2005 February

It’s finally happened. Send-Safe, the choice of spammers the world ’round, has finally been kicked off the MCI network. Of course Send-Safe had a safe harbour in MCI for way too long - Send-Safe was able to to provide safe sending services to spammers through the MCI network despite months of pressure from […]

Google has taken the unusual step of apologizing for its search results. But only, it seems, for results obtained by searching on the word “Jew,” the results for which have been deemed offensive.
Linked from the top result obtained by searching the word “Jew” by a link entitled “Offensive Search Results,” the apology starts off by […]

I don’t have much sympathy for people who scroll to the bottom of an End User License Agreement (EULA) and click “OK” just to get on with it. I do have some because it is a legal document and people do tend to glaze over when reading those. But, if you have installed the Microsoft […]

Even the most upstanding of Florida’s e-mail citizens can’t seem to avoid running afoul of good e-mail practices if not the law, it seems. It must be something in the tasty Florida water, which, of course, is not just for breakfast anymore.
Case in point: When Jack Nolan, a statistician for Florida’s Palm Beach County […]

Do you remember when Aunty told you that ChoicePoint had been hacked, leading to dozens of thousands of people having their private information which had been stored on ChoicePoint’s servers compromised, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal information?
And do you remember Aunty told you that ChoicePoint’s spokesperson had said that other […]

Remember when it used to be that “the dog ate my homework?” That didn’t work very well, did it?
Well, now it’s “the spam filter ate my court appearance notice,” and guess what? As it turns out, that works pretty well!
Attorney Jeffrey J. Stesiak, of South Bend, Indiana, was due to appear at the court […]

Who says that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn’t have a sense of humour? Anybody who does will be handily proven wrong by a look at its new “Endangered Gizmos” list, over which anybody should get a chuckle (not to mention an education) no matter where you fall along the technopolitical divide.

The FBI is warning the public about malicious e-mails designed to appear as if they were generated by the law enforcement agency, CNET News.com reports. Here is the actual warning from the FBI’s Web site:
Washington, D.C. - The FBI today warned the public to avoid falling victim to an on-going mass e-mail scheme wherein computer […]

New York teenager Anthony Greco must have thought that he’d really put one over on the man. Having just successefully sent more than 1.5 million pieces of “spim” - spam sent through an instant messenger system - to MySpace.com customers, having misappropriated MySpace.com’s instant messaging system, he then threatened MySpace.com that if they didn’t […]

What do you think the hot news is on the mean streets of the Internet? The Apple lawsuit against pre-med student Vivek “Desicanuck” Sambhara for putting a beta version of Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”) on Bit Torrent? The teenager who was arrested for sending instant messenger spam (”spim”)? The release of […]

A new report indicates that as many as forty-percent of all workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany spend at least an hour a day on personal email, while at work. And most of the rest spend at least half an hour a day.
In other words, nearly all workers spend at […]

Those of you who recall Aunty telling you about the T-Mobile Sidekick hacker will be interested to know that not only has he been apprehended, but he has pleaded guilty.
Twenty-one year old Nicholas Lee Jacobsen, an engineer now living in Oregon, formerly of Orange County, California, pleaded guilty to charges which could land him in […]

Just how stupid do you have to be (or how badly do you have to want to win an election, although the two apparently aren’t mutually exclusive) to send spam to thousands of your constituents?
To their cell phones.
Between midnight and four in the morning.
On election day.
Faking the “from” name as that of your opponent.
Aunty says […]

First, the big Internet annoyance was spam. Now it is spyware! Why is
this happening? Simply because there is big money in spyware, benefiting
both legitimate businesses and cybercriminals. Both wage a battle for your
personal information, surfing, and buying habits. There are Internet advertisers
that want to know where you click, and the “Net Mafia” is trying to […]

You know that spam which everyone gets for penis enlargement supplements? (Uh, you do all get that, don’t you? Or maybe that’s just Aunty…)
Well, believe it or not, some people actually buy that stuff! (Remember Aunty’s rant about people who buy things through spam?)
Not only that, but apparently the people who buy […]

The ECD, the full name of which is “The Electronic Civil Disobedience against the Fur and Vivisection Industry”, has declared open war on the Internet servers of companies which trade in fur.
It is doing this by bombarding the servers of the targetted companies with email in an effort to create a DoS (Denial […]

As many as 35,000 Californians may have had their credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal information compromised when hackers accessed identification and credential verification service provider ChoicePoint’s data servers.
Hacks into ChoicePoint’s system have already lead to six documented cases of identity theft in California alone. Authorities say that “hundreds of thousands […]

Have you heard about Adsense “click fraud”? It’s one of the latest Internet scams.
Here’s how it works:
You know those ubiquitous (and they’re everywhere!) “Ads by Google” which you see on what seems like a vast majority of the websites out there today? (Indeed, even here on the Net Patrol!) […]

Aunty has a firm belief that anybody who has a vested interest in charging money for keeping you safe from harm is likely to have a vested interest in perpetuating the threat of that harm - otherwise they run the risk of becoming obsolete when that harm is no longer.
In Aunty’s old stomping grounds […]

Verizon has been in the news quite a bit lately, and indeed here in Aunty’s own column, for its dunderheaded refusal of email from large chunks of the civilized world, by blocking incoming email from entire countries. In fact, Verizon is being sued by their users who have been unable to receive wanted email […]