Michael Gracie

I first heard the word “disintermediating” while listening to a CEO pitch his internet-based financial services business concept to me. The word was tossed around so much inside this particular office, that employees were actually given homework, reading a book on “distintermediation” written by some academics. The CEO wound up disintermediating himself from everyone with his babble, and the board ended up disintermediating him from their pile of money.

This doesn’t mean I don’t like the term, or see it applicability to the financial world. Securities brokerage is one place where the tide has turned - who need a broker anymore? Private markets like personal lending and angel investing are next.
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Email Battles notes that AOL lingered and malingered regarding email authentication, eventually pushing Yahoo!’s DomainKeys aside for the email postage concept that is causing such a ruckus. Or instead of ruckus, maybe we should call it whining.

MoveOn.org, a political group with a contact list 3,000,000 strong, is now pissing and moaning about AOL’s move, saying there is a growing list of not-for-profits like them that can’t afford that postage.

I say tough luck, to both sides.

If AOL choses to move their business by bucking the standards trend, that is their choice. Their customers have a choice too. Miss your favorite newsletter, point that subscription to a different address. Its that simple. By the same token, MoveOn should not expect preferential treatment, just because they have 501 status. Nor should any others in that bucket. Tell your members to change their address. Its that simple.

Simple, unless someone is thinking AOL’s move is somehow part of some vast conspiracy to shut down political action groups. If I heard that story, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

The internet gave small organizations a competitive edge, turning little guys into big guys. As a result of spam, phishing and other problems, the transport and delivery providers (the ones those once little guys rode on the backs of) have to make changes. Whether those changes are smart, or not, everyone has to adapt. Whining isn’t going to help anyone.

The title of the post is “Mac Trojan Horse Appears: Ha!”

The author is anonymous, and that is probably a good thing too. After the snappy title, we get:

“If it is launched it requires administrator access before having the ability to install files, cause carnage, and duplicate itself by sending to your iChat buddy list. Suck on dem apples, Apple.”

Windows users only dream of having to jump through hoops to get a trojan horse installed. So much for editorial quality in a top ranked weblog.

Next up…”Linux users running 24/7 as root get infected by Chinese language skull-and-crossbones Perl script, after un-tarring, manually moving to aliased cgi-bin directory, and making it executable, all of which can only be done via remote terminal window, from IP address 999.999.999.999, with SSH.”

Oh, I forgot…….Ha!
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Alan Dershowitz and Bill Bennett collaborate:

“We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities.” - via Instapundit.com

I’ll bet the botnet building sucker who was “inadvertently” outed by the Washington Post is agreeing with those guys too.

I don’t feel the least bit sorry for him.

Sophos, through its participation in the Anti-Phishing Working Group, reported that phishing attacks are still rising in number, with more than half of businesses surveyed saying they received at least one phishing lure a day (and almost a quarter receiving 5X that number). Unique phishing attempts increased almost 73% between December ‘04 and December ‘05, according to anti-phishing central, so even if the stats are a little bit scare tactic, it is hard to argue with such a big jump.

BlackSpider Technologies reports that spammers are taking better care of their botnets, stoking them slowly to avoid corporate spam detectors.

I believe it. Botnet builders are increasingly under attack, with authorities shutting down huge networks and arresting creators of those networks. While there are still a lot of computers out there infected, and many more unprotected targets, building one of these distribution networks takes time (particularly as they often number in the hundreds of thousands).

For spammers, botnets are an asset they would rather not lose.

The Department of Homeland Security thinks new laws against rootkits may be in order after the recent flurry of discoveries of their use (led by Sony BMG).

Like I said, I am getting more spam than ever (despite CAN-SPAM), so I have to withhold all comment, as the result is likely beyond my imagination.

I must admit I have a real problem with third-party desktop search tools. I don’t care who it is distributing it, the bottom line is they can and will be used to send data elsewhere, whether it is the sites you browse (for the purpose of sending you relevant ads), or to cache the data on your machine for quick search (like Google does with its latest computer-to-computer implementation).
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When someone hears about a new virus in circulation, you always hear someone say “get a Mac” or “run Linux instead.” Yes, it is a bit irritating, and even I am guilty of doing it now and then.

I’ve questioned whether the non-Windows crowd simply knows something the other side doesn’t, and maybe, just maybe, the security software firms do to. The latest threats against the two UNIX-based platforms were weak, to say the most, but they made big headlines anyway. As Techdirt points out, why such a big deal if the lack of threats really is “security by obscurity” (in this case, due to low market share)? A prideful malcreant would love the bragging rights that would invariably come from bringing down every graphic designer and hardcore developers’ machine, wouldn’t they?
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Use to be that trojans infected your machine, waited around until you logged into your bank account, and then captured your password for later use. Thieves are on the fast track now - they don’t bother stealing the passwords - they just empty your account while you are logged in.