Life in the honeypot: Dell Software Group has been acquired by spammers?

Home from SCA 50 Year (I did a quick, 4-day trip for the first half of it), catching up on email, and just got to this little oddness, which starts with:

On Monday (June 20th, 2016), Francisco Partners and Elliott Management announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Dell Software Group. This transaction includes Dell’s Systems and Information Management (SIM), Security, and Advanced Analytics business units.

It appears to be legit (looking around, I find the deal on TechCrunch, so this isn't some pump-and-dump scheme), and I would normally just skim past it, except for one thing -- I got *six* copies of it, *all* of them to fake email addresses at waks.org.

I don't even know where these particular addresses originated. They all look relatively legitimate -- none are real addresses scraped off my pages, but they're not the usual made-up "mom294784@waks.org" that the spammers make up by computer to sell to other gullible spammers, either. They're things like "msutton", "rgordon", "howard", and so on. I've seen them from time to time, so they've been making the resale rounds, but they look like someone spent the time to handcraft fake email addresses, or at least to mix and match real account names from one domain onto another.

But mostly I'm amused and slightly puzzled. Bad enough that the new acquirers of Dell Software send out such a wide email blast announcing the sale. Doing so to such an unvetted list, making unambiguously clear that they are simply buying and blasting to spam lists, is just embarrassing.

And the cherry on top? When I Google for "Francisco Partners spam", my first hit is one of their portfolio companies, Barracuda Networks, which sells spam-fighting tech. Way to undermine the corporate message...

Lessons in Sleep

One of the interesting side-notes from my trip to 50 Year was that it provided an accidental experiment in the usefulness of my CPAP.

About 18 months ago, Kate convinced me that I probably had a touch of apnea. (She described the noises I was occasionally making when I was sleeping, and they were pretty tell-tale.) So about a year ago I got a CPAP, and I quickly decided that it was at least a little helpful -- I felt slightly more rested when using it. So I've been utterly faithful about it ever since, and have used it every night since I got it.

But I realized, when I was packing for 50 Year, that I had no good way to *power* the bloody thing. I have a big battery, but it puts out DC, not AC, and while that's a solvable problem, I couldn't deal with it in the hours that I had left to prep. So I decided that it wouldn't kill me, and I'd just do without it for four days.

That was illuminating. Granted, it wasn't a perfectly controlled experiment by any means: I was sleeping on an air mattress, in rather warm and humid weather and (most importantly) without Kate, so my sleep patterns were a bit disrupted. But I would have subjectively sworn that I was getting at least six hours' sleep a night. By the second day I was running on pure adrenaline, and by the third I was comatose on my feet. It was startling: I sometimes think of myself as tired during the day nowadays, but I haven't felt that sort of bone-deep *exhaustion* in the past year. The contrast was vivid.

So the moral of the story is that the CPAP is *not* optional -- I'm going to have to be consistent in bringing it with me on trips from here on out. And I am now *especially* keeping my fingers crossed that the Airing project works out -- while I'm likely to continue using the conventional CPAP at home, I would love to be able to using Airings when traveling, especially when camping...