Security and anti-virus company Sophos is reporting that there is a new worm out this week which targets Windows users (don’t they all?) Dubbed “Cellery”, due to the text which appears on its splash screen, the worm offers its victims genuine entertainment in the form of an actual, playable game…

As if online downloaders don’t have enough to worry about (rightly or wrongly), now they have to worry about spyware being buried within the media files they download. I don’t think this is what Marshall McLuhan had in mind. According to a report in InformationWeek, hackers are taking advantage of…

Tempting though it may be, if you get an email in your inbox which promises a photo of naked people spelling out “Happy New Year” with their bodies, don’t open it. Not, mind you, that the picture isn’t there – it is ( although one is given to wonder given…

A hacker has compromised the personal information and identification of as many as 32,000 users whose details were stored on computers at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. The computer system which was compromised was that holding all of the information associated with university identification cards, including names, photos, and…

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this week has announced the first big bust of spammers under the so-called “plain brown wrapper” provisions of CAN-SPAM. The plain brown wrapper rules require that, in addition to the CAN-SPAM requirements for commercial email to which all commercial emailers are subject, email which is…

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In addition to the critical fix for the Help flaw which implicated Active X, and which Aunty posted about here, Microsoft today announced two additional security patches for Windows users. The first one involves both a cursor and icon handling vulnerability, along with a Windows kernal vulnerability, and affects a…

Not a moment too soon, Microsoft has announced a fix for that pesky “help flaw” involving ActiveX which Aunty first reported on here and again here just yesterday. Making this flaw even more devestating than some others is the fact that it affects so many flavours of Windows, including version…

Poppa’s got a brand new bag, and spammers got a brand new ploy. This one, interestingly enough, is being attributed to spammers’ concerns over running afoul of CAN-SPAM, and so trying to end run it instead. Specifically, it is claimed, they are trying to avoid the stiff penalties which can…

Security company Secunia, Inc. has raised the security threat warning for recently revealed Internet Explorer 6 security flaws to “extremely critical”, their highest threat level. This is the result of yet another “security” site publishing yet another set of instructions for how to exploit the security hole (what’s up with…

This month’s issue of Wired Magazine has an absolutely brilliantly done piece by Clive Thompson in which he interviews and dissects Bram Cohen, the inventor and founder of BitTorrent. Thompson expertly brings Cohen to life on the pages for his readers, painting a picture of someone who is at once…

Wired news makes a very good point this week in their analysis of the state of the art in India. On the one hand, India has become everybody’s favourite place to outsource their tech support, and, issues of U.S. job drain aside, with good reason. Indian culture puts a high…

Is there a person among us who actually likes pop-up ads? I mean, who isn’t an advertiser on the popping end? No, I thought not. Unfortunately, like loud cellphones, cigars at outdoor bistros, and over-application of cheap perfume, while they are annoying as all get-out, they are not illegal. That…

Always remember that the word “fan” has its roots in the word “fanatic”. And this is exemplified by the behaviour of Allan Carlson, a Los Angeles resident who is an avid fan of Philadelphia’s baseball team, the Philadelphia Phillies. Apparently Carlson had issues with the way that the Phillies’ management…

A Washington state Court of Appeals has ruled this week that police do not need a warrant to access and search the contents of an employee’s office-owned PC. All that is needed is the employer’s permission. This in the case of an employee who used his work PC to access…