which they seldom use. - Soren Kierkegaard
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm http://www.infosecbc.org/links
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
http://twitter.com/rslade
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
