I got a real Nigerian scam letter once, by lettermail. I was so proud of it, I showed it to people.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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There's actually conjecture in the Nicole community that Nicole might actually be the victim of bullying or some creepy obsession on the part of the perp.
It's not really awesome at all.
Nice try, Nicole
Does it though...?
Personally, yes.
We're getting married!
Congratulations, but please don't invite me to the wedding 🙂
We're all getting invited.
One of us! One of us!
What does “Nicole-ed” mean? I’m curious if it matches the Nicole I know.
She’s everyone’s proud Polish wife from Toronto.
Apparently there’s a vulnerability with sending messages with images in them and “she” might be logging people’s IP addresses through that. I’m under the impression that while the Nicole images are probably all pictures of the same girl, the scammer is not her.
Apparently there’s a vulnerability with sending messages with images in them and “she” might be logging people’s IP addresses through that.
If the images are hosted on your instance, this wouldn’t be relevant. If they’re links to an image hosted somewhere, this is possible, but there’d be a lot of noise and not much value. To link accounts to IPs the URLs would themselves need to be different
I checked the urls to the images in my PMs and they’re all hosted on Lemmy.
Every one of the posts today that I've received have the url https://lemmy.laitinlok.com/pictrs/image/e1be7d9e-9e3e-4ba9-9c08-1ff084b554e1.png. If everyone has the same links, then logging people's IP would get you the same information as logging IPs from a public post in any popular community. I think that would only make sense if each user was receiving different URLs, for the attacker to log the requested resource and their reference of which user they sent that URL to. I can't confirm this suspicion on my own, but if the URL I posted is the same one you got today, then I doubt there's any attempt to match users to their IP addresses.
The URL you posted is not what I received.
Some sort of deanonymizing and/or tracking is the only thing that makes sense here.
A VPN is called for any time we might receive a Nicole message, or any time we access a previously received message.
Which means any time we access Lemmy.