spam received mentioning ohloh

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Fil

2 months ago

Just received a spam this morning mentioning ohloh. The message is apparently originating from yahoo's webmail.

> Hello My name is Janet i saw your profile at www.ohloh.net and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you the more,and iwant you to send an email to my email address so i can give you mypicture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address(xxx@yahoo.com)I believe we can move from here. I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life ) pls my dear contact me back with my email address to give you my pics and to tell you about me thanks

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Fil

2 months ago

Needless to say "Janet" didn't bother sending me a kudo. And "she"'s talking about love? :-)

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Toni korpela

2 months ago

Your not the only one who got this. I got this also, sending some Kudo would have helped out instead of just spamming.

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Robin Luckey

2 months ago

I also received one of these spam emails this weekend.

We take privacy seriously, and we certainly do not intentionally distribute private information such as email addresses.

We do not believe that any private data entrusted to Ohloh has been compromised. The source of the email addresses was most likely the committer names found in the public source control logs.

On all of our HTML pages, Ohloh obfuscates the email addresses we find in source control logs, so that email addresses contained in the source control logs are not trivially scraped from our web site.

However, this obfuscation step was not performed in our XML API. If you queried the details of a project contributor from our XML API, you would see the committer name exactly as it appears in the source control log, even if it is an email address.

As of now, this is no longer true. All source control names contained in the XML API are now email-obscured. I hope this doesn't reduce the value of the XML API for honest purposes, but spammers have spoiled it for everyone.

Robin

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