December 10, 2018

Bitcoin Strikes Back!

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Apparently the crypto folks are really mad at me. Overnight I received 9,546 pieces of spam email, asking me to sign up for newsletters, buy shoes, end world hunger, or a variety of other things that require my username and password. Although they come in many languages, by a remarkable coincidence a large proportion of them are in Russian. Here’s one:

According to Google Translate, here’s what it says:

Hello pomqwrth1979!

Thank you for registering with LLC NEO. Your account has been created and must be activated. You can activate your account by clicking on the activation link, or by copying the link to your browser: http://ctoneon.ru/index.php?option=com_user&task=activate&activation=…

After activating your account, you will be able to login to http://ctoneon.ru/ using the specified username and password:

Username – pomqwrth1979
Password – 5c0e76.

So charming. On the bright side, the email account they’re attacking has been so larded up with spam for so long that I hardly use it anymore. However, since this is obviously bot-driven, I suppose I ought to deactivate it for a while so their spam gets bounced.

These crypto folks are pretty easily offended, aren’t they? Maybe I should start using blockchain technology to operate my blog just to assuage them.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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