Michael Gracie 

The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before — in 1932 and 1933 — two years when Americans were having to deplete savings to cope with the massive job layoffs and business failures caused by the Great Depression. This time the reasons for the negative savings rate are vastly different. [...]

Politicians and their cohorts have once again proven they have little to do except cover their own butts. They’ve spent who-knows-how-many-taxpayer-dollars making false entries in Wikipedia, never realizing that their tracks were glowing flourescent green on a dark wooded path. The politicos still don’t get it, and they never will. It takes, at minimum, amoebic [...]

Whether he actually sees that spam is beyond me. What’s good for the goose is not necessary good for the goslings, which is why I suggest everyone NOT follow Robert Scoble’s lead and post all their personal information on their blogs, like he did today. Most people don’t have the luxury of hiding behind Microsoft’s [...]

When someone simply walks from a big lawsuit, you know they either don’t have a case, or they don’t wan’t “something” to get disclosed in court. No telling which one it is here, but 180Solutions, who can’t seem to tell it straight, has now walked from their lawsuit against ZoneLabs.

While there is growing concern over phishing and hacking exploits that lead to identity theft, the fact remains that you are safer online that you are with personal acquaintances.

Wendy Selzer proclaims she doesn’t like anti-spyware zealots, and is putting her backing behind the latest institutional effort. It is awfully easy to pump up a new initiative backed by big money and academic smarts, but StopBadware.org isn’t the end all, be all of anti-anything, and the effort isn’t exactly their sole brainchild either. Like [...]

According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, phishing attacks almost doubled in 2005, and aren’t expected to subside anytime soon. The growth in incoming threats has its good points and bad points. On the positive, the more crappy, faked emails users see, the more aware they become of the situation. That awareness generates the extra care [...]

And again, its GMail users in the shackles. SpamCop recently added several Gmail servers to its blacklist. The reason: some spam came from those servers, and Google doesn’t pass the originating IP address of the email user. They prefer instead to push their own IP in place of the standard “X-Originating-IP” header line delivered from [...]

I am not exactly sure how Gmail’s spam filters work, and likely won’t figure it out anytime soon – I flunked out of my Astrophysics PhD program, don’t you know. But I do know that spam seems to be a very subjective thing at the Google service. Some people get it, and some don’t.

Getting millions upon millions of users can be had through sheer brilliance – superior service, superior marketing, superior management. Those superiors cannot be credited to building zombie botnets, or buying spam lists. Nor can it be attributed to distributing spyware. MySpace and Facebook are being investigated by some diligent bloggers, who have found some shady [...]