Now here’s an interesting showdown with potentially far-reaching ramifications. The location: o Mar Vista, a suburb of Los Angeles, California The players: o The Mar Vista Neighborhood Council, a public body of volunteer neighborhood do-gooders, certified by the city as an advisory agency for the city. o The Westmar Sun,…

The DOJ followed through with their promised big announcement today of the dozens of spammers, scammers, and just plain Internet nasties they’d whacked since June 1st. Here, from their own press release, is a peek at some of those badies: “Some of the charges filed in districts throughout the country…

On a sidenote to the much ballyhooed crackdown by the Justice Department on dozens of spammers, at least part of the funding for the crackdown came through the Direct Marketing Association’s “Operation Slam Spam”. The law under which these stings were made, CAN-SPAM, has been depicted as a win for…

Those good folks over at the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy have a really nifty idea to get back at those pesky spoofers – people who use your domain as the “from” address in their spam. ISIPP is offering a new service with which they will help you…

Microsoft has announced that they will begin checking email coming in to Hotmail, MSN and Microsoft.com to determine whether the sending server has published a valid SPF record. The change is to occur on the first of October. It makes sense, given that they have merged their own Caller I.D….

Being Joe-Jobbed – or, in normal English, having your email address spoofed in the “From:” line of a spam run – has always been annoying. Now it turns out that it can be dangerous, too. When Charles Booher of Sunnyvale, California kept receiving spam for products to improve and supersize…

In a move which surely can’t make Microsoft happy, no less an authority than US-CERT (the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) has recommended that one way to deal with the security holes in IE is to “use a different web browser”. In its notice, published this week and entitled…

The FTC today has announced to Congress and the country that it does not believe that a national “Do Not Email” (“DNE”) list is viable until such time as “a robust email authentication system that would prevent spammers from hiding their tracks” is in place. In other words, email sender…

An anti-spam DNS blacklist – or DNS blocklist – is typically a list of IP addresses all of which have some trait or traits in common, usually having to do with their association with spam. Here is a more full explanation

Nokia has announced production of a celphone which allows you to project short text messages into the air via a series of LEDs. The Nokia 3220 takes advantage of a known quirk of human vision, which causes us to see rapidly sequenced images as one whole image rather than as…

Here’s an interesting twist on war-driving*: war cycling. [*For those of you not familiar with the term, ‘war-driving’ refers to the act of driving around, wifi-enabled laptop in hand (or on the seat or lap next to you), and finding unsecured wireless access points through which you can send email…

If you are one of the legion who think that Gmail is a privacy nightmare, then just be glad that you don’t live in Zimbabwe. According to a report by BBC News, the government of Zimbabwe has introduced a proposal which would require Zimbabwean ISPs to report email which is…

You heard it from Aunty first – well, unless you’ve read the Reuters’ article. According to a Reuters report covering the testimony provided today by noted “Cajun Spammer” Ronnie Scelson to the Senate Commerce Committee, Scelson told the committee that he, and I quote, “has signed up for a “whitelist”…

Noted “Cajun Spammer” Ronnie Scelson, responsible for 30million pieces of spam a day by his own calculations, told the United States Senate Commerce Committee during testimony today that while he has given up his wicked spamming ways, and now complies with CAN-SPAM, if people don’t stop blocking his email he…

A 20-year-old man from Texas has been sentenced to 4 years for phishing, duping both PayPal and AOL customers into thinking that they had received email from those companies, inducing them to provide private information such as credit card and bank account numbers in order to keep their PayPal and…