Jigsaw – it’s like the illegitimate love child of eBay and Linked-In. Jigsaw is a new start-up headquartered in San Mateo, California, that has decided that it would be nifty cool to incentivize people to rat you out by posting your personal contact information from your business card to the Jigsaw database, which seems to be the functional equivalent of the world’s largest business card Rolodex, cross-referenced by name, address, area code, and for all one knows, shoe size. If you have ever given your business card to a Jigsaw user, odds are that your contact information is already in there.

The State of California is resorting to good old-fashioned U.S. mail to notify 1.4 million California residents that their personal information may have been compromised as a result of a hacking incident. The warning was made necessary by a hack-attack on the computer systems at U.C. Berkely, through which the…

You know all that spam you’ve been getting, promising you a university diploma? Well, the only degree that brothers Craig and Alton Poe are likely to be encountering in the foreseeable future is the third degree. The siblings, along with Trinity Southern University and Innovative Cellular and Wireless, have been…

IBM has announced that it is making it FairUCE anti-spam product available for free. “FairUCE” stands for “Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email”. FairUCE is an SMTP proxy for PostFix which works as a sort of amalgamation of email authentication and challenge/ response. In theory, at least, and hopefully in…

There are so many anti-spam products out there for Windows users, how is a person to know which one to choose?

by Karl Jacobs, CEO of Cloudmark Email security is becoming a critical concern for small businesses today as email infrastructure is under constant attack from spam, viruses and fraud attacks.  Spam, known as unsolicited e-mail, has become the single largest nuisance for Internet users with an estimated 45% of all email being defined…

by WD Basely — Background — This address has been in use for a long while; in Internet years I would call it middle aged. It has traveled around a good bit as well, having been used in various mailing lists, newsgroups and for myriad online signups for this and…

Taking a page from Bush the Senior, who immortalized the words “Read My Lips, No New Taxes”, President Bush today signed into law a three-year ban on the taxation of Internet connections. The new law completely bans any tax on any sort of Internet connection, from dial-up to broadband. Said…

And you thought that Lycos’ “Make Love Not Spam” screensaver was bad (or good, depending on how you looked at it). A company called Symbiot has developed a software package which is ostensibly designed to protect your system from attacks…by mounting a good offense qua defense. Using a process which…

There are people who don’t agree with peer-to-peer and other file-sharing networks, and then there are people who really don’t agree with peer-to-peer and other file-sharing networks. It would seem that someone in the latter category has taken umbrage with BitTorrent, and has taken it upon themselves to take BitTorrent…

I hope that all of you Windows users listened to Aunty, and didn’t download that Lycos “Make Love Not Spam” screensaver. Netcraft has announced that Lycos Europe has pulled their screensaver project, “Make Love Not Spam”, and now when you go to the site it simply displays a cute little…

Three cheers for Microsoft, who just announced that this week they have filed seven more anti-spam lawsuits, this time taking aim specifically at porn spammers. The lawsuits, filed in the Washington State Superior Court in Kings County, were filed against seven “John Does”. A ‘John Doe’ lawsuit happens when the…

A new security warning issued by Microsoft this week affects a large number of Windows users. In fact, according to the Microsoft site, people who should read the warning include “Customers who use Microsoft Windows”. That’s a pretty broad field. The security issue, rated by Microsoft as “Critical”, involves a…

It’s (one of) every IT manager’s nightmare: thousands of users, downloading and installing a seemingly innocent add-on program, in this case one offering to speed up their Internet experience. However, in reality, the program has the ability to compromise the most sensitive of user information, including passwords and more. This…

You just knew it had to happen, right? You can’t take aim at a group of spammers and just expect them to sit there quietly and take it on the chin. At least, not if you have half a brain. I mean, spammers aren’t really known for their social gracefulness,…