• About Chris Gagné

    Photo by Dave Bullock / eecue Chris Gagné is the COO for both Student of Fortune, Inc. and NOLS Corporation. Previously, he was a Product Manager at Oversee.net and Director of Client Services at Leads360. He also founded Cerbumi.org, an open-source network-based approach to real-world problem solving. Chris graduated from Occidental College, where he majored in Economics for Business and Management. Before attending Occidental, Chris was a project manager and user interface designer at Frontera Corporation, a former Idealab application service provider. more...

Some delicious coffee

By Chris Gagne | December 1, 2006

I’ve been buying coffee from Supreme Bean for a couple of years now. They’re recently created a “Dolce Terra” organic coffee that’s absolutely delicious. It’s a lighter roast with delicious earthy flavors that remind me of the best Kenyans or Sumatras, and it works brilliantly well for both drip and espresso. We just bought 5 pounds of it for the office. Absolutely solid.

2 Comments

A privacy breach at eMusic?

By Chris Gagne | December 1, 2006

I just received some spam at an email address that I’ve used only to sign up for eMusic. It seems I’m not the only one, either: http://trainedmonkey.com/2006/11/17/privacy_breach_at_emusic_.

There seems to be three distinct possibilities here:


  1. Their security was compromised (either internally or externally) and someone got a hold of their customer list.

  2. They blatantly gave away email addresses.

  3. Some spammer decided to randomly send spam to emusic@ a whole lot of domains.

1 & 2? Plausible.

3? Implausible. If you want a message to get through, you’re going to use info@, support@, sales@, etc. The number of people who would have emusic@ forwarding to anything remotely useful is significantly lower. Do spammers send mail to other user accounts? On occasion, but usually they use made-up user accounts as part of bogus “from” addresses, not “to” addresses.

I forwarded the message to eMusic’s support team yesterday, but haven’t heard anything back. I’ll give them a call on Monday and see what they say.

To everyone else - did you get this message on an email address that you used to sign up for eMusic?

Here’s the actual message:

From: Affiliate253@MyOwnCreditCoach.com
Subject: Credit tips enclosed - 58tks01
Date: November 30, 2006 3:58:17 AM PST
To: ( My EMusic Address )
Reply-To: Affiliate253@MyOwnCreditCoach.com

Good afternoon!

Good afternoon!

My name is Michael Matson and I wanted to connect with you briefly because
I am offering a new eBook all about credit, credit repair, the credit
reporting agencies, and how to boost your credit score by applying a few
simple concepts which I will be sharing with subscribers.

For those who act right away, I will be giving away some very powerful
bonus items at no cost.

Please register for the course here: http://www64.MyOwnCreditCoach.com

There is absolutely zero risk, and it will definatly give you a leg-up to
make your credit rating soar with eagles.

Again here is the link: http://www00.MyOwnCreditCoach.com

Feel free to share this with a friend but send it today, because I’m not
sure how long I am going to keep the price so low!

Thanks for being open to trying my mini-course and I’ll see you on the
other side!

Best regards,
Michael Matson

This communications was sent to: (address). We have no desire to send you
information at (address) that is unwanted.
If you want to be excluded from future Afilliate Ventures, SA mailings
please submit a REM0VE ME: http://www11.MyOwnCreditCoach.com/r/

3 Comments