rockstar rick

We’ve all done it: registered with a company’s website, only to be confronted by the “check here to receive email updates” button. Whether I click it or not is influenced primarily by my perception of the company, and tipped in either direction by my mood,  the weather, or whatever. I don’t worry much either way, armed with the knowledge that if I get tired of the emails I can just re-route them to the trash through the magic of gmail filters.

Today I noticed an email from a sender claiming to be the actual and authentic Target, but was in reality from someone who uses the email address TargetNews@target.bfi0.com. Surely that email can’t be from the Target that sells the perfectly-priced, horizontal-striped collared shirts I like so much. I can find that Target by visiting www.target.com, and this email is clearly from someone at bfi0 dot com, which has nothing to do with Target. That’s not even a name I recognize. And it has numbers in the domain name–a nearly sure sign that it’s from the dark back alleys of the internet. (Sorry, 1800flowers.com. You have nice flowers and I liked when you were on that “Undercover Boss” show.)

So I did what anyone with a gmail account can do–reported the email as a phishing scam. Reputable businesses use their proper domains, so they can let their customers know that it’s really them, and not some nefarious impostor intent on stealing your identity. Right? Apparently not. (See this also.)

I’ve trained myself to look for urls that are suspect in general–but the easiest thing to look for is the top level domain. Simply, if it isn’t company-name followed by .com, the alarm bells go off. So the question is: why are reputable companies doing this? All it does is train people that it’s okay to click a link from an email that leads to a 3rd party site. Yes, yes, it’s just Target. It’s not like I have all my checking accounts there.

So for now I’ve got Target on auto-filter to the virtual dustbin, and unless they change the ways they do mass emails, it’s unlikely that will change. No matter how good their deals are.

…is as easy as posting this, I guess.

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I’ve been following the progress of the One Laptop per Child (w) program for a while now, and I just heard that for the next 13 days, people can participate in the give one get one program by paying the price of two laptops, a measley $400. I remember getting really excited about it when I heard Nicholas Negroponte’s keynote address at the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference last November.

So if you’ve got $400 to spend, do it. They’re pretty cool laptops–even at 400 bucks. And you’re helping the education of third world children! What’s not awesome about that!