Officials are concerned about the welfare of at least 200 Alberta Separatists
Hundreds of social media accounts promoting the idea of Alberta separating from Canada have gone idle over the past few days, and officials are expressing concern.
“We have launched a full investigation,” said Danielle Quisling, allegedly a member of the government. “The preliminary indication is that they might have been at a conference where there was some kind of fire and explosion. We’ll seeking additional information but so far have been unable to confirm anything with the management of ‘Hotel Yandex’.”
This article will be updated as new details emerge.
Although I’d love to see it gain wide acceptance, this is a mostly frivolous suggestion for a new HTTP error response code:
455 You are an Ass. Go away.
The code is derived from “l33t speak” where characters are mapped into numbers. 455 should be easy enough to figure out.
Use case: websites are inundated with a wide range of unwanted traffic, including aggressive bots, hackers (especially the script kiddies), brute force password attacks, credential harvesting, and a range of denial of service attacks. Many tools have been developed to combat these attacks, with the normal response to return a 4xx code (often 403 Forbidden) while tossing the request IP into a firewall.
The problem with the existing official codes is that there’s no way for the server to convey a sense of irritation. A 403 could be something more normal, like attempting to access a protected resource without logging in. In this scenario, insulting a regular user would be inappropriate, but we really want to tell the bored idiot trying to read your .env file to go get a life. Hence the need for a 455.
Intro: I first posted this as it was happening and figured once all the accounts had been suspended, that would be the end of it. But no. The idiot(s) behind this scam keep coming back for more. So it starts as near real time, but now it’s daily updates until these losers realize they lost.
I follow a friend from back in my Joomla days, Jen Kramer. So far I’ve had two fake Jen Kramer accounts follow me from mastodon.social. So I thought I’d have a little fun with the second one (I figure I’d make use of the lag time after reporting the account.) So here’s the “transcript” (images have alt text).
Sure, like Jen would randomly ask me this question after 15 years or so.
Good old Department of Health and Human Services program “going on yet.” I guess that Canadian flag in my name wasn’t enough of a clue, so we have a real winner here: we don’t have a DHHS.
Nothing like helping the “disables.”
Ooh cash. I like cash.
I am really trying to give this idiot a clue here.
Really. You would think this would do it. But the key here is the link to the second account, which appears to be someone who hasn’t posted since 2024. Probably a compromised by a brute force password attack. FFS people, pick hard to guess passwords!!!
I’m assuming this idiot only gets paid when I message the second level scammer…
Yes, I only need four trillion dollars. This idiot didn’t clue in even then.
Big figures like four trillion? LOL
There it is “clearance fees.” Well I guess I can cough up a few thousand for a trillion bucks from a foreign agency…
At this point I have stopped responding so this turkey is trying hard to keep me on the hook, even though he’s already given away the scam. But then it gets better:
There’s probably going to be more of this, but I want to get this posted.
Oh. And in the middle of this I pinged the second hacked account:
But for some utterly inexplicable reason I haven’t gotten a response!
Addendum: I just got tired of this. 😉
Addendum 2: Just after posting this, I reported the second account. Some 15 minutes later, both accounts have been suspended, and this is why I love the fediverse. Real human moderation, and timely!
Addendum 3: Another ten minutes later, I get followed by a brand new fake Jen account. What does the account do? Well, it boosts real Jen’s most recent posts to make it look like it’s real, and the first one is her mentioning this post. So we can conclude that it’s a bot that’s creating these accounts.
Addendum 4: Two days and several fake Jen Kramers later, this idiot still thinks he has a mark…
Incredible!
Addendum 5: But wait, there’s more! LOL Another day and these idiots are still trying to pick up the scam.
The only remaining question is “Will there be a Fake Jen number nine?” Stay tuned…
Addendum 6: Fake number 9 showed up on September 6 (LOL) eleven days after first being abused, this idiot is still at it.
I didn’t have a chance to hurl more abuse though. I didn’t see the message for two hours, and by that time the moderation folks at mastodon.social had suspended the account. Gotta love moderation on the fediverse! Also of note, they’ve picked up Jen’s new profile image. I’m guessing there will be more to this thread…
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, thinks “weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay,” is a good system. Drop “income” out of that and he’s right!
The problem is, like many others who have reached a level of wealth in the billions, he sees everything as a business venture. But government is not a business, it’s a mechanism for providing services.
I’d like to suggest that proportional voting is a good idea, but the basis for weighting votes should be the amount of burden a taxpayer absorbs in running it. The “all taxes suck” right wing propaganda think tanks love to point out that for the average Canadian “tax freedom day” falls somewhere near the middle of the year, so let’s use that as a baseline.
While people who earn less than the average pay less income taxes, they pay a disproportionately large amount of tax when you consider that “all taxes combined, hidden or otherwise” version that the anti-tax people tout. For an example, let’s take someone who buys 2,000 litres of gas over the course of a year at an average $1.50/l. That’s $3,000 spent on gas. The anti-tax people happily point out that half or more of that is hidden taxes, so we’ll call that $1,500 in taxes for the year. For someone who makes $150,000 a year, that’s 1% of gross income. For someone making just $50,000 it’s 3%. Even at higher marginal income tax rates, “tax freedom day” can come a lot earlier in the year if you’re a high income earner. The propaganda pushers try to convince average people that they’re being hosed, but their agenda is more money for the wealthy, fewer services for those who need them.
Let’s look at that “level of tax you pay” not in absolute dollars, but rather in the percentage of your total tax load compared to income. Let’s give that “average” Canadian 50 votes to work with, then more to the people who pay more, less to those who pay less. In this scenario, we’ll use Tobias’ salary from 2024: 205.5 million. If he can demonstrate that his total tax load for the year was in the range of $155 million, he can have his 50 votes too, but I’m willing to wager that all he’d get is a few votes—at best. Maybe we round up so he gets at least one.
Your say in how the government is formed should be proportional to how much you have to bear on a percentage basis, not an absolute dollar value. Letting the people who depend on the services the government provide have a bigger say in who runs it sounds like a darn fine idea to me. I’m willing to bet most people would be a lot happier with the results. Not Tobias though. He can go cry on a super yacht or something.
Yep, some fool bought a scam package and instead of following the instructions, they just pushed them out. Unbelievable, but then again, nobody said these fools were smart!
I’ve seen a wave of these phishing for credentials from a number of stores, and the best part of this is where they tell the scammer to use one of a set of random headers. In theory, this means you can set your spam filters to look for exact matches to these segments, and if you see to many of them, tag the message as trash.
Now I present for your edification and development of spam filers, the full text!
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