Pandora's Website

First: no, not Pandora.com

Everyone has heard the Greek myth of Pandora. When the Gods first created Earth, it was perfect. There was no disease, there was no pain there was no suffering, there was no evil. The Gods took all of these things and placed them in a jar and entrusted that box to the world's first woman, Pandora.

Zeus issued Pandora one command when he gave her the jar, simply not to open it. Of course, as the story goes, her curiosity eventually got the better of her, and she opened the jar. The rest is history.

It's easy to make Pandora the bad guy in the story. How hard could it possibly be to just not open a box? It's not often you have the opportunity to make the world a much better place by doing nothing at all.

Fast forward to today. I was emailing with some friends back and forth, when all of a sudden an unknown email was listed in the recipients. It apparently got added out of the blue at one point on the thread, and everyone kept hitting "reply all" from there. No one could account for where the new email came from. It reeked of an online security issue.

I tried googling the mystery email. As you could expect when you try googling an email with a gmail.com domain, there were a lot of results. Only one result, however cited the email I was curious about, and that site was w w w . s a t i n p i l l o w c a s e s . c o m. (Spaces added for safety.) The google result had an important note next to it, however: "This site may harm your computer."

Now my curiosity was piqued. Satin pillowcases! All the signs to that point indicated that there was some type of identity scam going on, and my security was potentially implicated. But it was all somehow based around the idea that they could lure people in with satin pillowcases. What internet scam deals in satin pillowcases?

I decided to try the site. One quick look. It takes a few seconds for a computer to install malware, so if I open the page quickly, take a screenshot, and immediately quit my browser, I should be safe. Rather than follow the google link, I decided to retype the url into my browser. Upon hitting return, I was issued the following warning:

Zeus was making the point very clear. I was not to open this jar, there were bad things inside it.

How could you explain disease and famine to someone who hasn't ever experienced it? "One day it will just get hard to breathe, then you die." I needed to know why I couldn't open the jar. There was a reason this site was being flagged. No one who uploads malware kindly informs you that their site may infect you with Malware. There had to be someone out there in the depths of the internet who knew what was in the jar.

I knew the website was bad. I knew bad things would come to me if I opened it. I knew how malware can turn a computer against itself. The thing I didn't understand was how it involved satin pillowcases. How a website could use satin pillow cases to hold your attention was beyond me.

I decided to make a new appeal to the internet god Google for more information. I did a search for the website itself, w w w . s a t i n p i l l o w c a s e s . c o m. I expected some type of watchdog group would have it on a list somewhere and may have a brief blurb about what the site was. I was let down. Every result was some type of derivative from the site itself, and every one of them was flagged as harmful to my computer. I wanted to know what was so dangerous about the website, but the only source for that information was the website itself.

I'd imagine Pandora would have made any number of pleas to Zeus for information about what could be so bad in her jar. And of course Zeus, for whatever reason, wouldn't give that information up. That meant her only source of information about what was in the jar became the jar itself. She opened it, knowing it would be a bad thing, but at least she knew.

I'm still curious what is going on with satin pillowcases, and how a stranger's email turned up in my chat, but I'll probably never know. When Pandora opened her jar, Zeus was not mad at her. He always knew it was only a matter of time until it was opened. I suppose that's what the satin pillowcases are banking on. On some fluke, someone will come across them and wonder, and eventually that curiosity will make them look, and once they look, all the bad things start streaming out.