World Wide

I’ve had a lot of questions asking about the British Lottery International email scam which so many folks are receiving. It seems that with the Katrina scams starting to wane, the British Lottery International scam is picking up steam again. The questions always run along the lines of this one:

Home sex videos, taken on cell phones (c’mon, guys!), were being sold by a Greek cell phone repairman, without his customers’ knowledge. In other words, customers would bring in their cell phones for repair, the repairman would find these home sex videos on the cell phones, and then download them to his own computer, [...]

A man has hung himself while in video chat online, in an ultimate and bizarre reversal of the online viewing experience. Usually you hear about people watching something they perhaps shouldn’t be, and they don’t want the watched to know that they are being watched.
In this case, it was the watchee who pushed the [...]

A new survey conducted by network security company StreamShield suggests, they say, that women tend to practice safer surfing than do men, as well as being generally safer and more cautious when it comes to viruses, phishing, and other Internet pitfalls.

Lead by terrorism fears, search engine giant Google has been asked by no less than the head of Australia’s nuclear energy agency to please remove images of Australia’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor from Google’s database of satellite images.

Apparently the experts were wrong. Apparently Internet addiction is a factor with online gamers. At least some of them.
Oh sure, you can explain away the killing of a fellow gamer as an act of passion.

Apparently despairing of what is happening to Chinese youth as a result of violent online games (can’t wait for Aunty’s groupie, Kailee, to chime in here), the Chinese government has said that from now on, minors are prohibited from playing games which involve players killing other players (known as “PK”, for “Players Kill” in [...]

The below which came across Aunty’s desk today is somewhat dense to read, but the bottom line is that they are suggesting what is being called a “reverse 911″ - that mobile communications devices are the next new line of defense for citizens during a crisis such as a terror attack.

Argentine authorites have arrested fifteen people in a multinational phishing scam, and, separately, the U.S. FBI has arrested 8 people in a global online piracy investigation, spokespersons for the agencies have said.

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has just passed a tough new law aimed at spam, unsolicited text messages, and junk faxes. The new law requires a recipient’s opt-in, meaning that a commercial message must be solicited - the recipient must have agreed to receive commercial email from the sender first.

Nigeria really seems to be doing all the right things to bring under some semblence of control the flood of financial scams which originate within its borders, including the infamous “419 spam scam”.

Nigeria really seems to be doing all the right things to bring under some semblence of control the flood of financial scams which originate within its borders, including the infamous “419 spam scam”. Earlier this month the Nigerian courts sentenced a Nigerian 419 scamstress to 2 1/2 year in jail, and now their [...]

China has been in the news with relation to the Internet a lot of late. They recently joined the anti-spam “London Plan”, have expanded their Internet offerings to their citizens with MSN Spaces’ Chinese portal (which admits to censoring in China), and, most recently, have been in the center of a corporate espionage scandal.

If you are into understanding how much world-changing information is being kept away from us, while appreciating from a direct person account (which of course you can believe or not) how vulnerable high-security systems within the US Government and military really are, you MUST listen to this fascinating BBC interview with Gary McKinnon, who has [...]

In what is being hailed as one of the largest spam&scam busts of the decade, and the biggest 419 bust in history, the FBI and Spanish police have collaborated to arrest three hundred and ten (that’s right, 310) people in Spain, all of whom were connected with an enormous email scam being run by Nigerian [...]

Matt Clarkson was going to end poverty by willing the leaders at the G8 summit to do so. According to his recent press release, Clarkson planned to ask visitors to his website to “take part in a meditation to psychically influence leaders of the G-8 summit to make poverty history.”

Al Gore may not have really invented the Internet, but we can still bloody well control it, the U.S. seems to be saying.
In a gesture which is being seen by some as the U.S. thumbing its nose at the global Internet community, the U.S. has drawn a line in the sand and said, in essence, [...]

But, soft! What light through yonder Windows breaks? Windows Mobile that is, as historic Stratford-on-Avon goes not only digital, but unwired to boot.

It seems that adult-themed websites in the United States aren’t the only ones up in arms over the new U.S. “Age Records” rule for adult content websites, which became a reality this week.

This almost reads like one of those urban legends which you forward to a friend. Only it isn’t. It really happened, to a friend of Aunty’s, just last night. So he, and Aunty, would like to remind you: