inevitable negativity

i am now (technically) a faculty member at harvard medical school ("instructor": about as junior junior junior as possible)! wow! and, (technically), no longer a postdoctoral fellow: i am now a "senior scientific associate". all so i can apply for a grant with a less than a 1% chance of getting funded (optimistic i am). so, something there. beautiful appearance of progress.

also, couple of papers accepted; probably will have a paper in PLoS-one, which is nice, but i'm third of four authors, so..

***

came up with this on the train, coming home last friday night (9-28-12)

on Cambridge Street
put away
your umbrellas
or they'll wind up
cast aside
in tattered heaps
abandoned

on Cambridge Street
thrust your head
into the wind
and bear the rain
it's autumn
it's not cold yet
be thankful

MIT VPN

Just when I've lost interest in the internet, I get the following random email on my Gmail account (found it in the Junk folder):

Dear Outlook client, Notification ID: KG932J ========================================== - Please reconfigure your Microsoft Outlook information again . - Click on the link below to setup . http://outlook-mail-setup.gert54d.from-ks.com/index.php?id=KG932J ========================================== Microsoft Outlook 2012 .

Obviously this is a phishing thing. What's interesting is that the url refers to an IP address at MIT. The address is no longer active as far as I can tell, but it seems to have belonged to the MIT VPN network, because other addresses on the same /24 block are attached to vpn-ip.mit.edu urls.

So, my guess is that someone set up a site on the MIT VPN to direct their phishing business. That's all I've got.

Oh, coincidentally, just yesterday I was reading about VPNs, wondering about a convenient way to get past the China firewall from the inside. Seeing that MIT has a VPN makes me wonder if Harvard has one, and if I can use it...

tubely

I got an interesting email this morning - actually two of them. They were spam on my gmail account, which is interesting because I almost never get spam on that account. They were sent from the account of someone I know incidentally - actually by way of two incidents. That's a funny story, I'll tell it now, in parentheses:

(I go to a Taekwondo club, and most of the other people who go there are like me, normal slobs, not genuine atheletes or fighters, though there are many of those. Anyways, one of the people I had conversed with a few times was the mother of a child student, who would come to classes when her son was there. So, okay, we "knew" one another, saw eachother maybe once every week or two. So then, last summer, I'm shopping for a piano, looking at Craigslist ads. I see a total of 4 pianos. The second one (I bought the 3rd), I show up at the person's house to check it out - and it's the lady from Taekwondo. Very weird, in a city of a million people, that 1/4 piano ads answered contain a person you know. Oh well, that's the story.)

So, I'm apparently on this lady's email contacts list because of the piano interaction. She must have fallen for this Tubely thing - I'm still not sure exactly what Tubely is - and it dumped "invites" to everyone on her contacts list. It sounds like this is the typical Tubely MO.

The interesting thing about the emails (I got two simultaneous copies of the invite) is that they contained the sender's IP address. I have no idea why. I knew it was the lady's work address because 1) I know that she works at another Harvard-affiliated research institute, and 2) the address resolved to another computer on the Harvard network.

The emails were sent around 7:40am today, so she gets to her office at least by 7:40am. It's creepy that spam can reveal that sort of detail about you. Embarrassing and creepy.

And, it seems pretty weird, that spam would want to be giving out your exact location on the internet, through a Webmail service. Maybe it's an effort to *not* look like spam, by showing that you originate from the actual sender, as if IP addresses are obviously familiar or not. Oh well, who knows.