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Internet Messenger Use in the Workplace: A Right or a Responsibility?

Internet instant messenger programs and services, such as AOL Instant Messenger (“AIM”) and Yahoo! Instant Messenger, are as ubiquitous as the telephone, and indeed some may argue are replacing the phone in large part. This can be both a boon and a problem for the workplace. Employees can quickly and…

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Portrait of a Spammer

Ever wondered what it was like to be a spammer? Curioius about how they spend their days? How they earn their crust? The recent Virginia trial of notorious mega-spammer Jeremy Jaynes has given the public a first rare look into the habitat and life of the wild spammer. The thirty-year-old…

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Single Fathers Treated Like 2nd Class Citizens

I would like to take a moment to talk about a topic which is near and dear to my heart: single fathers, and their children.

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Microsoft Claims Rights to All Internet Protocols

In a move blatant and sweeping even for the company perceived by many to be megalomania personified, Microsoft has drafted an Internet protocol licensing agreement which includes essentially every single Internet protocol ever created, several (if not the majority) of which Microsoft has never touched, let alone helped to develop….

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Transferring Domains No Longer Requires Consent – Registrars Advise That You Lock Your Domain

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has put into place a new rule which says that if a request to transfer an Internet domain is made, and there is no response made denying the transfer within 5 days, the transfer will be approved and made. That means…

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Microsoft Takes Sender I.D.’s Case to the FTC Authentication Summit

Despite the miserable failure suffered by Microsoft’s efforts to win support for their Sender I.D. email authentication system, with such august institutions the Apache project, the Debian project, and even the IETF’s authentication working group all roundly rejecting Sender I.D. on technical as well as legal and moral grounds, and…

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Imagine if Email Worked Like RSS

Now here’s an interesting idea. Imagine if email worked like RSS. Your email program would aggregate a list of new message subjects and senders for you, and if you wanted to read them, it would go retrieve them from the sender’s site. As Todd Marshall, the developer of this version…

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New Phishing Tactic Uses Real URLs, Fake Pages

A new phishing tactic discovered by Internet security company SurfControl allows the phisher to take advantage of a weakness in a targeted company’s website, permitting them to use the company’s real URL, while serving up bogus look-alike content. According to Susan Larson of SurfControl, “This is definitely one of the…

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Open Source Web Browsers Taking Bite Out of Windows IE

As more and more users renounce the security-risk beleagured Internet Explorer, and move to open source web browsers such as Firefox, Microsoft is starting to feel the pinch. As a result, Explorer has slipped from a previous lofty 95% marketshare to below 93%. While this may seem like a tiny…

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The Ultimate Pay-Per-Click: So This Person Walks Into a Bar…

The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Motorola has just filed a patent on what has got to be the ultimate pay-per-click mechanism: beaming advertisements to celphones and then using geolocation to track when the celphone user has walked into an advertised merchant’s store, at which point the advertiser will be…

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Rewards of Up to $37,000 for Turning in Companies Using Unlicensed Software

Looking for a way to earn some spare cash for the holidays? Well, if you’re in the U.K., and know of a company who is using pirated, unlicensed, or otherwise illegal software, you’re in luck. Just turn the company in to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), and they will pay…

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Play Along with Aunty! Do Cookies Count As Spyware?

Dear Gentle Readers, Aunty recently became aware that some users are complaining that cookies are spyware, and accusing cookie-leaving companies of infecting their computers with spyware. This happened most recently to the people over at Pocket PC Thoughts, where users’ anti-spyware programs were detecting cookies set by Pocket PC Thoughts’…

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If You Use Challenge/Response It May Be Your Email Delivery Which is Challenged

If you are one of the thousands of users who uses a challenge/response system to stem the flow of email into your inbox, you may be missing out on more than just spam. One of the inherent flaws in challenge/response systems is that they don’t work if the sender never…

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Have You Been Spammed by Microsoft?

Dear Gentle Readers, MSNBC, of all places, is reporting that there are allegations that Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer has been spamming people. :gasp: Can it be true? Microsoft has been in the news a lot lately as a champion of anti-spam, suing spammers in Federal court left and right. To…

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Email Authentication Shindig at the Federal Trade Commission

As many of you may already know, the Federal Trade Commission has been charged with looking at, among other things, sender authentication. This is important because when certain sorts of email marketers send out their “permission based email marketing”, for some reason they don’t actually send it from their own…