Saturday, March 21, 2009

Luckily, I'm an Ass Man

Here's a funny post from the blog of a computer security company describing a real scam involving an Asian Internet service provider. The Asian ISP attempts to scare foreign companies into using their services to buy ".asia" domains by claiming that someone else is in the market for that company's name.

The marketing (or IS) department for a company called "Acme" would be emailed the following (italics added):

Dear Manager,

We are a professional Internet consultant organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies' domain name registration and internet intellectual property right protection. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company.

On feb 27th, 2009, we received an application formally, one person named "Jacques Tits" wanted to applied for the Internet brand "acme" and some domain names through our body.

During our preliminary investigation,we found that these domain names 'keyword and internet brand is identical with your trademark. I wonder whether you consigned "Jacques Tits" to register these domain names through us or not? Or is "Jacques Tits" your business partner or distributor in Asia? Currently, we have postponed this application of this company temporarily already. In order to deal with this issue better, please let the principal make a confirmation with me by telephone or email ASAP.

The same post also explains that according to Wikipedia:

"In mathematics, the Tits alternative, named for Jacques Tits, is an important theorem about the structure of finitely generated linear groups. It states that every such group is either virtually solvable (i.e. has a solvable subgroup of finite index), or it contains a subgroup isomorphic to the free group on two generators."

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