[2003.08.07 2242h]

in recent months, my phone bill has been 2 pages long.  the first page is
usually labelled "page 1".  the second page is usually labelled "page 3".

the first time this happened, i thought i had misplaced a page of the
bill.  after a futile search, i eventually gave up and assumed it was
lost.  the next month, i got another bill with only two pages, with the
second page labelled "page 3" again.  that's when i caught on.

anyhow, my roommates and i recently decided that we didn't need a land
line anymore, so we cancelled it.  i'll still be getting a phone bill,
though, since my internet connection fee is included in it.

the people in charge of the phone bill recently decided to make their bill
accessible online.  at first, this sounds like a good idea.  however,
someone decided that it was a good idea to spam all the bill payers with
an e-mail stating that their new bill was available online every month.
although questionable, this idea, in itself, doesn't sound too bad.

what's bad is that, in order to spam everyone, a mailing list was created,
with almost no security settings whatsoever.  inevitably, someone would
eventually accidentally reply to the mailing list, thus spamming a huge
portion of the stanford community.

this happened about a week ago.  someone claimed that the charges made on
his account were erroneous, as since he had already graduated and
disconnected his services prior to leaving.  my guess is that he never
actually checked his bill and assumed that receiving an e-mail for a bill
meant that he was charged for services, and that whoever was in charge of
the mailing list simply forgot to unsubscribe him.

anyway, the fact that anyone could send to the list caught on quickly, and
some people started advertising their groups and affiliations.  the
obligatory "please stop sending e-mails to the list, including replies to
this one" plea was eventually sent, as well as the obligatory hypocritical
"i agree" reply.  eventually, the flood died down late that night.

the next day, the incident was brought up in one of my classes.  what was
surprising to me was how nearly everybody was saying that they were
seriously thinking of joining in the spamming.  i'm not sure what popular
mailing list etiquette is, but i would like to think that it does not
include sending frivolous e-mails to a large part of your community,
regardless of how funny the e-mail might be.

anyhow, during this mess, i decided to check out how insecure the list
actually was.  i quickly found a member list, which included over 11700
stanford accounts.  that's roughly equivalent to the number of
undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at the university.

thankfully, the mailing list has been somewhat secured since then.  the
member list is no longer publicly accessible, but i haven't tried sending
anything to the list and seeing if it works.